AustLit

'Interracial couples at home, within the bounds of domesticity and the nation, offer difficult or somehow troubled subject matter that is seldom confronted on screen in Australian cinema. This essay explores the representation of intercultural domesticity in Aya and The Home Song Stories. It draws on theorisations of melodrama and national cinema in order to examine the figure of the first generation Asian Australian woman. I argue that while focused on the domestic realm, the inter-personal relationships and character construction in the two examples formulate an historicised politics of disappointment that not only explores the position of migrant women in interracial marriages in the 1960s and 1970s, when the films were set, but also suggest a critique of the politics of ethnicity that were prevalent at the time of the production of the films.' Source: The author.