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Rethinking Migration Histories: Australian Perspectives, and Global Directions -- HCNSW at Sydney Writers' Festival 2025

• The History Council of NSW and various guests

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Australian migration stories have tended to represent specific experiences of coming to Australia over our relatively short national history. But what does rethinking stories about mobility to, from, and within Australia offer historians and fellow story tellers? Leading historians Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson, Dr Yves Rees, and Dr Peter Hobbins will discuss overlooked narratives to challenge traditional views of what migration means for Australian history. By connecting past and present, the diversity of migration stories and their implications for understanding identities, place, and belonging will offer fresh perspectives for nuanced research and storying of our collective past.


The History Council of New South Wales is supported by the NSW Government via a grant from Create NSW.

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Music credit: 'The Path to Innovation' by Airae, licensed through Canva.

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Amanda Wells:

Welcome to another History Council of New South Wales podcast. This podcast is a recording of our Sydney Writers Festival panel held on the 22nd of May 2025 at History House in Sydney. We acknowledge and pay respects to the traditional owners of the land that this podcast was recorded on the Gadigal people who have cared for country over millennia and who have witnessed and participated in migrations large and small. We hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation between our speakers, Dr Sophie-Lore Wilson, Dr Yves Rees and our Chair, Dr Peter Hobbins.

Catherine Shirley:

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for coming out in this dreadful weather. We thought we'd probably only have about six people along here today, so we're absolutely thrilled and thank you for coming. Okay, so hello and welcome to this Sydney Writers Festival session, brought to you by the History Council of New South Wales, Rethinking Migration Histories, Australian Perspectives and Global Directions. My name is Catherine Shirley and I'm the Executive and Strategic Development Officer of the History Council of New South Wales. Today's session is a continuation of the History Council's support for, and participation in, many cultural events in New South Wales, including the Sydney Writers' Festival. Please note that this session is being recorded and will be published on our website in the near future she says hopefully. And so, with not much else to do, I'm going to hand you over to Peter Hobbins and the wonderful Dr Peter Hobbins is the Head of Knowledge at the Australian National Maritime Museum who will then introduce our speakers today.

Peter Hobbins:

Thanks, catherine, and welcome to all of you here. I really want to thank Sydney Writers Festival, the History Council of New South Wales and also the Royal Australian Historical Society, whose wonderful history house we're in, and this is a sold-out event. So well done for scoring a ticket and doubly well done for being here. I acknowledge that we meet today on the Barmal and the Badoo, or the lands and the waters of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I extend my respects to their elders, past, present and those awesome young people who are emerging and we'll be hearing a lot more from them next week through National Reconciliation Week. I extend that respect to elders around this country and including their land and their sea country as well. Yeah, catherine's pointed out, I have the highly dubious job title of Head of Knowledge. You can't get much better than that, except if you put the word big in front of it. That means that I'm in charge of the curators, the library and the publications team at the Australian National Maritime Museum down in Darling Harbour, and one of our areas of research is immigration, including refugee stories as well. So we actually have a Vietnamese refugee vessel in our museum.

Peter Hobbins:

But having said that, I was blindsided not that long ago by one of my Aboriginal colleagues who said to me what's your cultural heritage, peter, no one's ever asked me that. If you're a First Nations person, it gets asked all the time. If you're a first, second or third generation immigrant, it gets asked quite regularly, and sometimes intrusively. I'd never even thought about it. So that actually prompted me to start doing a little bit of the family history research, speaking to the old folks and asking what are our origins as well. So I actually came to this session today with that sort of destabilisation in my own mind.

Peter Hobbins:

But today's not about me. It's about these two wonderful people sitting next to me. I had the pleasure of meeting both of them when we were all at the University of Sydney about a decade ago. On my right is Dr Yves Rees, who's a prolific, thoughtful and very generous writer who spans many fields of achievement. They're based at La Trobe University down in Melbourne, so they've dashed up to join us today and have written about intellectual and transnational history, including the ways that both actors and ideas cross boundaries in time and space, as exemplified in last year's book Travelling to Tomorrow. Yves's also written, both personally and critically, about gender diversity and being recognised through a huge number of awards as a rising talent in the literary and scholarly fields.

