- Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies,
School of Archaeology and Anthropology,
Room 3.35, Sir Roland Wilson Building
W: https://migrantheritage.blog/
- Collective Memory, Migration History, Public History, Australian multiculturalism, Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage, and 27 moreOral history, Memory Studies, Cultural Memory, Transnationalism, Digital Humanities, Cultural History, Migration Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, Immigration, Cultural Studies, Migration, Australian History, White Australia Policy, Transnational migration, Identity politics, Multiculturalism (Literature), Heritage Tourism, Heritage Studies, Cultural Heritage Management, Museology, Museum and Heritage Studies, Ethnicity, Affect/Emotion, Heritage, Affect (Cultural Theory), and Memoryedit
This Element argues that community-initiated migrant heritage harbours the potential to challenge and expand state-sanctioned renderings of multiculturalism in liberal nation-states. In this search for alternative readings,... more
This Element argues that community-initiated migrant heritage harbours the potential to challenge and expand state-sanctioned renderings of multiculturalism in liberal nation-states. In this search for alternative readings, community-initiated migrant heritage is positioned as a grassroots challenge to positivist state-multiculturalism. It can do this if we adopt the migrant perspective, a diasporic perspective of 'settlement' that is always unfinished, non-static, and non-essentialist. As mobile subjects, either once or many times over - a subject position arrived at through acts of mobility, sometimes spawned by violence or structural inequality, which can reverberate throughout subsequent generations - the migrant subject position compels us to look both forwards and backwards in time and place.
Research Interests: Cultural History, Working Classes, Public History, Immigration, Migration History, and 6 moreAustralian History, Working-Class History, Museum and Heritage Studies, Industrial Archaeology & Heritage, Built Heritage, Cultural Heritage, Urban Art, Urban Design, Urban Regeneration Through Art, Urban Light, Urban Development, Rehabilitation, Reuse of Industrial Buildings., and Critical Heritage Studies
Research Interests:
release date: 14 August 2017 in both hardback and paperback
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This research stems from a desire to add social and emotional detail to earlier assessments made by Marxist scholars about the work of migrant rights activists in pre-multicultural Australia (1960s-1980s). While analysing interviews... more
This research stems from a desire to add social and emotional detail to earlier assessments
made by Marxist scholars about the work of migrant rights activists in pre-multicultural Australia
(1960s-1980s). While analysing interviews within two very different oral history collections, the
research became an exploration of the timeliness and future use of oral history collections in historical
research. How do researchers productively draw on and build histories with oral history collections
created in vastly different political and social contexts? This question is worth exploring in relation to
oral history collections formed in or after politically contentious contexts and with politically active
interviewees. Here, oral histories are read (or re-analysed) in a context for which there is a constrained
or different discourse around multiculturalism, and around the role of men and women in public life.
This type of re-analysis becomes a matter of listening both intersubjectively and dialogically. The aim is
to cast a light on a history of welfare rights and social activism in migrant working-class communities,
and thus explore their alternative visions of multiculturalism espoused by the migrant men and women
working on the frontlines.
made by Marxist scholars about the work of migrant rights activists in pre-multicultural Australia
(1960s-1980s). While analysing interviews within two very different oral history collections, the
research became an exploration of the timeliness and future use of oral history collections in historical
research. How do researchers productively draw on and build histories with oral history collections
created in vastly different political and social contexts? This question is worth exploring in relation to
oral history collections formed in or after politically contentious contexts and with politically active
interviewees. Here, oral histories are read (or re-analysed) in a context for which there is a constrained
or different discourse around multiculturalism, and around the role of men and women in public life.
This type of re-analysis becomes a matter of listening both intersubjectively and dialogically. The aim is
to cast a light on a history of welfare rights and social activism in migrant working-class communities,
and thus explore their alternative visions of multiculturalism espoused by the migrant men and women
working on the frontlines.
Research Interests:
In this article, I "read against the grain" of a monument to post-WWII immigration and migrant communities. I am concerned with how such monuments, locally situated, might be used in more progressive and transformative histories, ones... more
In this article, I "read against the grain" of a monument to post-WWII immigration and migrant communities. I am concerned with how such monuments, locally situated, might be used in more progressive and transformative histories, ones that harbor the potential to challenge existing public and collective memories of postwar migration and multiculturalism that occur on a national stage and within the ambit of Australia's heritage industry. This is a study in how discursively marginalized migrant groups, with subaltern narratives about mobility and settlement, claim space for alternative histories in the context of a restrictive official heritage.
