Eureka Henrich | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)
Books by Eureka Henrich
Palgrave, 2019
This book is a response to the binary thinking and misuse of history that characterize contempora... more This book is a response to the binary thinking and misuse of history that characterize contemporary immigration debates. Subverting the traditional injunction directed at migrants to ‘go back to where they came from’, it highlights the importance of the past to contemporary discussions around migration. It argues that historians have a significant contribution to make in this respect and shows how this can be done with chapters from scholars in, Asia, Europe, Australasia and North America. Through their work on global, transnational and national histories of migration, an alternative view emerges – one that complicates our understanding of 21st-century migration and reasserts movement as a central dimension of the human condition. History, Historians and the Immigration Debate makes the case for historians to assert themselves more confidently as expert commentators, offering a reflection on how we write migration history today and the forms it might take in the future.
Papers by Eureka Henrich
Studies in Oral History, 2022
This article explores the methodological and ethical issues arising from the reuse of migrant ora... more This article explores the methodological and ethical issues arising from the reuse of migrant oral history collections in Australia. It provides an overview of the literature on reuse, or the secondary analysis of qualitative data, and highlights approaches that consider the reuse of multiple collections. Two collections from the researcher’s own secondary analysis are presented as case studies: Morag Loh’s FILEF interviews from Melbourne in the late 1970s, and the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW Oral History Project interviews managed by Janis Wilton in Sydney in the early 1980s. Through comparing and connecting a small-scale community-engaged project, and an early government-initiated migrant oral history collection, the article posits that it is possible to listen not only ‘with’, but ‘across collections’. Listening across collections is a particularly valuable approach to histories of migration and health, both areas in which migrant and/or patient voices are rarely captured in ‘traditional’ historical records.
Histoire sociale/ Social History, 2019
This article brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medica... more This article brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medicalization of migrants in the postwar era, with a focus on medical writings about migrant patients in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that physicians adopted official assimilation ideologies to construct a "New Australian patient" whose beliefs and behaviours indicated a less sophisticated understanding of medicine, and who suffered particular psychosomatic illnesses and health risks linked to their migration, socioeconomic status, and linguistic isolation. By making assimilation medical, these doctors helped bridge the cultural gulf that existed between Australian doctors and their migrant patients, but they also perpetuated cultural stereotypes through which certain unassimilable groups were blamed for their own medical problems.
This chapter explores the history of prison tourism and its various contemporary manifestations i... more This chapter explores the history of prison tourism and its various contemporary manifestations in four colonial and postcolonial settings associated with the British Empire: Fremantle (Walyalup) and Rottnest Island (Wadjemup) in Western Australia; the Andaman Islands of India; and Changuu [Prison] Island in Zanzibar. It will analyse how and why each of these sites emerged historically as tourist attractions, and how and why they remain appealing to visitors today. Part of the explanation lies in the ecology of spaces that were attractive as prisons and remain alluring as leisure destinations, but it is also to do with their imbrication in wider narratives of nationalist struggle, (de)colonization, and nation building. Convicts were sometimes used as a means of colonizing remote locations and, even where they were not, colonial prisoners were often sent to jails in the furthest reaches of Empire.
History Compass
It is easy to take the presence of migration histories in Australian museums for granted. After a... more It is easy to take the presence of migration histories in Australian museums for granted. After all, most Australians are descended from immigrants, Australia’s cultural diversity is celebrated as a national strength, and museums must represent and explain that diversity in order to tell stories of the nation’s past. However, it is only in the last thirty years that experiences of migration have become the subject of collections, exhibitions, and even entire museums in Australia. In light of recent research and scholarly work this article surveys how migration history is portrayed in Australian museums. It reveals that creators of migration exhibitions have constantly negotiated a tension between an inclusive and affirming ‘nation of immigrants’ story and the more difficult histories of conflict, difference and exclusion that characterise Australia’s history of migration. Curatorial approaches to this tension have been shaped by changing political climates, public attitudes to migrants and multiculturalism, and community demands for representation in cultural institutions. International museological events, such as the opening of Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York in 1990, have also been influential. When located within these institutional, social and political contexts, exhibitions of migration history in Australia can be understood within three broad and overlapping phases. The earliest exhibitions, beginning in the mid-1980s, aimed to integrate minority migrant experiences into a pluralistic national story in order to overturn previous mono-cultural narratives of national becoming. A second phase of exhibitions, from the mid-1990s, overtly democratised this ‘new’ migration narrative in an attempt to appeal to Anglo-Celtic Australians who did not identify with multiculturalism. While elements of both approaches remain, in last decade Australian museums have begun to look beyond migrations to the nation and towards an exploration of transnational networks, personal belonging and dislocation, and the idea of home.
