"I am a British subject – deemed an alien": Marital Nationality and Australia’s Asian Communities

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nations across the world instituted a system whereby women who married aliens lost their natural-born nationality. Studies on dependent marital nationality in Australia are emerging but there is still much to be uncovered. This thesis examines legal discussions, media articles, and a collection of women’s correspondence with government officials in attempts to have their nationality and accompanying rights restored. It asks why dependent nationality legislation remained law in Australia for so long despite widespread public and political opposition to it and seeks to uncover how dependent nationality affected Australian women married to aliens and their families, including women’s affective and emotional responses to their altered nationality status. As the largest non-white, non-Indigenous group in Australia, Chinese-Australian communities are of particular interest in this study as they negotiated the intersections of dependent nationality and racialised restrictions under the White Australia Policy. This thesis argues that the loss of nationality on marriage affected women in profoundly existential and emotional ways, as well as through tangible disabilities and disadvantages, and that these experiences could be more tragic for Australian women married to Chinese nationals.