Immigrant Networks (Exhibition)

Abstract

Migration, industry and settlement were catalytic for modernisation in Australia after World War II, a period shaped by post-war reconstruction. Federal and corporate funding for major industries together with government policies for population growth enabled nation-building programs that shaped remote, rural and urban environments into modern industrial landscapes. Populations were drawn from war-destroyed nations, underdeveloped economies, and hostile political environments. Focussing on the architecture and landscapes of major but under-documented industrial sites and their complex social histories, this exhibition examines the intersection of the built environment and industrial growth, shifting attention to acknowledging the spatial and material dimensions of the immigrant legacy. It speaks directly to both anxieties and aspirations of new refugee and immigrant arrivals by uncovering the extent of the contribution made by war-displaced populations to national development in the past. Immigration centres and industries that employed refugee and immigrant labour in the post war period can be thought of as nodes in an interdependent spatial and transnational labour network. The physical sites and projects featured in this exhibition convey this network, its nodal points and inter-cultural social interactions through a study of migrant camps (the examples of Benalla and Greta are explored), key industrial sites for hydro-electric power generation (Snowy), defence (Woomera) and raw-material production (BHP Steelworks, Port Kembla), independent small businesses and the associated industrial infrastructure and landscapes (trans-Asian suburbanisation in Melbourne). selected These are selected due to their significance in the history of immigration and Australian modernisation and capacity to convey their co-dependence, and the later dispersal of new immigrants into manufacturing and service industries at the metropolitan periphery. This exhibition is founded on scholarly research, but involves processes of developing that work into creative and visual formats increasing its capacity to engage broader audiences, including immigrant and diaspora communities, the architecture and landscape professions, government and heritage authority representatives, multicultural program coordinators, and research interlocutors. This format of an exhibition, alternative to academic publication, reveals the primacy of the visual in architecture, and in our twenty-first century global flows of images. The visual is immediate and dominant, and therefore a powerful tool. There are major risks. Representation is at risk of omitting or romanticising transnational immigrant labour. Immigrant labour and industry has its own progressive modernising narratives that can marginalise complexities, dark histories, and leave many behind. And risks embedded in the social imaginary and contexts which make architectures and landscapes of migration visible but non-perceivable entities, deplete of discussion and access to larger symbolic narratives. Or in which such architectures are subjected to a hyper-visualisation exemplified as the 'very visible' mosque. The experience of exhibition is always inter-subjective and dependent on visitors' interests and ideological traditions. Each of us in the team has approached the task of exhibiting on - Immigration Camps, the Snowy Hydro, BHP Steelworks Port Kembla, Woomera, Suburban Immigrant industries - as an experimental (and modest) method that intertwines reason and the imagination, and opens a platform for an ethical recalibration of and within research, challenging research that is limited to objective methods. There has not to date been productive interest in this area of immigrants' role in industrial space - its architecture, landscape, and heritage - or its dual and simultaneous making of a modern and multicultural Australia.