‘These infants are future Australians’: making the nation through intercountry adoption

Abstract

The formal practice of intercountry adoption has its origins in the immediate postwar years but has increased in scale over the past two decades. Although rates of intercountry adoption remain low in Australia, in recent years proponents have called for the transnational adoption of children to be made more readily accessible by Australian couples. As researchers working on the history of adoption in Australia, we are interested in the ways in which intercountry adoption is conceptualised in current discourse. This article examines the manner in which submissions to a 2005 government inquiry into intercountry adoption in Australia mobilised the idea of the ‘interests of the nation’ in their arguments for intercountry adoption, a deployment which – on the surface – seems to represent a break with the nation-building rhetoric associated with ‘White Australia’, a policy which dominated attitudes to immigration and population growth for much of the twentieth century, and one which continues to have a strong resonance. However, we would like to suggest that this strategic deployment of the national interest by proponents of intercountry adoption in fact perpetuates many of the discourses and outcomes associated with earlier population and nation-building policies in Australian history.