Yves Rees:

Thanks, Peter, for that very generous introduction. It's a pleasure to be here today. On Gadigal Country, as Peter mentioned, I've come up from Wurundjeri land and so I want to pay my respects to Wurundjeri elders, past and present, and also Gadigal elders, past and present. This land was stolen and sovereignty was never ceded.

Peter Hobbins:

Thanks, Yves, and Dr Sophie Loy Wilson has been an inspiration for me for well over a decade, and she knows that's true. She has an expansive embrace of what the past means. It encompasses cultures, languages, families, sources, landscapes and prose, and every time I enjoy one of Sophie's conversations, her presentations or her written expositions, I come away feeling enriched. And I don't just mean that intellectually and creatively, but she also has a way of nourishing your soul and providing that precious characteristic that I think unites all three of us here on stage today, which is curiosity. Sophie, welcome.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Wow, I'm so touched. Thank you all for coming out today in rainy Sydney. I'm so honoured to be speaking to you and with my wonderful fellow panellists. I come to you from Gadigal land, from the University of Sydney where I work. I live on Wangal land too and I'd just like to acknowledge that the University of Sydney has long been a Nala or a meeting place for Eeyore people across Sydney. You know it was always on a hilltop overlooking this city and many of the great kind of donkey paths down to Circular Quay and up to Bondi. You know kind of are. You can see them from Sydney University. So I want to acknowledge the long tradition of history making at the University of Sydney.

Peter Hobbins:

Now I mentioned curiosity. We also want to hear your questions as well, so I have to be rigorous about keeping us to time. So you've got a chance to also ask the panel some of the questions coming out of our discussion today, which reminds me time. Check Right, we're going to start with the basics. This is a writer's festival. Where and how do you?

Yves Rees:

write? Great question. I write in deep concentration, I would say I've recently realised that I'm neurodiverse and I find the world often quite overwhelming and information dense and I've realised that writing is the place I create. That's a kind of little refuge from the world where I can make order and meaning and, hopefully, beauty. Sometimes, so physically, I write in my home office or in my office at La Trobe University, but often it actually feels like I'm quite dematerialised and I kind of go into this intense hyper focus where it's just my brain and the words on the page and we're kind of in this wrestling match or dance where I'm trying to kind of bring the ideas inside my head, the chaotic ideas, and convey them clearly and elegantly to a reader. It's the most satisfying experience I know in being alive. It's one of the hardest things I know.

Yves Rees:

Every morning when I get up and I know I have to write that day, I feel terrified and I procrastinate and I often have a very clean apartment on those days. But there's actually no better feeling at the end of a day than having written and feeling like you produced something meaningful. And then there's no. And actually I was going to say there's no better feeling, but there is a better feeling it's when those words go out into the world and they reach receptive readers and they touch people and they connect with your ideas and they reflect that back on you. So you know, for me, writing is completely my happy place and the place where I try to make the world more beautiful.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

I love this question, peter. So I feel like all writing and reading is in some ways a bit of a connection and an act of generosity. Right, and you know, for me I have for a long time written in an academic format. That was how I was kind of trained. The recent project that I'm working on has involved kind of seeping myself in local historical societies, such as the wonderful Historical Society at Camden where Julie and Ian work, but also I've had to kind of really steep myself in, kind of like the words of Chinese Australians from the kind of gold rush period and decide how to ethically tell their stories.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

And what kind of happened to me when I did that is I realised that all writing is a conversation with place and place making. So there was this wonderful thing that happened to me where I finally kind of went. This is a book about places in Australia. Yes, it's about the people and their voices, but actually what unifies everything is the place. And I need to somehow ethically as you know, a non-Indigenous person evoke this place in a way that is unifying and that is, you know, going to connect to people. So lately, uh, peter and ease, I've been, I've been making myself go to the actual places and actually really try to sit there and describe what it's like to be in that place.