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Research Interests:
Introduction to Special Issue of Immigrants and Minorities
Research Interests:
This article explores the memory-making of descendants of post-war displaced persons from Eastern Europe now living in Australia. Their processes to uncover their parents’ wartime, refugee and settlement pasts are mediated through public... more
This article explores the memory-making of descendants of post-war displaced persons from Eastern Europe now living in Australia. Their processes to uncover their parents’ wartime, refugee and settlement pasts are mediated through public and personal forums. Accordingly, this analysis is framed by a theory of post-memory, which considers the narrative effects of living in close proximity to (the sometimes concealed) stories of their parents’ displacement and family separation. This cohort search for a wider frame to articulate their parents’ pasts as Eastern European (mainly Polish and Latvian) refugees, which is lacking in public discussions around immigration to Australia. They complicate and in some cases undermine celebratory narratives of migration to Australia and of family settlement. On an intimate level, their parents’ experiences are deployed as a means to grapple with their alternative family structures and less-than-conventional childhoods within immigration centres or camps, which were influenced by discriminatory policy for non-British migrants, and single mothers in particular. When adopting a collective lens, these histories are projected onto wider historical understandings of the immigration scheme, which these descendants of displaced persons seek to complicate.
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On the 10 and 11 February 2016, former residents of one of Australia's postwar 'holding' centres for migrant arrivals presented evidence at a hearing for the site's inclusion on the Victorian Heritage Register. They were aware that the... more
On the 10 and 11 February 2016, former residents of one of Australia's postwar 'holding' centres for migrant arrivals presented evidence at a hearing for the site's inclusion on the Victorian Heritage Register. They were aware that the Victorian Heritage Register held few places of significance to postwar migrant communities, let alone working migrant women, which Benalla largely accommodated. They chose to retell their mothers' stories and explicitly expressed a desire to honour their mothers' memory at this hearing. This article will explore the impetus expressed by these former child migrants of Benalla to tell their mothers' stories and unpack its associated implications for the history and collective remembrance of Australia's postwar migrants. These former child migrants found a platform in the heritage hearing, a platform from which they could piece together their mothers' history and insist that it is a history worthy of heritage listing and public acknowledgement. On a broad level, I ask, what can a contentious history like Benalla's offer the history of postwar migration in Australia? Specifically, what role do generational stories of single working migrant women have in the remembering of migrant history and heritage practice in Australia?
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This article focuses on the migrant family in postwar Australia. The Commonwealth government’s two-year work contract scheme had significant effects on the initial settlement experience of displaced persons (DPs)—particularly, through the... more
This article focuses on the migrant family in postwar Australia. The Commonwealth government’s two-year work contract scheme had significant effects on the initial settlement experience of displaced persons (DPs)—particularly, through the family separation that the contract enforced. Family reunification was afforded in accordance with an occasionally callous and pragmatic concern for maintaining a directable pool of labour. In this regard, the scheme and the available hostels and centres, while extensive in their bureaucracy and administrative reach, were woefully unprepared for the needs and wants of DPs, specifically the need for family unity during the initial settlement process. In drawing on archival sources, this article explores bureaucratic practices, and responses to DP resistance and dismay in the face of family separation.
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Migrant heritage, as a grassroots practice seeking to commemorate pre- and post-war migrant communities and their contributions, emerged in Australia from the 1980s. Since that time, its appeal has continued to grow. It now receives, in... more
Migrant heritage, as a grassroots practice seeking to commemorate
pre- and post-war migrant communities and their contributions, emerged
in Australia from the 1980s. Since that time, its appeal has continued to
grow. It now receives, in some form, state sanction and is policed by the
same state and national legislation as other cultural heritage, both tangible
and intangible. This article seeks to complicate understandings of migrant
heritage as a marginal practice, specifically by interrogating the use-value of
particular narratives in the Australian context – that is, how do individuals,
communities and other groups (the grassroots) draw on sanctioned and
publicly circulating narratives to mark their site as heritage-worthy? Ideas of
what constitutes official and unofficial heritage can be mutually inclusive – a
dialectical process. I analyse this in relation to the commemoration of former
post-war migrant reception centres in Australia.
