Abstract
In the postwar period, demographers and politicians both recognised that marriage was a good indicator of migrant assimilation. Getting married indicated a commitment to making Australia home, and to the new domesticated version of the ‘Australian way of life’. Patterns of intermarriage were especially suggestive of the willingness of migrants to marry outside of their ethnic group, and of Australian society to accept migrants as marriage partners. Yet, the labour imperatives of the postwar immigration program also produced a surplus of men across a number of ethnic groups, some of whom became ‘hard-core’ bachelors. Read in the context of a persistent imbalance of the sexes, it is argued that marriage also revealed the limits of assimilation.This article has been peer-reviewed.
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