Peter Hobbins:

So that's been my, my writing process of late so then, coming out of that, this is a session about migration as well, so place is tricky when we're talking about migration. What do you think is the essence of the migration experience, Sophie?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Strangeness to familiarity. So all of us, all of us move, all of us are migrants in some ways. In this country we're all migrants on stolen, indigenous land. So all of us have stories in our families, or maybe recent stories, where the strange has become familiar. And in some ways this is the greatest act of compassion writers can do. They can both make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and all migration is about that. You know deep humiliation that comes from not knowing how to be in a new place right and then learning skills in terms of either surviving or being in that place. And in Australia that's been very much about the landscape and very much about Indigenous knowledge, but it's also been about acknowledging that that's an unequal experience. Some people are given more tools to make the strange familiar than others.

Yves Rees:

I think in many ways the migration experience is a kind of extreme literalisation of the human experience.

Yves Rees:

You know, to be human, to be alive, is to be constantly in transition, in flux, in motion.

Yves Rees:

You know, one of my other hats I wear aside from a historian who's concerned with mobility and migration is that I'm also a trans person and a trans writer who's written about gender transition.

Yves Rees:

And you know there are a lot of parallels between the way in which we think about and narrate transition across gender and the way we think about transition. You know the physical, geographical transition of moving across borders and that applies to so many other parts of human experience. You know transition between various life stages, between, you know, from childhood to adulthood and you know, going into then, you know, parenthood, between being single and married. I think these kind of metaphors of movement and that I love what Sophie said about kind of defamiliarisation and the sort of way in which it's a really humbling process, that defamiliarisation applies across so many domains and I think maybe that's why one of the reasons why we're so fascinated that defamiliarisation applies across so many domains and I think maybe that's why one of the reasons why we're so fascinated by migration and migrant histories and stories because it gives us a really obvious way to talk about the broader ways in which movement and migration and change are so fundamental to what it means to be alive.

Peter Hobbins:

And Yves, did you want to expand on that about your personal connections with? Why is migration, particularly movement of people and ideas around there? Why is that so important to the work you do?

Yves Rees:

So I've always, as a historian, been fascinated by Australia's relationship with the rest of the world. You know, I think there's such a contradictory relationship, like we narrate ourselves as being isolated and provincial and having a cultural cringe and feeling like we're at the bottom of the world. This is settler Australia, of course, I'm talking about, but we're also, you know, Australians have always been one of the world's most enthusiastic travellers. There's an incredibly, you know, we're all settlers, as Sophie said, unless we're Indigenous. So we've all kind of, or our ancestors have migrated here from elsewhere, but Australians have always been to quote the wonderful phrase used by Jill Matthews unsettled settlers. There's such a strong tradition of onwards migration, of moving around Australia and between Australia and New Zealand.

Yves Rees:

My work in particular focuses on Australia's, the migration and mobility of Australians to the United States and the way in which the United States sort of functioned as an alternative metropole throughout the 20th century when, you know, according to general wisdom, Australia was still very oriented towards Britain. So I have been very conscious of the way in which that story of Australians kind of going home to the mother country is a very familiar story in Australian culture and literature and history. And I guess in my work I've wanted to kind of tell the counter story to that of. You know what are the Australians who turned their back on Mother England and went to America instead? You know why did they make that choice? What did they think they were going to find in America? What did they actually find there and what did they bring back with them?

Yves Rees:

And you know, what my research has found is that it's a very gendered story, that for Australian women in particular, the United States seemed like the future, like the title of my book is Travelling to Tomorrow, because they literally thought they were going to tomorrow, and tomorrow in the sense of gender relations that you know, compared to a very, very misogynist Australian culture and a pretty regressive English culture, that the United States was a place where women could pursue education and careers and best kind of fulfill their potential. So I'm a kind of funny Australian migration historian. I don't normally call myself that because I'm essentially looking at outwards migration. You know, when we think about migration in the Australian context we talk about the building of a multicultural nation, but I'm looking at people who went the other way.

