Migrant Nation

Description

‘Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity’ provides a rich understanding of the complexity of contemporary Australian society – its politics, culture and identity

List of Figures; Chapter 1: Introduction: Transcultural Studies in Australian Identity, Paul Longley Arthur; Chapter 2: Remembering Aboriginal Sydney, Peter Read; Chapter 3: Files and Aboriginal Lives: Biographies from an Archive, Anna Haebich; Chapter 4: Writing, Femininity, and Colonialism: Judith Wright, Hélène Cixous, and Marie Cardinal, Alison Ravenscroft; Chapter 5: The Staging of Social Policy: The Photographing of Postwar British Child Migrants, Kerreen Ely-Harper; Chapter 6: Writing Home from China: Charles Allen’s Transnational Childhood, Kate Bagnall; Chapter 7: Australian? Autobiography?: Citizenship, Postnational Self-Identity, and the Politics of Belonging, Jack Bowers; Chapter 8: A Nikkei Australian Story: Legacy of the Pacific War, Yuriko Nagata; Chapter 9: Displaced Persons (1947-1952) in Australia: Memory in Autobiography, Jayne Persian; Chapter 10: Between Utopia and Autobiography: Migrant Narratives in Australia, Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams; Chapter 11: Vietnamese Australian Life Writing and Integration: The Magazine for Multicultural and Vietnamese Issues, Michael Jacklin; Chapter 12: Heroes, Legends, and Divas: Framing Famous Lives in Australia, Karen Fox; List of Contributors; Index.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783087228
• Langue: English

Extrait

Migrant Nation
Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture
Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specializes in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/or conceptually. We welcome well-researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames.

Series Editors
Katherine Bode – Australian National University, Australia
Nicole Moore – University of New South Wales, Australia

Editorial Board
Tanya Dalziell – University of Western Australia, Australia
Delia Falconer – University of Technology Sydney, Australia
John Frow – University of Sydney, Australia
Wang Guanglin – Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China
Ian Henderson – King’s College London, UK
Tony Hughes-D’Aeth – University of Western Australia, Australia
Ivor Indyk – Western Sydney University, Australia
Nicholas Jose – University of Adelaide, Australia
James Ley – Sydney Review of Books , Australia
Susan Martin – La Trobe University, Australia
Andrew McCann – Dartmouth College, USA
Lyn McCredden – Deakin University, Australia
Elizabeth McMahon – University of New South Wales, Australia
Brigitta Olubas – University of New South Wales, Australia
Anne Pender – University of New England, Australia
Fiona Polack – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Sue Sheridan – University of Adelaide, Australia
Ann Vickery – Deakin University, Australia
Russell West-Pavlov – Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany
Lydia Wevers – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Gillian Whitlock – University of Queensland, Australia
Migrant Nation
Australian Culture, Society and Identity
Edited by
Paul Longley Arthur
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2018 Paul Longley Arthur editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-720-4 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-720-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
List of Figures

1. Introduction: Transcultural Studies in Australian Identity
Paul Longley Arthur
2. Remembering Aboriginal Sydney
Peter Read
3. Files and Aboriginal Lives: Biographies from an Archive
Anna Haebich
4. Writing, Femininity and Colonialism: Judith Wright, Hélène Cixous and Marie Cardinal
Alison Ravenscroft
5. The Staging of Social Policy: The Photographing of Post-War British Child Migrants
Kerreen Ely-Harper
6. Writing Home from China: Charles Allen’s Transnational Childhood
Kate Bagnall
7. Australian? Autobiography? Citizenship, Postnational Self-Identity and the Politics of Belonging
Jack Bowers
8. A Nikkei Australian Story: Legacy of the Pacific War
Yuriko Nagata
9. Displaced Persons (1947–52) in Australia: Memory in Autobiography
Jayne Persian
10. Between Utopia and Autobiography: Migrant Narratives in Australia
Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams
11. Vietnamese–Australian Life Writing and Integration: The Magazine for Multicultural and Vietnamese Issues
Michael Jacklin
12. Heroes, Legends and Divas: Framing Famous Lives in Australia
Karen Fox
List of Contributors

