Tag Archives: Australia
Australian Migration Law Amendments: Deciding What it Means to be a Refugee
On December 5th the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Aslum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014 (the Bill) passed through the senate. This has significant impacts on refugee law in Australia as the Bill increases Australia’s capacity to dodge its obligations under International Law. No references to the Refugees Convention or its Protocol Despite […]
The repatriation of Aboriginal ancestral remains to Australia
by Rowena Dickins Morrison Last year, for the first time, Aboriginal human remains were returned to Australia from a German institution (as reported here). Nine sets of remains, including some full skeletons, were returned to South Australia by Charité University Hospital in Berlin. This was followed by the return of remains to Queensland, New South […]
Moments’ Monuments: Laurence Aberhart’s “Anzac”
Every immigrant absorbs a new cultural matrix, some of which is predictable, some that surprises. When I moved to New Zealand, I thought I knew my adopted matrix pretty well: after all, I had read Erewhon, owned at least three Crowded House CDs, and admired the cinematic settings of Middle-earth. My aversion to Robbie Williams […]
Fitting In: Bendigo’s Golden Dragon Museum
Sometimes the travel gods are against you. Worse, sometimes you hit a bad streak, where your whole decision-making process is off, and one bad decision leads to another. I felt that way on a visit last summer to Bendigo, in the heart of Australia’s nineteenth-century goldmining region. On my first evening I had dinner with […]
You Decide: The Immigration Museum, Melbourne
Are museums our new spiritual centres? Like the cathedrals of past centuries, museums have become our architectural wonders. Tourists travel to the Louvre to venerate I.M. Pei’s pyramid as much as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and Bilbao has become a new pilgrimage site since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997. Museums resemble places of worship […]
The Artist as Global Citizen: Cai Guo-Qiang in Brisbane
In the mid 1990s I taught English in Xiamen, a coastal city in southern China. Xiamen (also known as Amoy) has a lovely subtropical climate, and today it’s a favourite holiday spot among the Chinese. But from 1842 to the Second World War, it was a treaty port. After the First Opium War, the British […]
Transported
Sydney in winter. The brisk, bracing chill of a clear blue morning in early July (yes, northern hemisphere reader, July), which will quickly warm up to a comfy twenty degrees centigrade[1] before midday. Even so, Sydneysiders will stay bundled in their sweaters and scarves, thinking this is what winter feels like. To me it feels […]
Finding the self in otherness: global journeys in autobiography
What happens when we work strictly within a genre or grouping? When it comes to literature, the outcome can be destructive and boring: we risk isolating creative works, huddling them too close together and becoming blind to their engagement with the outside world. In my last blog I suggested that a discussion of migrant literature […]
The Migrationist 