The rationale for Dr Alexandra Dellios' current research project 'Making Migrant Heritage' grew out of a concern that too little scholarly attention had been paid to how ‘subaltern’ publics, including the ‘migrants’ who are the subject of many exhibitions and commemorations, actively create and publicise their own ‘heritage’. The heritage studies literature includes work on community engagements with heritage, which has been informed recently by studies into audience reception, and affect and emotion as experienced in museum and heritage spaces (Witcomb 2013, 2012; Smith 2015, 2017; Cooke and Freize 2014, 2015). But I wished to explore community uses of history and heritage by looking not only to consumption, but also to construction: to examine those who actively seek to have their migrant heritage made public. Few case studies have been conducted on the migrant community groups within Australia—self-defined not only by country or origin or ethnicity, but sometimes by experience or generation. And from what I had observed in regards to Bonegilla, many have taken an active role in making their own heritage public.

‘Making Migrant Heritage’ considers community-initiated public history projects pertaining to post-war migration - in doing so, it asks: how do community groups approach, interpret and refinfe heritage industry definitions of 'value' and 'significance' in the process of making their migration places and stories more public? What challenges do community-initiated public history projects pose to current practice and legislation (if any)? And what new or potentially progressive histories of migration result from these meeting points (between the official and the vernacular)? 

For more, please see: https://migrantheritage.blog/