Author: Alexandra Dellios

Alexandra Dellios is a historian and senior lecturer in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Her research considers the public and oral history of migrant and refugee communities, their experiences of settlement, and working and family life. She has published on: child migration; popular representations of multiculturalism; immigration centres and hostels; the intersections of migrant, industrial and labour heritage; public history practices, and cultural heritage management in Australia. She is the author of Heritage Making and Migrant Subjects in the Deindustrialising Region of the Latrobe Valley (Cambridge University Press, April 2022) and Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), editor of Memory and Family in Australian Refugee Histories (Routledge: 2019), and co-editor (with Eureka Henrich) of Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage: Beyond and Between Borders (Routledge: 2020). She is Chair of the Editorial Board for Studies in Oral History, a founding member of the Australian Migration History Network, and Executive Committee member of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies. She remains engaged in oral history projects and teaching, community volunteering, and heritage interpretation efforts.

Benalla and the Victorian Heritage Register: Expanding the Boundaries of Migrant Heritage

They are motivated by a desire to publicly remember the trials of their mothers, single working migrant women. Accordingly, many are also motivated by a sense of exclusion and injustice. However, not all the stories they voice are negative, although they do have the potential to challenge existing notions of post-war migrant ‘welcome’.

Making Migrant Heritage – What is it?

But what is ‘Making Migrant Heritage’? The rationale for the project 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’.