Peter Hobbins:

Thanks, and Sophie, why are you drawn to this topic? Why can't you stop writing about migration and immigration experiences?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Wonderful, wonderful question. Look, I was thinking hard about this before this panel today and I think, Peter, for me it's about the extent to which, as communities, we can accommodate difference and diversity. Right, I think there's this grand question we have, you know, in our erect communities, our cities and our national communities and our global community, which is about how do we deal with difference? What is it in us that means that we can't cope with some kinds of difference? And when is it possible to live in a place that accommodates lots of diversity of being, of the experience that encapsulates the diverse experience of being human? Right?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

And for me, this is, you know, I suppose something that comes from childhood, where, you know, I was the daughter of a diplomat and you know I was kind of thrown into these strange experiences, kind of growing up living in Russia and China in the 90s and 2000s, and you know, at that time, you know what I found when I was in these places at that time is there was a real kind of need to locate me with people they wanted to know where I was from, right, a question I couldn't really answer, to be honest with you. You know you gestured to this earlier, Peter. The question that you know most Anglophone people don't get asked in Australia, which is what is your ethnicity? And I was asked this a lot overseas all the time and I would say Australian, and in both the countries I lived in they would say well, that just means you're a lackey of America. You know this was the 90s. Right in 2000s, particularly in China, it was well, that's. The answer was often what is the difference between being American and being you?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

I found this so confronting. You know, that I had to explain this. I could see how, if you were a young Chinese person, the era of spy planes coming down over China, it seemed a natural response. So the only way I had to untangle this provocation was history, right, because it's in history that we construct the stories that connect our mobility to our identity. Right? It's in that space between you know, the movement of our ancestors, or our own movement, and the stories of place that nations tell that we have identity, and I think we have power over those stories and can change them and that if we tell them differently, more people can be included in those stories. I do believe that.

Peter Hobbins:

So you've both alluded in ways to the nation and the stories about why people come to Australia and why they leave. Do you find that there are sort of authorised narratives or that there are accepted narratives of migration? I mean, you've already said, like you know, when we say migration, actually we mean immigration, not emigration. Who would ever dare leave our country? You know, and could you both talk a little bit about that theme? Are there stories that you feel that should be received and there are stories that you feel should be challenged, about that movement of people, about migration as a process, not as an end point?

Yves Rees:

Yeah, I mean, as we all know, the modern history profession developed hand in hand with the nation state. You know we often talk about historians as handmaidens to the nation state and you know, for anyone who's read Benedict Anderson and his work on imagining communities, we know that the work of narrating the history of a nation was a core way of building a sense of national identity. And I think one of the ways in which that's played out in the Australian context is through telling very particular types of migration history and migration narratives where, as you've just said, peter, it's kind of this vision you know of particularly post-World War II migration of, you know, displaced people from World War II coming from Europe and our kind of joyful emergence from white Australia into a kind of, you know, multicultural nation. And that narrative is very neat and celebratory and it kind of fits within a national framework and I mean there's obviously some truth to that. That was a vast movement of people and the legacies of that are still with us today. But I think that kind of requirement to tell migration histories that exist in service of the nation have made it difficult to see other types of human mobility, the fact that Australians left, because of course you know we love this vision of Australia as the lucky country, as a place of, you know, sunshine and affluence and retreat and reprieve from war and poverty of the old world. But you know, we know that a lot of people found those same troubles here in Australia.

Yves Rees:

Some of the research I've done on my work between Australians and the US has been looking at particularly economic mobility and economic opportunism amongst Australians who moved to the US.

