[Anthropgrad] RSH WIP SEMINAR - MARY HUTCHISON - 29 FEBRUARY

[Jodi Parvey]

RESEARCH SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
WORK-IN-PROGRESS SEMINAR

FRIDAY 28 FEBRUARY - 1.00 TO 2.30

1-2.30 pm, Friday 29 February

This is the road you have to pass: personal perspectives on 
Australian migration histories

Mary Hutchison
ARC Research Associate

This paper discusses some contemporary personal understandings of 
migration to Australia from the colonial period to the present.   The 
material was collected for a research project which investigated 
approaches to representing migration histories in museums by making 
two experimental exhibitions.  My presentation will include visuals 
from the Migration Memories website (in progress) which highlight the 
research interest in expressing personal meanings of migration 
through the use of objects and text.

The Migration Memories exhibitions were interested in representing 
the local and the personal in the context of historical events and 
migration policies.  In each of the two exhibition locations, 
Lightning Ridge in NSW and Robinvale in Victoria, seven individual 
stories connecting with significant local migrations, and including 
an Indigenous perspective on migration, were developed for 
display.  The development of each story involved close collaboration 
between me and the respective individuals, and much discussion about 
what they saw as the main thread of the story and the items or 
objects that could express this.

One of my interests when I began the research was in the extent to 
which people might revise their stories or see them differently as 
the process of sorting and sifting and making public took place.  But 
for many of the participants it was much more a process of becoming 
than revisiting.  The detail of this becoming within the context of 
making a display and through interaction with me, offers some 
interesting examples of the way migration as history and policy plays 
out in the very particular frame of personal history.  I am at an 
early stage of reflecting on this material and welcome suggestions 
for the next becoming.

Bibliography

Mary is a Research Associate at CCR working on an ARC Linkage project 
with the National Museum of Australia (2005-2008). The project, 
Migration Memories, is an investigation of ways of representing 
Australian migration histories, ranging from 1788 to the present, in 
museum settings. The research focuses on how individuals remember 
personally significant migration experiences and the material culture 
that embodies these memories. It involves creating and analysing 
exhibitions in three specific localities.

Mary has a long term academic and professional interest in the public 
representation of personal stories. Her PhD, completed at the 
University of New England in 1999, explores the capacity of creative 
textual representations of stories of self to change established 
narratives of individual and collective identity. Working with 
multiple and distinct individual voices in wider frames of 
experience, place and history is a consistent thread of her own 
practice as a public historian, writer and curator. She has created 
and contributed to museum exhibitions, site specific heritage 
interpretations, publications, public art, theatre and radio for 
national heritage institutions, government and community organisations.

Venue: Theatrette, Old Canberra House, Building 73, ANU

>For more information please contact:
>T: 6125 2700;  W: http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc
>
>All Welcome
>Please circulate widely
>This lecture is free and open to the public. Parking vouchers are 
>available upon request.
>
>ANU COLLEGE OF ARTS & SOCIAL SCIENCES


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