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Displaced Persons (1947-1952) in Australia: Memory in Autobiography
Abstract
This chapter examines retrospective self-representations of Displaced Person (DP) experiences through literature, including autobiographical novels and memoirs. DPs arrived in Australia with little documentary evidence of their lives in Europe. They also soon found that their stories were not encouraged in an Australian society intent on assimilation. DP narratives were either co-opted to fit into the government’s and media’s representations, ignored, or became part of a diasporic literature. For those DPs interested in reaching out to an Australian audience, autobiographical novels and memoirs have been attempted in order to reposition both their individual life narratives, and their identities. DP memoir provides a mode of representation which can be seen as benign and yet is subversive, precisely because its individualised representations stand in opposition to dominant representations.
Migrants all over the world have left multiple traces in different countries, and this cultural heritage is of growing interest to researchers and to the migrant communities themselves. Cultural heritage institutions, however, have dwindling funds and resources to meet the demand for the heritage of immigrant communities to be protected. In this article we propose that the key to bridging this gap is to be found in new possibilities that are opened up if resources are linked to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections. In particular, we focus on the value of building a composite and distributed resource around migrants’ life courses. If this approach is used and dispersed collections held by heritage institutions can be linked, migrant communities can have access to detailed information about their families and researchers to a wealth of data—serial and qualitative—for sophisticated and innovative research. Not only does the scattered data become more usable and manageable, it becomes more visible and coherent; patterns can be discovered that were not apparent before. We use the Dutch-Australian collaborative project “Migrant: Mobilities and Connection” as an example and case study of this life course–centered methodology and propose that this may develop into a migration heritage template for migrants worldwide.
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