Yves Rees:

You know we think of as people coming to Australia to make money. You know, because we often boast we had, you know, some of the highest wages in the world the great union movement, the harvester judgment. But actually I found all this evidence in the world the great union movement, the harvester judgment, but actually I found all this evidence in the early 20th century People were struggling, working, people were struggling to make ends meet here and they were deliberately going to the US because they saw that as a land of opportunity, the land of affluence and a place for a better life for themselves. And that kind of mobility went in peaks and troughs, sort of depending on economic conditions. But particularly during the Great Depression there was a huge kind of outflow of people going to the US for this reason. But we don't tell these stories because they're inconvenient and there are so many other kind of forms of transnationalism and, you know, mobility that fall between the cracks of national narratives for similar reasons, and Sophie could tell us about some of them.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Yeah, I have kind of you know, two stories that I hope you know speak to these brilliant points here. And you know one is that one of the populations I studied for quite a while was this population of Chinese Australians that made their way to Republican era China, that is, China in the 1920s and 1930s. And in fact you know, for those of you that have maybe been to Shanghai, if you go down Shanghai's most famous street, Nanjing Road, the four largest kind of buildings on that road were built by Chinese Australians. They are four very big department stores and they were built by Chinese Australians.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

And in fact they said that, you know, in the 1930s it's been said, you know, if you walk down that street in Shanghai in the 30s, you heard a particular dialect from a place called Zhongshan. This is an area of South China where many, many migrants migrated to Sydney. Okay, so it's actually a big project at Western Sydney University called the Heritage Corridor linking Zhongshan with Sydney. So it said that you heard this dialect in Shanghai. And you know I remember thinking why did all these people kind of go from beautiful Australia to Shanghai in the 1930s?

Yves Rees:

Why would you ever leave?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Why would you do

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

that in the Great Depression, and when I looked into it, it wasn't just Chinese Australians, there was a large community of actually quite impoverished Australians, like white Australians, that had come to this city. In fact there were so many that there were these, like you know, consular letters between different British consuls saying, like what are we doing with all these like poor Australians that are rocking up in Shanghai on ships looking for work? But the Great Depression had motivated them right. They thought we need to find work, we're going to go. There's all these shipping lines and I thought it's so interesting that I would never have thought that migration went the other direction. You know I'm so used to studying anti-Chinese, you know kind of xenophobia in Australia, this notion that you know that Australia was a place of desire for Chinese migrants, that it did not occur to me that in fact impoverished white Australians would cause a problem, like you know, a precariat in Shanghai in the 30s. So that was a big prompt to me to kind of question my own internalisation of, I suppose, national ideas of migration.

Peter Hobbins:

Yeah, In fact, as I understand, the recession we had to have of the 90s also saw an overall net out-migration of Greek Australians back to Greece, where there were much better economic opportunities, even though there might be second or even third generation Greek Australians as well. So it's certainly a really interesting tie between economics and mobility as well. So we talked a bit about authorised narratives. Are there non-authorised narratives? Are there naughty stories, the stories we're not supposed to tell about migration, and how do you deal with those, Sophie?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Oh, I love this. So for a long time, as some of you will know, you know I worked with the archives of the White Australia Policy. So the White Australia Policy, as many scholars have shown, created this huge archive because all these people had to be documented and watched. So we have a lot of information on the people that the White Australia Policy targeted. And I realised, you know, after a while talking to families and reading oral history transcripts and listening to them, that in fact what people were telling the immigration officials wasn't necessarily the whole story, right. So you know, I began to realise that there were these incredibly clever tactics that migrants use to survive and to live outside the what I began to call the surveillance archive, right, that they had this whole world of families selling documents to each other and, you know, kind of like making sure that a lot of their lives and work could not be tracked so easily by the white Australia policy, which was so intent on tracking their lives and work.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

And you know, you know, for example, like there were incredible ways in Melbourne's Chinatown in which you could kind of get immigration documents at certain times right. These are problematic stories because they play into stereotypes, but they showed such ingenuity and I was able to track these through court cases. Okay, so I could only ever track these particular secret worlds. When things fell apart Say, someone didn't pay someone else the money they were supposed to pay them, or the documents didn't eventuate or the person didn't arrive, there would be a court case. And in the field that I work in, Chinese Australians use the Australian petticoats more than any other non-Anglo migrant group, and I think that's very interesting. And so I was able to kind of track what I call this kind of ghost world of Chinese-Australian life, and what it showed is that laws are one thing, policies are one thing, survival and ingenuity, and, you know, human rebellion and resistance is a whole other story, and migration has that flip side, I think.

