Remembering the Family Home: Emotions, belonging, and migrant men in multicultural Australia

Abstract

The article opens a space in which to discuss migrant men's emotions and their engagement with family life. It focuses on Australia's Goan community to explore the fluidity of ethnic identity and its relation to remembered family and childhood. The article suggests a “family” that is not only a domestic home but is constituted across both time and space. The men's memories of their childhood and family life prior to arrival in Australia are central to their constitution of self within Australia. These memories provide the men with the emotional means to contest their positioning in Australia's multicultural framework. The men's memories of childhood are experienced beyond domestic and multicultural spaces, making remembered families an important part of their work lives and sense of success in Australia.