The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (ed. Sten Pultz Mosland, Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm), 2015
Childhood in the Past
A miniature English cottage, a doll’s dress made of paper and a ‘Game Boy’: what could these obje... more A miniature English cottage, a doll’s dress made of paper and a ‘Game Boy’: what could these objects have in common? All are toys that belonged to children who had moved to a new country, and all have been displayed in exhibitions of migration history. From unaccompanied child migrants, to refugee arrivals and children living in immigration detention, these toys and other children’s things are often windows onto controversial topics that allow visitors to imagine themselves in someone else’s smaller shoes. But what do they tell us about children’s differing experiences of migration, and the roles that possessions such as toys play in the remembering and retelling of those experiences? This article draws on examples from three decades of exhibitions in Australia to examine how, and why, children’s toys and the memories associated with them have been an important way of engaging audiences in historic and contemporary experiences of migration.
International Journal of the Inclusive Museum
This paper provides a comparative historical perspective of how Australian museums have exhibited... more This paper provides a comparative historical perspective of how Australian museums have exhibited stories of migration over the past three decades, with a focus on the use of objects. The pioneering of community access spaces, collecting of oral histories, innovative use of art-as-object and the development of theatrical recreations or props are all features of these exhibitions. Recent critiques have suggested that early migration exhibitions were uncritically ‘multicultural’ and represented only the “external markers of ethnicity”; however, this study reveals that curators in fact challenged and changed museum practice in negotiating these difficult histories. Examples are drawn from archival research and interviews with past and present curators of Australian museums, including the Migration Museum in Adelaide, the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, and the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.
Sydney Journal
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ragged Schools were a feature of many of... more During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ragged Schools were a feature of many of Sydney’s overcrowded inner city suburbs. At their height over 500 children were taught across five Schools each day. This article charts the formation of the Ragged Schools in 1860, preceded by an overview of their precursors in Great Britain and a survey of the social and demographic changes in Sydney in the 1850s. It explores the relationships between teachers, scholars and their parents and probes at the slum stereotypes that affected the way the Ragged Schools were written about by middle-class philanthropists. Finally, the reasons for the disintegration of Sydney’s Ragged Schools in the 1920s are surmised and the article concludes with a reflection on how this part of Sydney’s history has been both remembered and forgotten.
Reviews by Eureka Henrich
History Workshop Journal, 2014
History Today, 2014
A major multi-authored history of Australia appears once in a generation. The celebrated and cont... more A major multi-authored history of Australia appears once in a generation. The celebrated and contested bicentenary of British colonisation in 1988 marked the last effort: Australians: A Historical Library, which sliced the nation's past at fifty year intervals to examine Australians before 1788, at 1838, 1888, 1938, and after 1939. With the recent release of the two volume set, The Cambridge History of Australia, we have an updated picture of the 'land down under' fit for the 21 st century. No longer an island nation scourged by the 'tyranny of distance' (in Geoffrey Blainey's influential 1966 vision), the 67 contributors make plain the geological, geographical and human connections which have shaped the continent we now know as Australia, and the people who call it home.
reCollections: A journal of museums and collections
reCollections: A journal of museums and collections
Reviews in Australian Studies
Reviews in Australian Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2014
Reviews in Australian Studies
Thesis by Eureka Henrich
Since the introduction of multiculturalism as a public policy in 1973, the peopling of Australia ... more Since the introduction of multiculturalism as a public policy in 1973, the peopling of Australia by migrants from many different countries has become a celebrated national narrative. One place where this story has been told is in the nation's museums. Yet the aims and content of Australia's early migration exhibitions, which were among the first in the world, remain unrepresented in the relevant literature. They also remain disconnected from later exhibitions and museums of migration, when in fact they had a profound influence on them. This thesis asks: whose stories were told in Australian exhibitions of immigration history? And how did they change? To explore these questions, this thesis weaves a history of key exhibitions across institutions. A combination of archival research and interviews with museum curators reveals the complex ideas, decisions and circumstances that shaped these displays. The broader historical and political developments surrounding the opening of the Migration Museum in 1986, the Powerhouse Museum in 1988, the Australian National Maritime Museum in 1991, the Immigration Museum in 1998 and the long gestation of the National Museum of Australia from 1980 until 2001 provide the vital context for the exhibition analyses. A survey of the literature relating to multiculturalism, migration history and museums in Australia locates the chosen exhibitions within wider debates about ethnicity, identity, concepts of heritage and the role of national museums. I argue that we can understand museum exhibitions about migration in Australia between 1984 and 2001 as operating within two broad and internally variable phases. The first phase, "inventing the nation of immigrants", was characterised by a radical, revisionist and unashamedly multicultural challenge to standard national narratives; the second, "democratising the nation of immigrants", by a more conservative and inclusive approach that, in an attempt to include all Australians in the migration story, distanced itself from political controversy. The findings bring into question assumptions about the 'multicultural era' in Australian history, and reveal that museums, as sites of public history, as disseminators and reflectors of ideas, education and debate, richly repay the attention of historians long after their exhibitions have been dismantled.
