Memory and Family in Australian Refugee Histories

Abstract

This special issue engages with histories of refugees and ‘family’ and their intersections with aspects of memory studies – including oral history, public storytelling, family history and museum exhibitions and objects. The impetus for this special issue arose out of a collection of papers presented at Professor Joy Damousi’s ARC Laureate Fellowship conference, ‘Global Histories of Refugees in the 20th and 21st Centuries’ at the University of Melbourne in October 2016. The authors presented papers that engaged in some part, conceptually or empirically, with memory and public storytelling relating to refugee families seeking asylum. We know that border crossings and the search for refuge are experiences shared by children, siblings, parents, partners and families. Emerging histories work to move us away from a focus on individual adults or nationally defined cohorts towards multilayered and rich histories of groups and individuals with a variety of intersectional affiliations, socially and historically constructed, including that of family. In the social sciences and the humanities, studies of refugees in Australia have often addressed individuals and groups (ethnic or politically defined cohorts) and shared personal stories, but rarely within a family context.1 Perhaps because they were the first refugee cohort to highlight the need for a specific policy for refugee processing and reception in Australia, South Vietnamese refugees arriving after 1975 have been the subject of much academic study. Some in the social sciences have explored intergenerational tensions that arise from refugee sponsorship and reunification after long periods of separation and violence.2 Culturally situated understandings of family and family dynamics are a strength in this context; but the ongoing evolution of memories of migration, influenced by new social and political contexts and changing dominant discourses around multiculturalism and refugeeness, also necessitates that historians return to earlier studies. As historians, we should be compelled to consider the conflicting layers of meaning built up around (racialised and de-racialised) refugee groups throughout the twentieth century,