Picturing Assimilation in Post-war Australia: ‘Destination: Australia. Sharing Our Post-war Migrant Stories’, www.destinationaustralia.gov.au, a National Archives of Australia website and exhibition based on its Immigration Photographic Archive

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Immigration Photographic Archive, Fact Sheet 254, National Archives of Australia (NAA): http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs254.aspx.

²‘Were you snapped as migrant?’, Media Release, 13 August 2012, NAA: http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/media-releases/2012/destination_australia.aspx.

³Anna Haebich, ‘Retro-assimilation’, Griffith Review 15 (2007): 243–55.

⁵‘Publicity—Conditioning campaigns’, minutes 55–62, meetings of the Immigration Advisory Council, 1947, NAA A2169/1947.

⁴Immigration Advisory Council Agenda, notes and minutes, meeting 4 May 1959, agendum 26/1959, NAA 10875/1959.

⁶I thank Angela McAdam and Tracey Clarke for involving me in an early website trial.

⁷Recordsearch: http://www.naa.gov.au/. Trove: http://trove.nla.gov.au/. Picsearch: http://www.picsearch.com/. Google Images: www.google.com/images .

⁸Stephen Castles et al., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1992), 54.

⁹For departmental hopes for two such films, ‘No Strangers Here’, black-and-white, 1950, and ‘The Way We Live’, colour, 1959, see NAA A445, 261/5/1/ and photograph captions A12111/1959/34/1–20.

¹⁰My personal observations of visitor behaviour at Bonegilla Migrant Experience Heritage Park. For similar responses to picture displays elsewhere see Yaniv Poria, ‘The Story behind the Picture: Preferences for Visual Display at Heritage Sites’, in Culture Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on Visuality and the Past, ed. Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 217–28.

¹¹‘Marketing Migrants’, in ‘Horizon—the Peopling of Australia since 1788’, National Museum of Australia website, http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/horizons/marketing_migrants.

¹²Ian McShane, ‘Challenging or Conventional? Migration Memory in Australian Museums’, in National Museums, Negotiating Histories: Conference Proceedings, ed. Darryl McIntyre and Kirsten Wehner (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001), 122–33; Andrea Witcomb, ‘Migration, Social Cohesion and Diversity: Can Museums Move beyond Pluralism?’, Humanities Research 15, no. 2 (2009): 49–66.

¹³Sara Wills, ‘When Good Neighbours Become Good Friends: The Australian Embrace of Its Millionth Migrant’, Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 124 (October 2004): 332–54.

¹⁴For example, Emma Greenwood, ‘No Migrants Here: Migration Absence within Australian Migration Publicity Films’, antiTHESIS 7, no. 2 (1995): 108–22; Gwenda Tavan, ‘“Good Neighbours”: Community Organisations, Migrant Assimilation and Australian Society and Culture, 1950–1961’, Australian Historical Studies 27, no. 109 (October 1997): 77–89; Philip O'Meara, ‘Negotiating Change: Presentations of Immigrants in Australian Magazines’ (PhD thesis, Monash University, 1998); Susan Sheridan, ‘The “Australian Woman” and Her Migrant Others in the Postwar Australian Women's Weekly’, Continuum 14, no. 2 (2000): 121–32; Jayne Persian, ‘Displaced Persons (1947–1952): Representations, Memory and Commemorations’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2011).

¹⁵Egon F. Kunz, Displaced Persons: Calwell's New Australians (Sydney: ANU Press, 1988), 256–7; John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), 155.

¹⁶Jean Martin, quoted in Kunz, 256–7.

¹⁷Ann-Mari Jordens, Redefining Australians: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1995), 77.

¹⁸Haebich suggests an analytic frame for the broader publicity program similar to that used here. She makes passing references to government photographs. Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007), 171–8.

¹⁹Department of Immigration bulletins or newsletters, Tomorrow's Australians, c.1948–9; New Australian, 1949–63; Good Neighbour, c.1954–65.

²⁰Hugh J. Murphy, ‘Publicity needs in Australia for IRO and Displaced Persons migrants’, January 1949, NAA C815/1, 021.134.

²¹Ghassan Hage has bemoaned the ‘lost art of the well-administered national cuddle’. Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003), 22.

²²Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995); Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

²³For example, see Anne Manne's reading of a Gaita family album photograph, in Raimond Gaita, After Romulus (Melbourne: Text, 2010), 221–4.

²⁴Art Gallery of NSW item notes, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/429.1997/; Bronwyn Watson, ‘Public Works’, Weekend Australian Review, 24–5 October 2009, 15.