In 2002 Gary Lee and I were fortunate enough to be given the chance, thanks to Francesca Merlan and other members of the Steering Committee, to organise a panel, ‘Changing Cultural Contexts: Representations of the Hmong’, at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Anthropological Society held at The Australian National University, Canberra (3–5 October). We believe this was the first time researchers on the Hmong in Australia had been enabled to come together to compare their findings in very different fields and to discuss a wide range of different issues concerning the Hmong population and society of Australia. Some...

It has been nearly thirty years since the first Hmong families arrived to settle in Australia in March 1976. Many more families followed until 1992 when the last were accepted from refugee camps in Thailand. Today, they number about 1,800.

Given that most of them were former soldiers or subsistence farmers from Laos, how have they managed with their new life in highly industrialised urban Australia? This chapter will try to shed some light on this question and update the current state of Hmong settlement in the country since the first overview on the subject which I gave at an...

This chapter is part of a larger project exploring the impact of globalisation on Australian national identity. In this chapter I examine identification processes among a small Asian community in Australia by drawing on my research with Hmong in Tasmania. My involvement with the Hmong community in Tasmania began in 1993 when some colleagues and I from the University of Tasmania were approached by Vue Thaow, the first Hmong person to settle in Tasmania, to undertake research on Hmong settlement experiences. We secured funding from the then Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research to undertake a study of refugee...

North Queensland has been no stranger to ethnic variety and conflict. After the visits of early explorers, Leichhardt’s expedition of 1844–45 had led to a much greater knowledge of the north. Almost every expedition to the region seems to have involved fatal skirmishes with aboriginal inhabitants. Overland squatters started to arrive from the 1850s in search of pasturelands for sheep and cattle, and in 1859 Queensland was formally separated as a colony from New South Wales. Bolton (1963: 53) says that although aboriginal resistance had been successfully quelled within a few years of the coming of the white man,...

There are very few societies in the world in which costume, whether an everyday dress or festive garment, has received such significant cultural recognition as in the case of the Hmong people. Costumes and silver jewellery have become for the Hmong their major form of artistic expression, a means of visual communication as well as a marker of ethnic identity. The Hmong costume adorns and protects, but it also sends subliminal messages about its owner’s gender, group membership, locality, marital status, wealth, and so on. This study is based on research conducted during 1995–2003 among Hmong communities in Innisfail...

The Hmong qeej, sometimes called the lusheng¹ when used by the Miao in China, is a musical instrument which presents divergent and multiple personalities in its history, musical styles and contextual applications. On the one hand, the sound of this set of free reed pipes signifies death; on the other, it is used as a tool of public and happy display. In this chapter, I propose that the qeej occupies at least two spaces in Hmong thinking about themselves. The first space is for Hmong ears and eyes only. It occurs during funerals inside the house, the place of clan-specific...

Women, Women ... Well! if you don’t have menses then you will not be able to have children, but if you have your menses then you will be able to have children (Fieldnotes 1994)

Menstruation! People who are ignorant would say that it is a dirty thing, but it is the most important thing for you. If you don’t have that you are not able to have children. If you don’t have that you will not look healthy and it makes you look pale and unhealthy. If you have it you have no problems at all (Fieldnotes, 1997)

Menstruation is a...

My investigation of the White Hmong language was made possible through the kindness and generosity of my primary language teacher, Cua Lis, and her family: Cua’s husband Choj (Sao), Choj’s brothers Yeeb, Nkaj Yias (Gary), and Ntxawg (Yeu), and their dear mother Maiv Yaj. I also received enthusiastic help from Charlie Sayaxang, Sourivan Thongpao, Maiv Dub Yaj, and Ge and Niaj Pov Lis. Cua and her family originally came from Xieng Khoung province in Laos and, at the time I conducted the basic research for this investigation during the mid 1980s to early 1990s, they lived in Sydney, Australia.

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