Alison Atkinson-Phillips

Australian history has undergone major transformations over the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Started by small groups of antiquarians and novelists, it is today practised in a myriad of ways by millions of Australians. Local, community and family historians spend huge amounts of time and resources investigating the past. The Stolen and Forgotten Generations seek connection and healing through history. The digital revolution has democratised history making and its production and consumption. In the academy, land settlement, politics and great men have been supplanted by Indigenous histories, immigration stories, gender and memory perspectives, cultural, environmental and public history. Through 22 readable chapters by leading practitioners, this book explores the complex, multi-roomed house of Australian history.

Australia is a nation in which migration plays an important role in the national imaginary. Yet the position of the migrant, particularly those who fall outside of current definitions of whiteness, is ambiguous and unstable. The importance of Australia’s migrant heritage, and the need to understand the migrant’s place as citizen, are reflected in a series of migration- or maritime-themed museum sites in major Australian cities. Each of these sites also hosts a kind of “user pays” commemoration, in which a migrant or their descendants can pay to add their names to a “Welcome Wall” or other form of tribute. Yet within Australia’s settler-colonial context, the question of who has the right to offer welcome is complex and draws attention to the question of Aboriginal sovereignty. This paper draws on Dennis Byrne’s concept of networked heritage to consider urban spaces of migrant memory in dialogue with other less visible sites, including places of Aboriginal and settler incarceration, postwar reception centers, and the “black sites” of contemporary immigration detention.