Palgrave, 2019
This book is a response to the binary thinking and misuse of history that characterize contempora... more This book is a response to the binary thinking and misuse of history that characterize contemporary immigration debates. Subverting the traditional injunction directed at migrants to ‘go back to where they came from’, it highlights the importance of the past to contemporary discussions around migration. It argues that historians have a significant contribution to make in this respect and shows how this can be done with chapters from scholars in, Asia, Europe, Australasia and North America. Through their work on global, transnational and national histories of migration, an alternative view emerges – one that complicates our understanding of 21st-century migration and reasserts movement as a central dimension of the human condition. History, Historians and the Immigration Debate makes the case for historians to assert themselves more confidently as expert commentators, offering a reflection on how we write migration history today and the forms it might take in the future.
Studies in Oral History, 2022
This article explores the methodological and ethical issues arising from the reuse of migrant ora... more This article explores the methodological and ethical issues arising from the reuse of migrant oral history collections in Australia. It provides an overview of the literature on reuse, or the secondary analysis of qualitative data, and highlights approaches that consider the reuse of multiple collections. Two collections from the researcher’s own secondary analysis are presented as case studies: Morag Loh’s FILEF interviews from Melbourne in the late 1970s, and the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW Oral History Project interviews managed by Janis Wilton in Sydney in the early 1980s. Through comparing and connecting a small-scale community-engaged project, and an early government-initiated migrant oral history collection, the article posits that it is possible to listen not only ‘with’, but ‘across collections’. Listening across collections is a particularly valuable approach to histories of migration and health, both areas in which migrant and/or patient voices are rarely captured in ‘traditional’ historical records.
Histoire sociale/ Social History, 2019
This article brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medica... more This article brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medicalization of migrants in the postwar era, with a focus on medical writings about migrant patients in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that physicians adopted official assimilation ideologies to construct a "New Australian patient" whose beliefs and behaviours indicated a less sophisticated understanding of medicine, and who suffered particular psychosomatic illnesses and health risks linked to their migration, socioeconomic status, and linguistic isolation. By making assimilation medical, these doctors helped bridge the cultural gulf that existed between Australian doctors and their migrant patients, but they also perpetuated cultural stereotypes through which certain unassimilable groups were blamed for their own medical problems.
This chapter explores the history of prison tourism and its various contemporary manifestations i... more This chapter explores the history of prison tourism and its various contemporary manifestations in four colonial and postcolonial settings associated with the British Empire: Fremantle (Walyalup) and Rottnest Island (Wadjemup) in Western Australia; the Andaman Islands of India; and Changuu [Prison] Island in Zanzibar. It will analyse how and why each of these sites emerged historically as tourist attractions, and how and why they remain appealing to visitors today. Part of the explanation lies in the ecology of spaces that were attractive as prisons and remain alluring as leisure destinations, but it is also to do with their imbrication in wider narratives of nationalist struggle, (de)colonization, and nation building. Convicts were sometimes used as a means of colonizing remote locations and, even where they were not, colonial prisoners were often sent to jails in the furthest reaches of Empire.
History Compass
It is easy to take the presence of migration histories in Australian museums for granted. After a... more It is easy to take the presence of migration histories in Australian museums for granted. After all, most Australians are descended from immigrants, Australia’s cultural diversity is celebrated as a national strength, and museums must represent and explain that diversity in order to tell stories of the nation’s past. However, it is only in the last thirty years that experiences of migration have become the subject of collections, exhibitions, and even entire museums in Australia. In light of recent research and scholarly work this article surveys how migration history is portrayed in Australian museums. It reveals that creators of migration exhibitions have constantly negotiated a tension between an inclusive and affirming ‘nation of immigrants’ story and the more difficult histories of conflict, difference and exclusion that characterise Australia’s history of migration. Curatorial approaches to this tension have been shaped by changing political climates, public attitudes to migrants and multiculturalism, and community demands for representation in cultural institutions. International museological events, such as the opening of Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York in 1990, have also been influential. When located within these institutional, social and political contexts, exhibitions of migration history in Australia can be understood within three broad and overlapping phases. The earliest exhibitions, beginning in the mid-1980s, aimed to integrate minority migrant experiences into a pluralistic national story in order to overturn previous mono-cultural narratives of national becoming. A second phase of exhibitions, from the mid-1990s, overtly democratised this ‘new’ migration narrative in an attempt to appeal to Anglo-Celtic Australians who did not identify with multiculturalism. While elements of both approaches remain, in last decade Australian museums have begun to look beyond migrations to the nation and towards an exploration of transnational networks, personal belonging and dislocation, and the idea of home.