Index
FIGURES
5.1 Dr Barnardos’s 1948 party on board the Ormonde
5.2 Documentation of the Barnardo’s Australian Archival Collection
5.3 Clifford Remmer, age 12, photographed prior to leaving England for Australia
5.4 ‘What a great place it was to be a kid’
5.5 ‘Cliff Remmer on right showing new boys Ray Searby and mate the chicks at the Mowbray Farm School 1951’
5.6 ‘Burwood Girls at Mowbray Park to visit their Brothers’
5.7 Back view of ‘Burwood Girls at Mowbray Park’ photograph
6.1 Charles Allen as a boy, photographed sometime before he went to China in 1909
6.2 Backyards along Campbell Street in Surry Hills, Sydney, in 1900
6.3 One of the letters Charles Allen wrote from China to his mother in Sydney, dated 11 April 1911
6.4 Chuk Sau Yuen village was located outside of the county capital of Shekki, pictured in 1932
6.5 Charles Allen’s Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test, issued in June 1909
Chapter 1
Introduction: Transcultural Studies in Australian Identity
Paul Longley Arthur

It’s my present that is foreign, and […] the past is home, albeit a lost home.
(Rushdie 1991 , 9)

Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity.
(Kristeva 1991 , 1)
As a former colony of Great Britain, Australia has faced the dual challenge experienced by all settler colonies of forging an identity that allows it to distinguish itself from its ‘parent’ culture at the same time deal with its complicity in the colonization of the new land and the treatment of its original inhabitants. In the case of Australia, this situation has been further complicated by the fact that the land was simply taken – without a war, without a treaty and without negotiation. Throughout its European history, Australia has needed to perpetuate its founding myth of being a previously uninhabited land. The false descriptor terra nullius was the framing principle for a mythology and a moral platform with repercussions that are felt to this day. This principle has facilitated long-term ‘historical amnesia’ (Young 1990 , 25) 1 and provided justification for ruthless racial policies designed to serve the dream of a young, white egalitarian society building a nation in a ‘new’ land. 2 Australian writer Peter Carey has commented, ‘We preferred to forget the doctrine of Terra Nullius to justify theft and murder’. Forgetting ‘is a habit for us’, he says, adding, ‘as it is for most people’. 3
A few years before Australia’s bicentenary in 1988, Richard White pointed out that while every new nation has to go through the process of inventing an identity, in Australia it is ‘a national obsession’. Australia, he reflected, ‘has long supported a whole industry of image-makers to tell us what we are’ (White 1981 , viii). Other scholars since then have directly addressed the topic of the construction of Australian identity, using a wide variety of approaches. 4 In these explorations an undercurrent of anxiety has repeatedly been identified in the self-image that Australia has projected. This anxiety has many possible causes, but prominent among them is the uncomfortable recognition, growing stronger over recent decades, that the old identity ‘brand’ is now so far from the reality of what Australia has become in its national policies, practices and the daily life of its citizens that it can no longer be invoked without irony. In particular, Australians’ professed egalitarianism is at odds with widely held community attitudes to difference – whether racial, ethnic or cultural. Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country exposed the problem and explained it in terms of ‘the inability to imagine a way of life different from one’s own’ (Horne 1964 , 46). Now the discrepancy between Australia’s public face and its inner life has grown to unmanageable proportions and has become highly visible, demanding attention. Put simply, a vast gap now exists between the old dream and the accumulating narratives of the reality of living in Australia today. As Salman Rushdie once put it, in the context of India, ‘their descriptions [are] incompatible’ (Rushdie 1991 , 13). 5 In recent years the resultant tension between these divergent narratives has been causing social and political collisions of views about Australia and Australianness on an unprecedented scale, with digital media providing more scope and freedom than ever before. Commenting in the Australian Financial Review , Anne Hyland wrote, ‘As a nation we hold a mirror to ourselves and the reflection we see is that of progressive people: an egalitarian bunch, who are in favour of a fair-go. But that’s not the reflection at the moment’ (Hyland 2015 , 53). Nor is it how Australia is perceived by the rest of the world, as was made painfully clear in 2015 when, as part of a periodic review by the United Nations Human Rights Council, more than a hundred countries criticized Australia’s human rights record, 6 with the treatment of asylum seekers and Indigenous people dominating their concerns. 7
The chapters in this volume enter this fraught arena of national self-examination on the common understanding that it would be as unproductive to attempt to define ‘what we are’ as to try to record the past ‘as it really was’. 8 Instead, the chapters work within the gap between