The Lives of Ancestors

Abstract

Arguing that the past informs our present and indeed our future as migrants, this essay focuses on the history of movement and interaction of the earliest Sri Lankans who emigrated to Australia in the late nineteenth century. Rather than follow a sequential narrative arc, I use a personal essay form that allows me to humanize the migrant by identifying imaginatively with the migrant's sense of self, and through that strategy, question assumptions about singular national, ethnic and religious identity in the light of transnational border-crossings.

• Australia
• migration
• Sri Lanka
• transnationalism

Notes

1 Sri Lankans were mistakenly called “Cingalese”, of which the correct spelling would be “Ceylonese”. “Cingalese” could be a concoction of Ceylonese (the colonial name for people from Ceylon as Sri Lanka was then called) and Sinhalese (the majority race in Sri Lanka), which was also spelt during those times as “Singhalese”.

2 See Brown (2018) for his interpretation of Negombo as a cosmopolitan city. A coastal city like Galle, Negombo is positioned higher up the western coast.

3 The fact that Punchi Appu (Peter) Warnakulasuriya, a family member sponsored by Mendis, had been educated at Colombo's leading private college for boys, St Thomas College, Mount Lavinia before his arrival in Australia (Sparkes and Shnukal 2017, 187), confirms that the family belonged to the westernized higher echelons of Sri Lankan society.

4 For a detailed examination of Edward's epiphanies, see Lokuge (2000).