The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (ed. Sten Pultz Mosland, Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm), 2015
Childhood in the Past
A miniature English cottage, a doll’s dress made of paper and a ‘Game Boy’: what could these obje... more A miniature English cottage, a doll’s dress made of paper and a ‘Game Boy’: what could these objects have in common? All are toys that belonged to children who had moved to a new country, and all have been displayed in exhibitions of migration history. From unaccompanied child migrants, to refugee arrivals and children living in immigration detention, these toys and other children’s things are often windows onto controversial topics that allow visitors to imagine themselves in someone else’s smaller shoes. But what do they tell us about children’s differing experiences of migration, and the roles that possessions such as toys play in the remembering and retelling of those experiences? This article draws on examples from three decades of exhibitions in Australia to examine how, and why, children’s toys and the memories associated with them have been an important way of engaging audiences in historic and contemporary experiences of migration.
International Journal of the Inclusive Museum
This paper provides a comparative historical perspective of how Australian museums have exhibited... more This paper provides a comparative historical perspective of how Australian museums have exhibited stories of migration over the past three decades, with a focus on the use of objects. The pioneering of community access spaces, collecting of oral histories, innovative use of art-as-object and the development of theatrical recreations or props are all features of these exhibitions. Recent critiques have suggested that early migration exhibitions were uncritically ‘multicultural’ and represented only the “external markers of ethnicity”; however, this study reveals that curators in fact challenged and changed museum practice in negotiating these difficult histories. Examples are drawn from archival research and interviews with past and present curators of Australian museums, including the Migration Museum in Adelaide, the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, and the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.
Sydney Journal
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ragged Schools were a feature of many of... more During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ragged Schools were a feature of many of Sydney’s overcrowded inner city suburbs. At their height over 500 children were taught across five Schools each day. This article charts the formation of the Ragged Schools in 1860, preceded by an overview of their precursors in Great Britain and a survey of the social and demographic changes in Sydney in the 1850s. It explores the relationships between teachers, scholars and their parents and probes at the slum stereotypes that affected the way the Ragged Schools were written about by middle-class philanthropists. Finally, the reasons for the disintegration of Sydney’s Ragged Schools in the 1920s are surmised and the article concludes with a reflection on how this part of Sydney’s history has been both remembered and forgotten.
History Workshop Journal, 2014
History Today, 2014
A major multi-authored history of Australia appears once in a generation. The celebrated and cont... more A major multi-authored history of Australia appears once in a generation. The celebrated and contested bicentenary of British colonisation in 1988 marked the last effort: Australians: A Historical Library, which sliced the nation's past at fifty year intervals to examine Australians before 1788, at 1838, 1888, 1938, and after 1939. With the recent release of the two volume set, The Cambridge History of Australia, we have an updated picture of the 'land down under' fit for the 21 st century. No longer an island nation scourged by the 'tyranny of distance' (in Geoffrey Blainey's influential 1966 vision), the 67 contributors make plain the geological, geographical and human connections which have shaped the continent we now know as Australia, and the people who call it home.
reCollections: A journal of museums and collections
reCollections: A journal of museums and collections
Reviews in Australian Studies
Reviews in Australian Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2014
Reviews in Australian Studies
Since the introduction of multiculturalism as a public policy in 1973, the peopling of Australia ... more Since the introduction of multiculturalism as a public policy in 1973, the peopling of Australia by migrants from many different countries has become a celebrated national narrative. One place where this story has been told is in the nation's museums. Yet the aims and content of Australia's early migration exhibitions, which were among the first in the world, remain unrepresented in the relevant literature. They also remain disconnected from later exhibitions and museums of migration, when in fact they had a profound influence on them. This thesis asks: whose stories were told in Australian exhibitions of immigration history? And how did they change? To explore these questions, this thesis weaves a history of key exhibitions across institutions. A combination of archival research and interviews with museum curators reveals the complex ideas, decisions and circumstances that shaped these displays. The broader historical and political developments surrounding the opening of the Migration Museum in 1986, the Powerhouse Museum in 1988, the Australian National Maritime Museum in 1991, the Immigration Museum in 1998 and the long gestation of the National Museum of Australia from 1980 until 2001 provide the vital context for the exhibition analyses. A survey of the literature relating to multiculturalism, migration history and museums in Australia locates the chosen exhibitions within wider debates about ethnicity, identity, concepts of heritage and the role of national museums. I argue that we can understand museum exhibitions about migration in Australia between 1984 and 2001 as operating within two broad and internally variable phases. The first phase, "inventing the nation of immigrants", was characterised by a radical, revisionist and unashamedly multicultural challenge to standard national narratives; the second, "democratising the nation of immigrants", by a more conservative and inclusive approach that, in an attempt to include all Australians in the migration story, distanced itself from political controversy. The findings bring into question assumptions about the 'multicultural era' in Australian history, and reveal that museums, as sites of public history, as disseminators and reflectors of ideas, education and debate, richly repay the attention of historians long after their exhibitions have been dismantled.