pre- and post-war migrant communities and their contributions, emerged
in Australia from the 1980s. Since that time, its appeal has continued to
grow. It now receives, in some form, state sanction and is policed by the
same state and national legislation as other cultural heritage, both tangible
and intangible. This article seeks to complicate understandings of migrant
heritage as a marginal practice, specifically by interrogating the use-value of
particular narratives in the Australian context – that is, how do individuals,
communities and other groups (the grassroots) draw on sanctioned and
publicly circulating narratives to mark their site as heritage-worthy? Ideas of
what constitutes official and unofficial heritage can be mutually inclusive – a
dialectical process. I analyse this in relation to the commemoration of former
post-war migrant reception centres in Australia.
Research Interests:
Bonegilla, Australia’s largest post-war migrant processing and reception centre, reemerged in the public sphere from the late 1980s. A reunion festival was staged on the grounds of the former centre in 1987. Widely attended by former... more
Bonegilla, Australia’s largest post-war migrant processing and reception centre, reemerged
in the public sphere from the late 1980s. A reunion festival was staged on the
grounds of the former centre in 1987. Widely attended by former residents, it was
considered a success by its organisers, a grass-roots committee of former residents.
Another reunion was held ten years later, this time by a committee led by local council
members. Both these reunions are important moments in the formation of Bonegilla’s
public history and its orientation to a narrative of progress and Australian multiculturalism.
Analysing them highlights wider changes in heritage discourses and
management, and in the evolution of multiculturalism in Australia. Many recent studies
of public commemorations in Australia have argued that vernacular or participatory
commemorations can be, and almost inevitably are, overtaken and dominated by statesanctioned
narratives. In this article, I will focus on these two reunions in order to
argue that despite the progressive dominance of official or institutional powers over
Bonegilla’s public history, participants’ voices endure within or alongside official
frameworks. Despite the obvious differences between the 1987 and 1997 reunions,
collective and individual recollections from ex-residents and their families creatively
operate within established and seemingly official narrative frameworks. These are not
restrictive, nor do they silence alternative articulations. Some ex-residents actively
draw on the narrative frameworks available to them to attribute new significance to
their experiences, whether melancholy or fond, and consequently include alternative
stories that add further to Bonegilla’s public multi-vocality.
in the public sphere from the late 1980s. A reunion festival was staged on the
grounds of the former centre in 1987. Widely attended by former residents, it was
considered a success by its organisers, a grass-roots committee of former residents.
Another reunion was held ten years later, this time by a committee led by local council
members. Both these reunions are important moments in the formation of Bonegilla’s
public history and its orientation to a narrative of progress and Australian multiculturalism.
Analysing them highlights wider changes in heritage discourses and
management, and in the evolution of multiculturalism in Australia. Many recent studies
of public commemorations in Australia have argued that vernacular or participatory
commemorations can be, and almost inevitably are, overtaken and dominated by statesanctioned
narratives. In this article, I will focus on these two reunions in order to
argue that despite the progressive dominance of official or institutional powers over
Bonegilla’s public history, participants’ voices endure within or alongside official
frameworks. Despite the obvious differences between the 1987 and 1997 reunions,
collective and individual recollections from ex-residents and their families creatively
operate within established and seemingly official narrative frameworks. These are not
restrictive, nor do they silence alternative articulations. Some ex-residents actively
draw on the narrative frameworks available to them to attribute new significance to
their experiences, whether melancholy or fond, and consequently include alternative
stories that add further to Bonegilla’s public multi-vocality.
Research Interests:
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Exploring the dynamic processes involved in cultural adaptation for child migrants requires sensitivity to personal and situational expressions of belonging. It was requires sensitivity to the social and cultural context of child... more
Exploring the dynamic processes involved in cultural adaptation for child migrants requires sensitivity to personal and situational expressions of belonging. It was requires sensitivity to the social and cultural context of child migrants’ experiences. With that precept in mind, this article aims to address some of the shortcomings of early sociological research on post-war child migrants and make a contribution to more recent cultural studies of migration and belonging. I do this via a case study of the school experiences of a dozen Greek child migrants who arrived and settled in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s. Specific attention is given to the seminal space of the school, with the aim of undermining the monolithic application of the ‘cultural conflict thesis’ and its attendant separation of Anglo-Australian and ethnic cultural expectations.
