Abstract
This chapter examines the collection, production and consumption of migrant memories in the public domain through the prism of the Immigration Museum since it opened in Melbourne in 1998. This has involved the politics of the individual, community and government as the Museum negotiates an emotionally charged environment with high community stakes—while striving to meet its own priorities and communication objectives. Through this significant heritage site of migration memory-making, this chapter traces changes in collection development, exhibition interpretation and community engagement methodologies, at a time when demand for authenticity and authority of voice is high, and the public is more involved than ever in the production of their own stories.
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- 1.
Rowe et al., “Linking Little Narratives to Big Ones: Narrative and Public Memory in History Museums,” Culture & Psychology 8, no. 1 (2012): 97.
- 2.
Viv Szekeres, “Museums and Multiculturalism: Too Vague to Understand, Too Important to Ignore,” in Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien eds, Understanding Museums: Australian Museums and Museology (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2011).
- 3.
Museums Victoria, Collection Plans, 1994, 2001, 2005 and 2013.
- 4.
Eureka Heinrich, “Museums, History and Migration in Australia,” History Compass 11, no. 10 (October 2013): 796.
- 5.
Jean Billington, email correspondence with the author, 2010, for Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition (Melbourne: Immigration Museum, 2010).
- 6.
Hong Duc Nguyen, email correspondence with the author, 2010, for Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition (Melbourne: Immigration Museum, 2010).
- 7.
Sheila Watson, “History Museums, Community Identities and a Sense of Place: Rewriting Histories,” in Simon J. Knell et al. eds, Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed (New York: Routledge, 2007), 160.
- 8.
Anderson et al., “Insights on How Museum Objects Mediate Recall of Nostalgic Life Episodes at a Showa Era Museum in Japan,” Curator: The Museum Journal 59, no. 1 (2016): 5–26.
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Walton et al., Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours Exhibition Evaluation Report (Melbourne: Museums Victoria, 2016).
- 10.
Walton et al., Identity, 129.
- 11.
Andrea Witcomb, “Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums,” Museum Management and Curatorship 28, no. 3 (2013): 267.
- 12.
Paul Williams, “The Personalization of Loss in Memorial Museums,” in James B. Gardner and Paula Hamilton eds, The Oxford Handbook of Public History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 382.
- 13.
Refer to Rowe et al., “Linking Little Narratives to Big Ones,” 108.
- 14.
Anderson et al., “Insights on How Museum Objects Mediate Recall of Nostalgic Life Episodes at a Showa Era Museum in Japan,” 10.
- 15.
Paula Hamilton, “Speak, Memory: Issues in Oral and Public History,” in Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik eds, What is Public History Globally? Working with the Past in the Present (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019) In Press.
- 16.
Paul Williams, “The Personalization of Loss in Memorial Museums,” 370.
- 17.
Stephen Sloan, “Swimming in the Exaflood: Oral History as Information in the Digital Age,” in Mary Larson and Doug Boyd eds, Oral History and Digital Humanities. Voice, Access and Engagement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 180–81.
- 18.
Bonnie Temple, Research Report. They Cannot Take the Sky: Stories from Detention (Melbourne: University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria, 2017), 3.
- 19.
Museums Victoria, Ten Pound Poms Focus Group Evaluation, Report no. 995 (April 2016): 7.
- 20.
Jan Coolen, email correspondence with the author, 27 November 2017, after launch of British Migrants: Instant Australians? Exhibition (Melbourne: Immigration Museum, 2017).
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McFadzean, M. (2019). Purposeful Memory-Making: Personal Narratives of Migration at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum. In: Darian-Smith, K., Hamilton, P. (eds) Remembering Migration. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17751-5_17
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