A syringe, a jar of baby ointment and a packet of painkillers: how might these ordinary, everyday... more A syringe, a jar of baby ointment and a packet of painkillers: how might these ordinary, everyday items provide a fresh perspective on Australia in the mid-twentieth century? All three relate to a common human concern: health. And all three allow us to imagine Australia as seen from the outside, by those who migrated to the country in search of refuge, work, and a better life.
At a time when images of young, healthy ‘New Australians’ were key to the acceptance of the Government’s radical post-war immigration scheme, the actual experiences of those migrants who were new to Australia’s health systems and medical culture were, and have since been, largely overlooked. This oversight reflects the official historical record, which is dominated by the writings of medical practitioners and government officials concerned with the selection and regulation of quality ‘human stock’.
Personal objects, together with oral histories and written memoirs, offer a way for historians to recover a migrant perspective on health in a period where migrant’s voices were rarely part of medical discourse or policy formation. This presentation demonstrates the potential of such an approach through a virtual exhibition ‘A Full Healthy Life’: Migration & Health in Post-War Australia. Developed as part of a public engagement programme funded by the Wellcome Trust, the exhibition features items from Australian collections including those of the Powerhouse Museum, Museum Victoria, the South Australian Migration Museum and the National Museum of Australia.
This paper brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medicali... more This paper brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medicalisation of migrants in the post-war era, with a focus on medical writings about migrant patients in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that physicians adopted official assimilation ideologies to construct a “New Australian patient” whose beliefs and behaviours indicated a less sophisticated understanding of medicine, and who suffered particular psychosomatic illnesses and health risks linked to their migration, socio-economic status and linguistic isolation. By making assimilation medical, these doctors helped bridge the cultural gulf that existed between Australian doctors and their migrant patients, but they also perpetuated cultural stereotypes through which certain unassimilable groups were blamed for their own medical problems.
This presentation showcases a piece of medical equipment brought to Australia in 1958 by an Itali... more This presentation showcases a piece of medical equipment brought to Australia in 1958 by an Italian woman, and now held in the collections of the Migration Museum in Adelaide. Bound up in this one small possession are beliefs about race, culture and difference which shed new light on encounters between migrants and medical professionals in post-war Australia. At a time when images of young, healthy ‘New Australians’ were key to the acceptance of the Government’s radical immigration scheme, the actual experiences of those migrants who navigated Australia’s health systems and medical culture were, and have since been, largely overlooked. I argue that personal objects, together with oral histories and written memoirs, can reposition migrants as active agents in the maintenance of their own health and that of their loved ones, rather than the passive subjects of medical expertise and government policy.
Health shapes every stage of migration. But while immigration processes such as medical screening... more Health shapes every stage of migration. But while immigration processes such as medical screening and quarantine leave a bureaucratic cache in the archives, encounters between migrants and the medical system in primary care settings are recorded in only scattered and diffuse ways. Likewise, personal or familial efforts to maintain health and wellbeing whilst establishing working lives in a new country leave little documentary evidence. Yet health continues to be important beyond national borders, both in the early years of settlement and throughout the life course of individuals, families and communities.
To better understand the role that health plays throughout the migration experience, this paper presents emergent findings from a study of oral histories, life writing and material culture yielded by people who journeyed to Australia during the peak years of the post-war immigration programme. These personal accounts are contextualised by the contemporaneous writings of medical professionals and grey literature from government departments and social scientists concerning ‘migrant problems’. The study enhances a growing literature on the gaps between immigration and settlement policies, government rhetoric and the lived experience of migrants in the period. I argue that a focus on health can provide a unique insight into the ways migrants navigated mid-twentieth century Australian society, attitudes, institutions and cultures. Such an approach can shed new light on structures of power which shaped the ways migrant patients were perceived by medical professionals and limited their access to mainstream healthcare.
Australia wants, and will welcome, new healthy citizens who are determined to become good Austral... more Australia wants, and will welcome, new healthy citizens who are determined to become good Australians by adoption - Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration, 2 August 1945.