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Since the 1970s, noticeable shifts have occurred in the filmic representation of the post-war migrant experience. In this article, I consider two such representations of the migrant experience of Reception and Training Centres... more
Since the 1970s, noticeable shifts have occurred in the filmic representation of the post-war migrant experience. In this article, I consider two such representations of the migrant experience of Reception and Training Centres (colloquially known as migrant camps): the 1984 feature film Silver City and the 1994 mini-series Bordertown. They are analysed in relation to the shifting cultural landscape of Australian public and political life, particularly the complex evolution and reception of multiculturalism, and the social and economic development of post-war migrant communities. My analysis draws on a long-standing yet growing theoretical field that focuses on popular culture as a material artefact that communities draw on to facilitate, communicate, and contest collective memories. In these two examples, we witness a broadening of the spatial and metaphysical limits of the personal migrant journey. This representation is reflective of shifts in Australian political life, particularly the status and standing of the "ethnic other". However, Silver City and Bordertown and the specific reactions they incited from certain publics must also be analysed within their context, and according to their function as a resource for collective memories.
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In Australia, museum exhibitions play an important social function in both framing and reflecting collective memories of immigration. Since the 1980s, Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre has emerged as a key part of that... more
In Australia, museum exhibitions play an important social function in both framing and reflecting collective memories of immigration. Since the 1980s, Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre has emerged as a key part of that national immigration story. But its representation in the museum space necessitates the negotiation of some difficult terrain: capturing the migrant experience of some 320, 000 displaced persons and assisted migrants over a twenty-four year history is a neigh impossible task. Bonegilla has been the subject of many small, large, touring and temporary museum exhibitions since the 1990s. The histories they present work with or struggle against stakeholders and other important memory groups involved in the commemoration of the Bonegilla—separate ethnic organisations, local councils, heritage agencies, former residents’ associations, and invested individuals and their families. While a narrative of progress and a benign history of modern-day multiculturalism tends to dominate the interpretation on offer at these exhibitions, the visitors and receivers of this interpretation are not without a voice. Analysing the processes and peoples that surround public history efforts, how groups and individuals get invested in the site, and what responses and uses they make of it can provide important methodological implications for the developing and intersecting fields of memory and museology studies.
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Chp 1 of Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage explores the role heritage has played in representing, contesting and negotiating the history and politics of ethnic, migrant, multicultural, diasporic or ‘other’ heritages in,... more
Chp 1 of Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage explores the role heritage has played in representing, contesting and negotiating the history and politics of ethnic, migrant, multicultural, diasporic or ‘other’ heritages in, within, between and beyond nations and national boundaries.
Containing contributions from academics and professionals working across a range of fields, this volume contends that, in the face of various global ‘crises’, the role of heritage is especially important: it is a stage for the negotiation of shifting identities and for the rewriting of traditions and historical narratives of belonging and becoming. As a whole, the book connects and further develops methodological and theoretical discourses that can fuel and inform practice and social outcomes. It also examines the unique opportunities, challenges and limitations that various actors encounter in their efforts to preserve, identify, assess, manage, interpret and promote heritage pertaining to the experience and history of migration and migrant groups.
Bringing together diverse case studies of migration and migrants in cultural heritage practice, Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage and museums, as well as those working in the fields of memory studies, public history, anthropology, archaeology, tourism and cultural studies.
Containing contributions from academics and professionals working across a range of fields, this volume contends that, in the face of various global ‘crises’, the role of heritage is especially important: it is a stage for the negotiation of shifting identities and for the rewriting of traditions and historical narratives of belonging and becoming. As a whole, the book connects and further develops methodological and theoretical discourses that can fuel and inform practice and social outcomes. It also examines the unique opportunities, challenges and limitations that various actors encounter in their efforts to preserve, identify, assess, manage, interpret and promote heritage pertaining to the experience and history of migration and migrant groups.
Bringing together diverse case studies of migration and migrants in cultural heritage practice, Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage and museums, as well as those working in the fields of memory studies, public history, anthropology, archaeology, tourism and cultural studies.
