Australian Welcome Walls and Other Sites of Networked Migrant Memory

Atkinson-Phillips, A

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_3

Australian Welcome Walls and Other Sites of Networked Migrant Memory

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Alison Atkinson-Phillips ORCiD

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Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Australia is a nation in which migration plays an important role in the national imaginary. Yet the position of the migrant, particularly those who fall outside of current definitions of whiteness, is ambiguous and unstable. The importance of Australia’s migrant heritage, and the need to understand the migrant’s place as citizen, are reflected in a series of migration- or maritime-themed museum sites in major Australian cities. Each of these sites also hosts a kind of “user pays” commemoration, in which a migrant or their descendants can pay to add their names to a “Welcome Wall” or other form of tribute. Yet within Australia’s settler-colonial context, the question of who has the right to offer welcome is complex and draws attention to the question of Aboriginal sovereignty. This paper draws on Dennis Byrne’s concept of networked heritage to consider urban spaces of migrant memory in dialogue with other less visible sites, including places of Aboriginal and settler incarceration, postwar reception centers, and the “black sites” of contemporary immigration detention.