The experiences of those who migrated to Australia in the years following the Second World War have, since the 1980s, gained increasing historical attention, yet the centrality of health to the promotion, implementation and lived-experience of migration and settlement is an aspect of this history that remains to be written. This talk will report on the preliminary findings of a research project which foregrounds migrants’ own narratives of health and ill-health, gleaned through a vast and scattered archive of oral histories, material culture and life writing held in the collections of libraries, galleries and museums in Australia and the UK. Ranging across experiences of childbirth, hospitalisation, childhood illness, ageing and work-related injuries, these sources offer precious and sometimes painful windows into the lives of individuals and families caught up in Australia’s post-war migration programme. Rather than merely the objects of government policies of selection, work assignment and assimilation, migrants emerge in these sources as subjects encountering and negotiating an Australia that was, quite often, far from the one they had imagined.
In the quarter century following the Second World War, Australia embarked upon an unprecedented i... more In the quarter century following the Second World War, Australia embarked upon an unprecedented immigration programme which encouraged 2.5 million people to move to the other side of the world. Assisted passage agreements were brokered with Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, West Germany, Austria, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia, as well as with the International Refugee Organisation, the latter facilitating the journeys of more than 170,000 refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. These migrants were intended to increase national security by bolstering the Australian population, and to provide the essential labour for an expanding economy. The Department of Information, together with the Department of Immigration orchestrated a publicity campaign to allay domestic concerns about the arrival of so many ‘Poms’ and ‘foreigners’. They emphasised the health and assimilability of these ‘New Australians’, portraying robust and friendly young workers keen to shake off their pasts and become fellow citizens. To attract migrants, an image of Australia as a ‘healthy haven’ was cultivated, with an emphasis on quality of life and an abundance of opportunities.
But while the public image of migrants as ‘splendid human material’ was promoted throughout the 1950s and 1960s, doubts began to be raised in political, academic and medical circles as to the fitness of the new arrivals, especially given the stress of migration and the pressure to rapidly assimilate. In particular, psychologists and general practitioners began to ask ‘Is migration bad for people’s health?’, ‘Who is to blame?’ and ‘What can be done about it?’ Drawing on an analysis of articles from medical journals of the period, this talk will examine how migrant health became constructed as a ‘problem’ in post-war Australia. It will consider the ways that medical professionals designed and implemented scientific studies, chose and narrated their case studies and characterised their migrant patients in their writings. By examining the frequent assumptions and opinions about national and cultural ‘types’ that can be found in this literature (as well as the occasional rebuttals that these opinions provoked), this talk aims to give fresh insights into how ideas about health were central to the post-war project of making ‘new Australians’.
Is there a danger, when migration becomes a contentious topic of political debate, that museums r... more Is there a danger, when migration becomes a contentious topic of political debate, that museums retreat from dealing with the inevitable conflicts that arise in developing relationships with migrant communities and representing their lives? This seminar, drawing on lessons learnt in the UK, France and Australia, opens up debate on how to use conflict constructively.
A seminar with Dr Eureka Henrich (King’s College London) and Zelda Baveystock (Trustee, Migration... more A seminar with Dr Eureka Henrich (King’s College London) and Zelda Baveystock (Trustee, Migration Museum Project).
Migration museums now appear ubiquitous in many of the world’s major cities, a ‘must-have’ institution alongside national galleries, history museums and public libraries. But what is the relationship between national histories and migration histories? Who do these museums seek to represent, and what roles do they end up playing once established?
This seminar will investigate these questions from two different perspectives. Historian Eureka Henrich will explore the development of migration museums in Australia, including the world’s first Migration Museum in Adelaide (1986) and the Immigration Museum in Melbourne (1998). Zelda Baveystock, a museum professional and trustee of the Migration Museum Project, will explain how the idea for a national migration museum in Britain emerged, what the project aims to achieve and how it is progressing. Both presenters will consider the challenges and limitations of the migration museum model as well as the exciting opportunities it presents.
Australia is home to two migration museums, each with its own institutional history and identity.... more Australia is home to two migration museums, each with its own institutional history and identity. The Migration Museum in Adelaide opened in 1986 as the world’s first migration museum, inviting potential visitors to ‘discover the immigrant in us all’. Twelve years later, the Immigration Museum in Melbourne opened as a new campus of the revamped Museum Victoria, aiming to attract a new audience by declaring ‘this isn’t a museum about them, it’s about us’. A comparison of these two museums illuminates the metamorphosis that the concept of ‘migrant’ has undergone in Australian public culture in the late 20th century. It also allows a consideration of the profound changes that have occurred within museums – professionalisation, the digital revolution and increased pressure to turn a profit have all impacted upon the presentation of history.