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In this paper, I will address the public re-emergence of former sites of post-war migrant reception centres as heritage-worthy. Both grassroots and state groups were behind efforts to make public these previously silenced sites of migrant... more
In this paper, I will address the public re-emergence of former sites of post-war migrant reception centres as heritage-worthy. Both grassroots and state groups were behind efforts to make public these previously silenced sites of migrant accommodation. Rather than view the heritage listing and promotion of these sites as a process dominated by the state, I choose to view these public history practices as collaborative, creating more spaces for the vernacular exchange of collective memories, a process that amends “forgotten” pasts. Collective memories are challenged, shared and reframed by participants who wish the make their stories heard, and heard as part of a wider and now officially-sanctioned narrative of multicultural progress.
The casting of these sites as heritage, particularly Bonegilla, and the subsequent silencing of the army history of these former reception centres, also speaks to the role of forgetting as necessary, as integral to remembering. It underlines the role of heritage in creating “collective memories for the future.” I refer specifically to the growing importance of reception centres to the second generation and those who were accommodated as children. They are remembering their pasts or “origin stories” anew, some of them creatively drawing on an official heritage discourse that promotes a revisionist narrative of multiculturalism to attribute wider significance to their personal histories. This is not only a collaborative heritage process, as indicated, but can also be a restorative one for participants and respondents.
The casting of these sites as heritage, particularly Bonegilla, and the subsequent silencing of the army history of these former reception centres, also speaks to the role of forgetting as necessary, as integral to remembering. It underlines the role of heritage in creating “collective memories for the future.” I refer specifically to the growing importance of reception centres to the second generation and those who were accommodated as children. They are remembering their pasts or “origin stories” anew, some of them creatively drawing on an official heritage discourse that promotes a revisionist narrative of multiculturalism to attribute wider significance to their personal histories. This is not only a collaborative heritage process, as indicated, but can also be a restorative one for participants and respondents.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Over the last twenty years, certain sites of post-war migrant reception have been labelled “birthplaces of multiculturalism”. Bonegilla Migrant Camp and the Snowy Mountains Scheme are the prime examples. They are now popular and... more
Over the last twenty years, certain sites of post-war migrant reception have been labelled “birthplaces of multiculturalism”. Bonegilla Migrant Camp and the Snowy Mountains Scheme are the prime examples. They are now popular and officially recognisable symbols of Australia’s successful post-war immigration program, specifically as benign places of contact and integration, and markers of multiculturalism and national progress. This has not always been the case: these sites have re-emerged on the public stage and gained retrospective significance in relation to changing ideas of multiculturalism and migrant heritage since the 1980s and 1990s.
Heritage is a present-centred cultural practice and is often cast as an instrument of cultural power. Official heritage and heritage lists are said to codify significance and align sites with positivist narratives of national progress. However, rather than view heritage practice as a process of domination over a vernacular past, I ask: how do ethnic and other communities interact with, drawn on, and involve themselves with instruments of cultural power, including the popular tropes and narratives of migration and multiculturalism that official heritage promotes? This paper will focus on the public emergence and embrace of alternative sites of post-war migrant reception—places like Greta Holding Centre in VIC, Northam Holding Centre in WA, and Balgownie Hostel in NSW. Specifically, I will analyse how these sites became public and the actors behind their heritage promotion—that is, invested communities and authorised heritage bodies and the interactions, conflicts and collusions between them.
The spaces opened up by heritage sites and museums exhibitions must be viewed as participatory; they create multi-vocal histories, to which diverse publics with widely divergent experiences contribute their voices. Some publics actively draw on positive revisionist versions of Australia’s immigration history for their own communal, familial and personal memorialising, and for building and commemorating their own national or state heritage sites. Grassroots’ ex-resident groups, local communities, or ethnic community organisations are capable of drawing on authorised heritage discourses and often do so in surprising and alternative ways that sometimes expand the frameworks available to them. These processes complicate the vernacular/official dichotomy to which some scholars ascribe when studying public commemorations. That said, my approach is not new, for I draw on recent works in critical heritage studies by Laurajane Smith and Andrea Witcomb. These scholars seek to refocus attentions away from representational analyses in favour of audience reception and audiences’ many and varied responses to and uses of heritage.
