This book revisits Australian histories of refugee arrivals and settlement – with a particular focus on family and family life. It brings together new empirical research, and methodologies in memory and oral history, to offer multilayered histories of people seeking refuge in the 20th century. Engaging with histories of refugees and ‘family’, and how these histories intersect with aspects of memory studies — including oral history, public storytelling, family history, and museum exhibitions and objects — the book moves away from a focus on individual adults and towards multilayered and rich histories of groups with a variety of intersectional affiliations. The contributions consider the conflicting layers of meaning built up around racialised and de-racialised refugee groups throughout the 20th century, and their relationship to structural inequalities, their shifting socio-economic positions, and the changing racial and religious categories of inclusion and exclusion employed by dominant institutions. As the contributors to this book suggest, ‘family’ functions as a means to revisit or research histories of mobility and refuge. This focus on ‘family’ illuminates intimate aspects of a history and the emotions it contains and enables – complicating the passive victim stereotype often applied to refugees. As interest in refugee ‘integration’ continues to rise as a result of increasingly vociferous identity politics and rising right-wing rhetoric, this book offers readers new insights into the intersections between family and memory, and the potential avenues this might open up for considering refugee studies in a more intimate way. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants & Minorities.

This book provides the first comprehensive study of diverse migrant memories and what they mean for Australia in the twenty-first century. Drawing on rich case studies, it captures the changing political and cultural dimensions of migration memories as they are negotiated and commemorated by individuals, communities and the nation. Remembering Migration is divided into two sections, the first on oral histories and the second examining the complexity of migrant heritage, and the sources and genres of memory writing. The focused and thematic analysis in the book explores how these histories are re-remembered in private and public spaces, including museum exhibitions, heritage sites and the media. Written by leading and emerging scholars, the collected essays explore how memories of global migration across generations contribute to the ever-changing social and cultural fabric of Australia and its place in the world.

This book is about how Australians have responded to stories about suffering and injustice in Australia, presented in a range of public media, including literature, history, films, and television. Those who have responded are both ordinary and prominent Australians�politicians, writers, and scholars. All have sought to come to terms with Australia's history by responding empathetically to stories of its marginalized citizens. Drawing upon international scholarship on collective memory, public history, testimony, and witnessing, this book represents a cultural history of contemporary Australia. It examines the forms of witnessing that dominated Australian public culture at the turn of the millennium. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in Australia in response to the increasingly audible voices of indigenous peoples, migrants, and more recently, asylum seekers. As these voices became public, they posed a challenge not only to scholars and politicians, but also, most importantly, to ordinary citizens. When former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his historic apology to Australia's indigenous peoples in February 2008, he performed an act of collective witnessing that affirmed the testimony and experiences of Aboriginal Australians. The phenomenon of witnessing became crucial, not only to the recognition and reparation of past injustices, but to efforts to create a more cosmopolitan Australia in the present. This is a vital addition to Transaction's critically acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.

By conversing with the main bodies of relevant literature from Migration Studies and Memory Studies, this overview highlights how analysing memories can contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of migrant incorporation. The chapters consider international case studies from Europe, North America, Australia, Asia and the Middle East.

Silent Memories -- Traumatic Lives is a quest for understanding, an attempt to make sense of the very emotional history of the Ukrainian post-war migrants to Western Australia. Ukrainian migrants arrived in Australia by ship between 1947 and 1951, from the Displaced Persons camps of Europe, survivors of the worst of the Soviet regime's atrocities, including genocidal famine, and only recently released from forced unpaid labour under the German Nazi regime. The testimonies of Ukrainian famine survivors included in this book reflect the findings of similar studies carried out in Ukrainian communities throughout the world. This work adds to mounting evidence of the genocidal nature of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 and the lasting effects it has had on survivors.

"In an engaging and original contribution to the field of memory studies, Joy Damousi considers the enduring impact of war on family memory in the Greek diaspora. Focusing on Australia's Greek immigrants in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War, the book explores the concept of remembrance within the larger context of migration to show how inter-generational experience of war and trauma transcend both place and nation. Drawing from the most recent research in memory, trauma and transnationalism, Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War deals with the continuities and discontinuities of war stories, assimilation in modern Australia, politics and activism, child migration and memories of mothers and children in war. Damousi sheds new lights on aspects of forgotten memory and silence within families and communities, and in particular the ways in which past experience of violence and tragedy is both negotiated and processed"--

This Element argues that community-initiated migrant heritage harbours the potential to challenge and expand state-sanctioned renderings of multiculturalism in liberal nation-states. In this search for alternative readings, community-initiated migrant heritage is positioned as a grassroots challenge to positivist state-multiculturalism. It can do this if we adopt the migrant perspective, a diasporic perspective of 'settlement' that is always unfinished, non-static, and non-essentialist. As mobile subjects, either once or many times over - a subject position arrived at through acts of mobility, sometimes spawned by violence or structural inequality, which can reverberate throughout subsequent generations - the migrant subject position compels us to look both forwards and backwards in time and place.