This paper will compare and contrast the development of Australia’s two migration museums in order to illuminate the ways that migrant identity has been constructed through their exhibitions and programmes. It will assess how social and political contexts have shaped these constructions, how personal identities have been expressed through involvement with migration museums (or shaped by them), and how institutional identities have developed through relationships with audiences and ‘migrant communities’.
The act of inscribing individual names on a memorial is one most readily associated with national... more The act of inscribing individual names on a memorial is one most readily associated with national service in war. However, since the early 1990s, migration and maritime museums have launched memorials where, for a fee, the names of migrants can be displayed, effectively carving them into the nation’s history. These ‘migrant memorial walls’, as I call them, remain popular in post-colonial settler nations such as Australia, Canada and the United States, where they function to unite the diverse heritages of citizens and convey a cohesive narrative of nation building. Importantly, they also allow people to commemorate relatives or ancestors in a public way, lending legitimacy and validation to their family histories. This paper traces the international history of ‘migrant memorial walls’ with a focus on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York, and the Welcome Wall at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. I’ll explain why migrant memorial walls emerged at this time, explore their ongoing popularity, and examine the implications this ‘user-pays’ model of memorialisation has for understandings of national and migration histories.
A miniature English cottage, a doll’s dress made of paper and a ‘Game Boy’: what could these obje... more A miniature English cottage, a doll’s dress made of paper and a ‘Game Boy’: what could these objects have in common? All are toys that once belonged to children moving to a new country, and all have been displayed in exhibitions of migration history. From unaccompanied child migrants, to refugee arrivals and children living in immigration detention, these toys are often windows onto controversial topics that allow visitors to imagine themselves in someone else’s smaller shoes. But what do they tell us about children’s experiences of migration, how they have changed over time, and what role possessions such as toys play in the process of adapting to a new environment? This talk draws on examples from thirty years of exhibitions in Australia to examine how, and why, children’s toys have been an important way of engaging audiences in historic and contemporary experiences of migration.
It is easy to take the presence of migration histories in Australian museums for granted. After a... more It is easy to take the presence of migration histories in Australian museums for granted. After all, most Australians are descended from immigrants, Australia’s cultural diversity is celebrated as a national strength, and museums must represent and explain that diversity in order to tell stories of the nation’s past. However, it is only in the last thirty years that experiences of migration have become the subject of collections, exhibitions, and even entire museums in Australia. This paper traces that history – from the opening of the first dedicated migration museum in the world in Adelaide in 1986, to the Melbourne Immigration Museum’s latest permanent exhibition Identity in 2011. It focuses on key national ‘moments’ including the Australian Bicentenary of 1988, the lead up to the Sydney 2000 Olympics and the Centenary of Federation in 2001, in order to examine how museum workers took part in public debates about national identity and culture through their exhibitions and programs. This ‘history of exhibitions’ approach, made possible by extensive archival research across Australian museums and through interviews with curators, reveals that museum workers have constantly negotiated a complex tension between the need to thread an inclusive ‘nation of immigrants’ narrative and to confront the more problematic histories of exclusion, conflict and division that characterise Australia’s immigration history.
Between 1860 and 1924 ten Ragged Schools opened in Sydney. Located in the Rocks, the city centre,... more Between 1860 and 1924 ten Ragged Schools opened in Sydney. Located in the Rocks, the city centre, and the inner-city suburbs of Glebe, Surry Hills and Waterloo, the dates of their operation map the growth of the city and the displacement of the urban working poor. By the time of their demise in the mid 1920s, an estimated 18,000 children had passed through their schoolrooms. Yet there exists little public memory of Sydney’s Ragged Schools. Records are scarce. The stigma associated with poverty that resulted in a ragged schooling seems to have silenced the memories of those who attended. Some never spoke of their experiences, not even to their children.
This paper reinscribes the history of these schools onto the streets and suburbs of Sydney. Through a series of “snapshots” of different schools at different times, the relationships between children, parents and teachers are explored. The practice of visiting the homes of the poor by teachers of the Ragged Schools, and their subsequent reports on these excursions in the organisation’s Annual Reports, provides a glimpse into both the domestic and public spaces where these interactions took place.
