Migration Parks and Monuments to Multiculturalism: Finding the Challenge to Australian Heritage Discourses through Community Public History Practice

Abstract

In this article, I “read against the grain” of a monument to post-WWII immigration and migrant communities. I am concerned with how such monuments, locally situated, might be used in more progressive and transformative histories, ones that harbor the potential to challenge existing public and collective memories of postwar migration and multiculturalism that occur on a national stage and within the ambit of Australia’s heritage industry. This is a study in how discursively marginalized migrant groups, with subaltern narratives about mobility and settlement, claim space for alternative histories in the context of a restrictive official heritage