Heritage is a present-centred cultural practice and is often cast as an instrument of cultural power. Official heritage and heritage lists are said to codify significance and align sites with positivist narratives of national progress. However, rather than view heritage practice as a process of domination over a vernacular past, I ask: how do ethnic and other communities interact with, drawn on, and involve themselves with instruments of cultural power, including the popular tropes and narratives of migration and multiculturalism that official heritage promotes? This paper will focus on the public emergence and embrace of alternative sites of post-war migrant reception—places like Greta Holding Centre in VIC, Northam Holding Centre in WA, and Balgownie Hostel in NSW. Specifically, I will analyse how these sites became public and the actors behind their heritage promotion—that is, invested communities and authorised heritage bodies and the interactions, conflicts and collusions between them.
The spaces opened up by heritage sites and museums exhibitions must be viewed as participatory; they create multi-vocal histories, to which diverse publics with widely divergent experiences contribute their voices. Some publics actively draw on positive revisionist versions of Australia’s immigration history for their own communal, familial and personal memorialising, and for building and commemorating their own national or state heritage sites. Grassroots’ ex-resident groups, local communities, or ethnic community organisations are capable of drawing on authorised heritage discourses and often do so in surprising and alternative ways that sometimes expand the frameworks available to them. These processes complicate the vernacular/official dichotomy to which some scholars ascribe when studying public commemorations. That said, my approach is not new, for I draw on recent works in critical heritage studies by Laurajane Smith and Andrea Witcomb. These scholars seek to refocus attentions away from representational analyses in favour of audience reception and audiences’ many and varied responses to and uses of heritage.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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This chapter makes a case for an urgent reappraisal of migrant heritage in the context of recent global ‘crises’ – refugee, financial, and environmental. We define ‘migrant heritage’ as that which is made with, by, for, or in reaction to... more
This chapter makes a case for an urgent reappraisal of migrant heritage in the context of recent global ‘crises’ – refugee, financial, and environmental. We define ‘migrant heritage’ as that which is made with, by, for, or in reaction to community groups and individuals who have, or whose ancestors have, moved across borders and/or cultures. We then outline the scholarly literatures which have shaped understandings of migrant heritage, zoning in on the overlaps between memory studies, migration studies and critical heritage studies. Themes including human rights, affect and activism emerge as key vectors of the volume, which presents case studies of migrant, multicultural and diasporic heritage making across the globe. On 12 July 2019 hundreds of protestors occupied the Pantheon in Paris, the historic monument and mausoleum housing the remains of revered French citizens. The protestors were immigrants without papers or sans papiers, identifying themselves as ‘Gilets Noirs’ (black ve...
This Element argues that community-initiated migrant heritage harbours the potential to challenge and expand state-sanctioned renderings of multiculturalism in liberal nation-states. In this search for alternative readings,... more
This Element argues that community-initiated migrant heritage harbours the potential to challenge and expand state-sanctioned renderings of multiculturalism in liberal nation-states. In this search for alternative readings, community-initiated migrant heritage is positioned as a grassroots challenge to positivist state-multiculturalism. It can do this if we adopt the migrant perspective, a diasporic perspective of 'settlement' that is always unfinished, non-static, and non-essentialist. As mobile subjects, either once or many times over - a subject position arrived at through acts of mobility, sometimes spawned by violence or structural inequality, which can reverberate throughout subsequent generations - the migrant subject position compels us to look both forwards and backwards in time and place.
Research Interests: Cultural History, Sociology, Gender Studies, Multiculturalism, Working Classes, and 10 morePublic History, Immigration, Essentialism, Migration History, Australian History, Museum and Heritage Studies, Grassroots, Working Class History, Critical Heritage Studies, and Industrial Archaeology and Heritage
Individuals and community groups must engage with instruments of cultural power to make their sites of migrant heritage public. In doing so, they negotiate both public histories around mass migration, state settlement and societal... more
Individuals and community groups must engage with instruments of cultural power to make their sites of migrant heritage public. In doing so, they negotiate both public histories around mass migration, state settlement and societal reception, as well as personal meanings around family history, adjustment and hardship. This chapter analyses how personal and community meanings around migrant heritage are produced in relation to heritage bodies, state representatives and “authorized heritage discourses.” It engages with ongoing debates about the relationship between personal and public memories. Benalla Migrant Camp in Benalla, Victoria.