The act of inscribing individual names on a memorial is one most readily associated with national... more The act of inscribing individual names on a memorial is one most readily associated with national service in war. However, since the early 1990s, immigration and maritime museums have launched memorials where, for a fee, the names of migrants and their descendants can be displayed, effectively carving them into the nation’s history. Most often in the fashion of Ellis Island’s American Immigrant Wall of Honor, these sites celebrate what Graeme Davison has termed the “myth of the Great Voyage”, which “focuses our ideals on the experience of journeying - of national becoming - rather than upon our origins or destination”. Yet the databases of information that accompany registered names record precious individual stories of triumph and success, sorrow and grief, which transcend national boundaries. The meanings of these sites are complex, diverse, and sometimes contradictory. The huge popularity of Ellis Island’s Wall inspired the Welcome Wall at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and the Tribute Garden at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne in the late 1990s. In 2011 similar projects were completed by the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle and Albany. A proposed national monument to Australia’s migrant past, called “Immigration Place”, is currently garnering support and may form part of Canberra’s centenary celebrations in 2013. Why the continuing demand in Australia for such memorials? What are their functions, and what meanings do they convey? This paper will shed light on these questions though an examination of three key sites. It will then assess how Australia’s collective migrant memory has been shaped by the adoption of an American model, and how memories of loss and trauma are remembered and forgotten through such projects.
Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow wrote last year in Rivers and Resilience "despite many Aborigi... more Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow wrote last year in Rivers and Resilience "despite many Aboriginal people having been displaced by choice or force from their original homelands, Australian analysts almost never consider Aboriginal people along with non-Indigenous migrants or refugees, no matter how similar their experiences of movement and dislocation may be." Ann Curthoys has tracked this division from the 19th century until the present day, noting that it was only in the 1990s that an "uneasy conversation" began between the two discourses. However, one space where the tension between Indigenous and migrant histories has been continually confronted since the mid-1980s is in museum exhibitions.
This paper tracks how Indigenous history has been represented in exhibitions of migration in Australia in the past twenty five years, drawing on examples from the Migration Museum in Adelaide, the National Museum of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum and the Immigration Museum in Melbourne. It describes the different curatorial approaches to Australia's first peoples - which range from a construction of them as migrants and settlers themselves, to a recognition of the belief that they "have always been here" - and asks what implications these representations may have.
An 'expert essay' written for the Convict Voyages website in 2015.
The Conversation, Jun 3, 2014
* Immigration, Nation and Public History * Call for papers Wednesday 18 June 2014 at King’s C... more * Immigration, Nation and Public History *
Call for papers
Wednesday 18 June 2014 at King’s College London
Hosted by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies.
Convenor: Dr Eureka Henrich
Symposium Aims and Themes
This symposium provides an opportunity to reflect upon the tension between different representations of migrants in the public arena – from so-called ‘medical tourists’ and ‘problem’ populations, to immigrant ancestors and national founders, to affluent global citizens and international students. It asks: what part do historical perspectives play in these representations? Can we talk about a ‘public history of immigration’ within Britain or elsewhere? If so, what might it look like? In other words, where do we encounter historical narratives of migration beyond the academy, how are they constructed and who do they seek to represent?
Given the current context of escalating far-right movements across Europe, and tighter restrictions upon migrant movements in other regions, this symposium is particularly interested in locating and analysing national narratives of migration, their narrators and their audiences. If Britain and France are ‘nations of immigrants’, to be placed alongside settler societies like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, can immigrants be seen as founders and pioneers rather than interlopers and outsiders? Who might these narratives appeal to, and whom might they alienate?
Immigration, Nation and Public History takes place on 18 June 2014, at King’s College London, Strand Campus. The event aims to bring together a wide range of interested parties across museums, archives, galleries, universities, journalism, education, politics and public services. It is hoped that the symposium will establish research networks and new partnerships between researchers, practitioners and organisations.
While other submissions are welcome, prospective papers (20 minutes duration) might address themes such as:
• Migration history in school curricula
• Museums and migration (including exhibitions, public programmes, collections, and community engagement)
• Migrant memorials
• Forced migration (e.g. convict transportation, slavery, child migration) and its representations
• Migration in the news media
• Public attitudes towards migration, how they are represented (e.g. opinion polls and their use)
• Family history/genealogy, and the discovery of immigrant ancestors
• Links between migration and tourism
• Links between national histories and migration histories
• Representations of indigenous peoples in ‘immigrant nations’
• Asylum seekers and refugees: historical and contemporary representations
• Representations of migration/migrants/migrant communities in film and television
• Migrant communities and individual’s self-representations
• Changing representations of migration given the so-called ‘failure of multiculturalism’ in Britain and Europe
Submission Guidelines
Proposals should include:
- Paper title
- 250-word abstract
- Biography of 50-100 words
- 2-page CV
Deadline: 31 January 2014. Notification of acceptance: 21 February 2014
Submissions should be sent to:
eureka.henrich@kcl.ac.uk
Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage: Beyond and Between Borders, 2020
Chp 1 of Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage explores the role heritage has played in r... 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.