On 15 August 1947, the date of Indian independence, HMAS Manoora reached Western Australia with more than 700 Anglo-Indians on board. In the same year that Australia began accepting refugees from Europe, the troop carrier Manoora was refitted to evacuate Australians and Europeans from India. As Immigration Labor Minister Arthur Calwell said: The use of Manoora should be limited to Australians and British citizens of pure European descent. In the publicity surrounding his arrival, Australia was described as a free, democratic and peaceful homeland, in contrast to the instability and communal conflict of India. But the arrival of Anglo-Indians instead of Australians or Britons of pure European descent disrupted this fantasy of “whiteness” and prompted increasingly restrictive immigration policies based on racial exclusivity. Increasing numbers of Anglo-Indians emigrated to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s because they were considered culturally European as they spoke English as their native language, wore Western clothing and their home life was more Western than Indian. Such cultural similarities came to replace the mixed ancestry of Anglo-Indians by identifying them as capable of assimilating and integrating into Australia at a time when the White Australia policy was being replaced by mainstream multiculturalism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Australian author Suneta Peres da Costa's debut novel Homework (1999) tells us about the difficulties of growing up in an immigrant family in contemporary multicultural Australia. Mina Pereira, the unreliable child narrator, experiences the many faces of integration not only in her daily school life but also at home, in her family's various attempts to do housework in Australia. Housework for parents becomes synonymous with experiences of loss and homelessness. In this context Mina tries to remember her and her family's past to create her Australian world, a world composed of multiple stories. It is the story of her unhappy and crazy mother, who never got over her experiences as a refugee. As a result, the mother steals the food and stores it in old suitcases under the bed. And it is the story of his father, who works for the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs while considering himself a freedom fighter, who is unwilling to accept that his homeland Goa is no longer under Portuguese rule. He even transferred his political struggle to Australia, always claiming Goa's independence from India. To further complicate Mina's already complex life, the girl is lucky enough to have "a brilliant sister who simply knows too much" (79), while Mina must cope with a physical disability which, from the Indian point of view, always indicates the work of karmic intervention. Her physical deformity, two antennae on her head, cannot be removed because they are ingrained in her brain and to Mina's misfortune they even begin to grow during her adolescence. Mina's feelings, however, are visible indicators of her "otherness." Thus, her tentacles mark her as an outsider not only in Australian society, but also disconnect her from her mother's love. It is because of Mina's longing for this love that she eventually begins to invent alternative worlds. With these themes, the novel weaves a dense narrative web of family experiences and childhood memories that portray the life of a young Australian who experiences otherness as part of her daily negotiation of the self, questioning both valuestraditions of diasporic Indian communities in Australia as well as common norms presented by official representatives of multicultural Australia. The emerging fictional home becomes Mina's place of reconciliation, as well as a fabricated network of strangely unreliable memories and stories that generates the narrative drive within the novel. Also included are references to the world of Indian myths such as the story of Kali, the goddess Indian of destruction: She [Mina reflects on her sister's friend Jacinta] was not a suitor, nor an enchantress, she, an incarnation of Kali, goddess of destruction, devastating our lives and then dancing barefoot on the corpses sacrificed violated. It is the variety of cultural signifiers, dramatic rhythms, and linguistic modes that generate the protagonist-narrator's rich and vivid transcultural narrative style. This stylistic novelty is characterized by the emergence of new cultural forms which are, as John McLeod (2001) reminds us, at once indigenous but emerging from a colonial legacy. Mina's narration constantly plays with fantastic elements, so the text suggests that the construction of history, memory and truth features prominently in her act of narration. When the protagonist-narrator's parents finally die in a fire accident, Mina also frees herself from her tentacles: I ran crying and ripped those rotten knobs from my scalp. My umbilical cord to the world is gone forever! My chrysalis is gone! My antennae forever detached from my skull, I finally understood while running what it meant to feel the blood that previously might have flowed to those organs flowing in predictable patterns only through my veins. This plot development marks Mina's awakening and suggests that Mina has grown into an independent young woman who realizes that her desire for her mother's love, which implies ultimate protection from the world, is rooted in nothing else than an illusion: having lost her parents, who represented her Indian heritage and her family's overall postcolonial legacy, Mina begins to create a space to negotiate and invent her Australian self. In an effective combination of various plots, the haunted past survives and interacts with the protagonist's present and composes a transcultural narrative space in which the postcolonial past comes to life in the protagonist's multicultural present. Homework therefore not only provides a new perspective on the discourses of postcolonial and transcultural literature by adding a fictionalized transcultural perspective of Indian-Australian women, but also enriches the literary landscape by adding a distinctive Indo-Australian aesthetic. Consequently, this aesthetic represents the modern transcultural lifeworlds of Indian-Australians and their postcolonial heritage. Seen in this light, the intellectual enterprise of postcolonialism has indeed become an integral part of modern transcultural life in the transformation of societies. Interestingly, Homework represents its particular multicultural background by staging modern worlds and transcultural lifestyles not as readily available spaces but rather as spheres of constant negotiation. The novel's unreliable stories therefore not only emerge from and combine different cultural traditions; they also highlight the novel's struggle with its own transcultural and multicultural contents (for a more detailed discussion of the transcultural novel genre, see Helff 2008). [Anglo-Indians were able to migrate to Australia from the mid-1960s because they were seen culturally as European, but when they arrived they were often perceived as Indian. Many Anglo-Indians suffered from racial prejudice.