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In this article, I “read against the grain” of a monument to post-WWII immigration and migrant communities. I am concerned with how such monuments, locally situated, might be used in more progressive and transformative histories, ones... more
In this article, I “read against the grain” of a monument to post-WWII immigration and migrant communities. I am concerned with how such monuments, locally situated, might be used in more progressive and transformative histories, ones that harbor the potential to challenge existing public and collective memories of postwar migration and multiculturalism that occur on a national stage and within the ambit of Australia’s heritage industry. This is a study in how discursively marginalized migrant groups, with subaltern narratives about mobility and settlement, claim space for alternative histories in the context of a restrictive official heritage.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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Since the 1980s, efforts to publically commemorate the former migrant training and reception centre of Bonegilla, while intermittent, have increased. I am referring to: reunions and anniversaries, state and national heritage listings, the... more
Since the 1980s, efforts to publically commemorate the former migrant training and reception centre of Bonegilla, while intermittent, have increased. I am referring to: reunions and anniversaries, state and national heritage listings, the erection of museum displays, temporary and touring exhibitions, the on-site Heritage Park, and forms of popular culture. For the national audience, as well as several ethnic communities, Bonegilla now plays a role in the collective imagination of the post-war period and the migrant journey. Furthermore, the nature of Bonegilla’s public representation has evolved since the late 1980s. Bonegilla has become much more than a place of personal migrant memory, and its previous negative connotations in the public arena have been erased. This public evolution is linked to much wider processes in our national history. This article thus explores the contestation and co-ordination of collective memories—that is, multiple narratives of Bonegilla’s past, which,...
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Abstract Migrant heritage, as a grassroots practice seeking to commemorate pre- and post-war migrant communities and their contributions, emerged in Australia from the 1980s. Since that time, its appeal has continued to grow. It now... more
Abstract Migrant heritage, as a grassroots practice seeking to commemorate pre- and post-war migrant communities and their contributions, emerged in Australia from the 1980s. Since that time, its appeal has continued to grow. It now receives, in some form, state sanction and is policed by the same state and national legislation as other cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible. This article seeks to complicate understandings of migrant heritage as a marginal practice, specifically by interrogating the use-value of particular narratives in the Australian context – that is, how do individuals, communities and other groups (the grassroots) draw on sanctioned and publicly circulating narratives to mark their site as heritage-worthy? Ideas of what constitutes official and unofficial heritage can be mutually inclusive – a dialectical process. I analyse this in relation to the commemoration of former post-war migrant reception centres in Australia.
Research Interests:
Bonegilla, Australia's largest post-war migrant processing and reception centre, re-emerged in the public sphere from the late 1980s. A reunion festival was staged on the grounds of the former centre in 1987. Widely attended by former... more
Bonegilla, Australia's largest post-war migrant processing and reception centre, re-emerged in the public sphere from the late 1980s. A reunion festival was staged on the grounds of the former centre in 1987. Widely attended by former residents, it was considered a success by its organisers, a grass-roots committee of former residents. Another reunion was held ten years later, this time by a committee led by local council members. Both these reunions are important moments in the formation of Bonegilla's public history and its orientation to a narrative of progress and Australian multiculturalism. Analysing them highlights wider changes in heritage discourses and management, and in the evolution of multiculturalism in Australia. Many recent studies of public commemorations in Australia have argued that vernacular or participatory commemorations can be, and almost inevitably are, overtaken and dominated by state-sanctioned narratives. In this article, I will focus on these two reunions in order to argue that despite the progressive dominance of official or institutional powers over Bonegilla's public history, participants’ voices endure within or alongside official frameworks. Despite the obvious differences between the 1987 and 1997 reunions, collective and individual recollections from ex-residents and their families creatively operate within established and seemingly official narrative frameworks. These are not restrictive, nor do they silence alternative articulations. Some ex-residents actively draw on the narrative frameworks available to them to attribute new significance to their experiences, whether melancholy or fond, and consequently include alternative stories that add further to Bonegilla's public multi-vocality.
Research Interests:
Abstract In Australia, museum exhibitions play an important social function in both framing and reflecting collective memories of immigration. Since the 1980s, Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre has emerged as a key part of... more
Abstract In Australia, museum exhibitions play an important social function in both framing and reflecting collective memories of immigration. Since the 1980s, Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre has emerged as a key part of the national immigration story. But its representation in the museum space necessitates the negotiation of some difficult terrain: capturing the migrant experience of some 320,000 displaced persons and assisted migrants over a twenty-four year history is a nigh impossible task. Bonegilla has been the subject of many small, large, touring, and temporary museum exhibitions since the 1990s. The histories they present work with or struggle against stakeholders and other important memory groups involved in the commemoration of the Bonegilla—separate ethnic organizations, local councils, heritage agencies, former residents’ associations, and invested individuals and their families. Analyzing the processes and peoples that surround public history efforts, how groups and individuals get invested in the site, and what responses and uses they make of it, can provide important methodological implications for the developing and intersecting fields of memory and museology studies.
