https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9512-2171
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ABSTRACT
This article uses a microhistory—a family history, a form of autoethnography—to think through the role of migration archives, and family histories of migration, within the settler colony. By exploring my grandparents’ naturalisation applications, who came to this country as Jewish Holocaust survivors and stateless refugees, I consider what we can learn from bureaucratic archives, and how we can approach the problem of how to use these archives to write histories. Centring ambivalence, uncertainty and openness, this article ponders the devastating ruins of knowledge that we are left with in the long aftermath of the Holocaust, and the ways that those of us from migrant families are implicated in ongoing genocide in Australia. Trying to ethically think alongside the work of Aboriginal scholars, and using frameworks offered by other Jewish scholars, I take seriously the question of how we can work through questions of statelessness, naturalisation, citizenship and belonging in the settler colony, as we write our histories.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marc Mierowsky, who invited me to give the seminar paper that became this article, as well as the generous audience who attended that presentation and offered fruitful thoughts, questions and encouragement. My thanks as well to Michelle Foster and everyone at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 “Polish Citizenship & Family History,” Lost Histories, https://www.losthistories.com/ (accessed 19 October 2022).
2 This process was considerably easier than the process that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people must undertake to attain access to their family’s, or their own, government records. Natalie Harkin details this process and the ways it is part of colonial control. See Jeanine Leane and Natalie Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen: Conversations with the Archive,” in Law’s Documents: Authority, Materiality, Aesthetics, ed. Katherine Biber, Trish Luker, and Priya Vaughan (London: Routledge, 2021), 61–62.
3 “Annexure 1 Table A: Material Exempted by Folio Number and Grouped by the Application of Exemption Provisions,” NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
4 On new moves within the study of family history in Australia, see, for instance, Ashley Barnwell, “Aunting as Family Shadow-Work,” Journal of Family History 47, no. 3 (2022): 317–31; Tanya Evans, Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
5 See, in particular, Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 8–33. See also Jonathan Boyarin, Jewishness and the Human Dimension (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 25–44.
6 For other important explorations of repatriation of archives, see Henrietta Fourmile, “Who Owns the Past? Aborigines as Captives of the Archives,” Aboriginal History 13, no. 1 (1989): 1–8; Kirsten Thorpe, Shannon Faulkhead, and Lauren Booker, “Transforming the Archive: Returning and Connecting Indigenous Repatriation Records,” in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation, ed. Cressida Fforde, C. Timothy McKeown, and Honor Keeler (London: Routledge, 2020), 822–34.
7 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 54.
8 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 56–57.
9 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 59.
10 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 60.
11 Crystal McKinnon, “Enduring Indigeneity and Solidarity in Response to Australia’s Carceral Colonialism,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 692.
12 For another example of the recent use of microhistory to tell stories of migrant groups on Aboriginal land, see Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli and Francesco Ricatti, “Migrant Lives on First Nation Land: Greek-Australian Memories of Titjikala in the 1960s,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 43, no. 5 (2022): 535–57.
13 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87.
14 Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 6.
15 Burton, “Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” 11.
16 Craig Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport,” in Burton, Archive Stories, 71.
17 Ruth Balint, “‘To reunite the dispersed family’: War, Displacement and Migration in the Tracing Files of the Australian Red Cross,” History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015): 140–41.
18 Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion,” 71.
19 Alison Mountz, “Specters at the Port of Entry: Understanding State Mobilities through an Ontology of Exclusion,” Mobilities 6, no. 3 (2011): 320.
20 Michael Klapdor, Moira Coombs, and Catherine Bohm, “Australian Citizenship: A Chronology of Major Developments in Policy and Law,” Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Australia, 11 September 2009, https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/0910/AustCitizenship (accessed 14 October 2022).
21 NAA: A446, 59/50770 STAWSKI M and NAA: A435, 1950/4/8135 STAWSKI Chaim—born 15 August 1913—Polish.
22 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44232 Stawski, Sofia.
23 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
24 “Renunciation of Allegiance,” 2 August 1957, NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
25 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
26 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44232 Stawski, Sofia.
27 Wolf Stawski, “Statutory Declaration by a Person Applying, or Intending to Apply, for Naturalization as an Australian Citizen,” 27 August 1956, NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
28 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
29 English translations of documents from Sosnowiec Urząd Stanu Cywilnego held in author’s possession.
30 Anthea Vogl, “What Is a Bogus Document? Refugees, Race and Identity Documents in Australian Migration Law,” in Biber, Luker, and Vaughan, Law's Documents, 94–111.
31 Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 711.
32 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 705.
33 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 721.
