Personal, Public Pasts: Negotiating Migrant Heritage—Heritage Practice and Migration History in Australia

Abstract

Individuals and community groups must engage with instruments of cultural power to make their sites of migrant heritage public. In doing so, they negotiate both public histories around mass migration, state settlement and societal reception, as well as personal meanings around family history, adjustment and hardship. This chapter analyses how personal and community meanings around migrant heritage are produced in relation to heritage bodies, state representatives and “authorized heritage discourses.” It engages with ongoing debates about the relationship between personal and public memories. Benalla Migrant Camp in Benalla, Victoria.