ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts our focus to the intergenerational memory and complex family histories of Chinese Australians. Imagining the experiences and motivations of ancestors who travel between the two continents, Alex Miller in The Ancestor Game (1992) and Brian Castro in Birds of Passage (1983) and Shanghai Dancing (2003) explore family histories that tie China to Australia. They encounter the racism and trauma underpinning the Chinese experience of the Australian Gold Rush, but also the repercussions of migration and displacement on the experience of belonging in a new country. More deeply embedded on the fictional side of family historiography, both novels examine the weave of the familial, personal, and national, and the relationship between the past and the present. In addition to their mappings of Chinese/Australian history, the novels cohere around ideas and objects of writing and script, and consider the role of material cultures in family histories.