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Research Interests: History, Architecture, Cultural Heritage, Immigration, Migration, and 12 moreLabour history, Migration Studies, Australian History, Architectural Heritage, Punishment and Prisons, Prisons, Global Convict Labour History, Tasmanian History, Tasmanian colonial history, Convict labourers - Tasmania, Port Arthur Historic Site, and Tasman Peninsula
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Alison Atkinson-Phillips has written a wide-ranging and insightful book about survivors and their memorials in contemporary Australia. Survivor Memorials explores a shift in memorial practice and what is remembered publicly. Namely, it... more
Alison Atkinson-Phillips has written a wide-ranging and insightful book about survivors and their memorials in contemporary Australia. Survivor Memorials explores a shift in memorial practice and what is remembered publicly. Namely, it highlights an expansion in the concepts of grief and loss that move us “beyond death.” The earliest of the memorials she examines dates from the 1980s. And although loss is a key component of the survivor memorials under analysis here, Atkinson-Phillips does not get lost in the insular miasma of trauma studies. Memorials are analyzed as socio-political constructs with evolving relationships to different communities of memory that hold different levels of power and agency. In fact, most of the memorials under consideration are also described as “monumemorials” (48), carrying both memorial (funerary) and monumental (celebratory aesthetic) traditions. Most importantly, they do political work. As Atkinson-Phillips puts it, “They lay claim to a particular ...
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, an Informa Plc company. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a chapter published by Routledge in Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage: Beyond and Between Borders (9780367348465) on August 3, 2020:... more
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, an Informa Plc company. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a chapter published by Routledge in Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage: Beyond and Between Borders (9780367348465) on August 3, 2020: https://www.routledge.com/Migrant-Multicultural-and-Diasporic-Heritage-Beyond-and-Between-Borders/Dellios-Henrich/p/book/9780367348465.
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Review(s) of: Beautiful Balts: From displaced persons to new Australians, by Jayne Persian, Sydney, New South Books, 2017, 240 pages, ISBN 9781742234854.
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Migrant camps were unsettling spaces for newly arrived families in post-war Australia. Post-WWII refugees and assisted migrants arriving from 1947 to the early 1970s labelled these temporary accommodation centres run by the Department of... more
Migrant camps were unsettling spaces for newly arrived families in post-war Australia. Post-WWII refugees and assisted migrants arriving from 1947 to the early 1970s labelled these temporary accommodation centres run by the Department of Immigration “camps”. Their ambiguity as spaces of refuge and containment persists in memory. Hundreds of thousands of assisted migrants and refugees passed through these camps, which were established from 1947 and progressively shut down from the late 1960s. This chapter will analyse memories of migrant camps by mothers, sons and daughters. They have grappled with their own contentious and contradictory family histories in the migrant camp and the ongoing legacies of being “received” and temporarily housed in a place of containment and control. As temporary and transient places, migrant camps were never intended to be long-term “homes” for migrant families. However, many families, particularly those with single mothers or with heads of households un...
Alexandra Dellios reviews Belonging: Reflections on Place , Wendy Woodson, curator. Immigration Museum , Melbourne. Until 22 January 2012. Entry: $10 adults, concession and children (3–16 years) free.
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This essay takes the history of Greek-Australians as a representative case for studying the revision of ethnic minority histories since the 1970s. Identifying three broad chronological and conceptual frameworks - structuralism and... more
This essay takes the history of Greek-Australians as a representative case for studying the revision of ethnic minority histories since the 1970s. Identifying three broad chronological and conceptual frameworks - structuralism and isolation, culturalism and surface culture, and inclusion and silence - it traces the trends in methodology (and content) that have attempted to contain or address the question of ethnic agency and their complication of an implausible and all-encompassing national narrative.
Review(s) of: Across the seas: Australia's response to refugees: A history, by Klaus Neumann, Black Inc, Collingwood Vic, 2015, x + 358 pages, ISBN 978 1 86395 735 9.