34 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 711.
35 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 715. Moreover, they assert, “Within conditions of Diaspora, tendencies toward nativism were also materially discouraged. Diaspora culture and identity allows (and has historically allowed in the best circumstances, such as in Muslim Spain) for a complex continuation of Jewish cultural creativity and identity at the same time that the same people participate fully in the common cultural life of their surroundings.” See Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 720–21.
36 Klaus Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees, A History (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2015), 110–11.
37 “National Party Leader Condemns Remarks by National Party Federal Candidate, Bob Burgess, Who Referred to Australian Citizenship Ceremonies as ‘Dewogging Ceremonies’,” radio program, 26 January 1996, https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fradioprm%2FZRP20%22.
38 Helen Pringle, ‘“The Crimson Thread of Kinship Runs through Us All’: Bob Katter and the Colour of Australian Law,” ABC Religion & Ethics, 27 August 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-crimson-thread-of-kinship-runs-through-us-all-bob-katter-and/10214292.
39 Sara Dehm, “Passport Struggles: Lawful Documents and the Politics of Recognition and Refusal,” in Biber, Luker, and Vaughan, Law's Documents, 71.
40 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 72–73.
41 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 85.
42 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 77.
43 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 78.
44 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 80.
45 McKinnon, “Enduring Indigeneity,” 692. See also Suvendrini Perera, “What Is a Camp … ?” Borderlands e-journal 1, no. 1 (2002): 1–12.
46 Gwenda Tavan, “Testing Times: The Problem of ‘History’ in the Howard Government’s Australian Citizenship Test,” in Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan (Canberra: ANU Press, 2009), 128.
47 Klaus Neumann, “The Admission of European Refugees from East and South Asia in 1947: Antecedents of Australia’s International Refugee Organization Mass Resettlement Scheme,” History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015): 74–75. For broader contexts of Jewish immigration across this time, see, for instance, Andrew Markus, “Jewish Migration to Australia 1938–49,” Journal of Australian Studies 7, no. 13 (1983): 18–31. For non-Jewish contexts at this time, see, for instance, Jayne Persian, “‘Chifley Liked Them Blond’: DP Immigrants for Australia,” History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015): 80–101.
48 Neumann, “The Admission of European Refugees from East and South Asia in 1947,” 75.
49 Joseph Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty: Colonial Law as a Species of Excess of its own Authority, Aboriginal Passport Ceremonies and Asylum Seekers,” Law Text Culture 19 (2015): 86.
50 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 88.
51 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 88.
52 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 95.
53 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 95. For another example, see the work of the Yidindji Government: www.yidindji.org; Saffron Howden, “Murrumu Walubara Yidindju Renounces Citizenship to Reclaim Australia,” Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 2015, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/murrumu-walubara-yidindji-renounces-citizenship-to-reclaim-australia-20151102-gkok6g.html. I am grateful to Elia Shugg for alerting me to this.
54 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 71.
55 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 72. See also Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 84, where Dehm shows how Haudenosaunee “repeatedly framed the issuing and use of First Nations passports as a legal practice of Indigenous nationhood”.
56 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 72. See also Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 83, where Dehm discusses the ways that Border Force in Australia has responded to the use of Aboriginal Provisional Government passports.
57 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 9–11. See also Michael Rothberg’s work on “multidirectional memory”, in particular Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–48.
58 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2.
59 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 54.
60 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 56.
61 Menachem Kaiser, Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Stolen Nazi Treasure (Brunswick: Scribe Publications, 2021), 6.
62 We also have an address for my grandfather and his first wife, Raszjka, but I cannot find it on Google Maps. The street does not seem to exist (anymore?) in Sosnowiec. There is a street by that name in Katowice, though, the next town along. On a trip to Poland in 2016, I visited Zalman and Frajda’s address, as well as the possible address in Katowice for Wolf and Raszjka. I also visited an address we have for Wolf and his brothers and parents in Czestochowa. It is now a carpark.
63 Kaiser, Plunder, 132.
64 Jason Francisco, Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 90.
65 Jonathan Boyarin, Jewishness and the Human Dimension (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 26.
66 Jeanine Hourani, “Reclaiming Statelessness Narratives by Resisting ‘Deficit’ Discourse and Amplifying the Voices of Stateless People,” Critical Statelessness Studies Blog, March 2021, https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/statelessness/resources/critical-statelessness-studies-blog/reclaiming-statelessness-narratives-by-resisting-deficit-discourse-and-amplifying-the-voices-of-stateless-people.
67 Joseph Pugliese, “Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: For a Decolonising Migrant Historiography,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 9.