Yves Rees:

Yeah, I also uncovered some stories of kind of people of people I guess on the wrong side of the law which also relates to another kind of you know unpermitted narrative that I love, which is of white Australians as undesirable migrants. Going back to Sophie's point before about the impoverished, the impoverished hordes of white Australians in Depression-era Shanghai, there were sort of fascinatingly similar dynamics that played out in the US which relate to the kind of weird intricacies of US border policy. So we all know about the history of the white Australia policy and you know the way in which it was very effective, apart from when people cheated it at restricting non-white immigration In the early 20th century. The United States was inspired by the Australian model to basically emulate that because there was concerns in the US about the huge numbers of migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe that had come in in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So the US developed a very elaborate system that they explicitly say is modelled on the Australian example, to have a kind of veneer of scientific, logical, kind of non-racist, even-handed treatment of all nations. But he's actually very, very deeply racially motivated and it was a quota system where each sending nation had an allocated number of migrants they could send per year to the United States.

Yves Rees:

Now, due to the intricacies of the way in which this system was designed, Australia had a very, very tiny quota, which meant in practice so this was only about 100 people a year, from the 20s onwards, could migrate to the US.

Yves Rees:

So in practice it often meant that white Australians who were used to thinking of the world as their oyster and them, as you know, incredibly desirable people to have anywhere, suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of US immigration law and, you know, illegal aliens, quite literally.

Yves Rees:

So there are many cases I uncovered and this regime went from the 1920s to the 1960s, when there was a big overhaul of US immigration policy, of Australians arriving at Ellis Island in New York or at Angel Island in San Francisco, expecting just to kind of waltz through immigration control and, you know, be welcomed with open arms by Uncle Sam, only to be told, no, sorry, you know, you haven't got a quota place, you've got the wrong visa. And they were quite often either like turned around, like quite literally put on a boat back to Australia or, in some cases, put in immigration detention, potentially for weeks or in a few cases, even for months. See this sense of sort of white entitlement and privilege kind of rub up against the realities of US border control and sort of see the kind of unintended fallout of the way in which you know the US attempt to emulate white Australia actually kind of ended up, you know, hurting individual white Australians.

Peter Hobbins:

Reminds me of a story from Van Diemen's Land in 1829 when a group of convicts hijacked a boat and sailed it. They said to Japan I think they were heading for China actually. They get to Japan and what happens? Turn back the boats. They were illegal immigrants coming into a country that didn't want foreigners. They were actually criminals and they were basically sent packing, even though they were flying a prominent Union Jack. They were actually fired at and sent out of the country. So it was kind of a reverse refugee story. That's not the sort of story we expect to hear as Australians.

Peter Hobbins:

Thank you for these wonderful, thoughtful responses. We've talked a little bit around the edges of multiculturalism and I think you know, even this morning I was watching some video footage digitised video footage of the 1980s immigration, multiculturalism moment. Is that mentality still with us, that idea that we as a society will accept all manner of immigrants and incorporate them into our society and respect their differences on their own grounds? Was that a laudable goal in the first place? And 50 years on from the 70s when it was introduced, where are we now? Who wants to turn to that question?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Yeah, I mean I still find this moment inspiring. You know I really do. If we think about the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act, you know, under Whitlam we think about, you know, the migration of Indo-Chinese refugees that came in the late 70s, very important for the history of Sydney, of course, and the history of Australia. These were inspiring moments and I grew up with these people who were kind of part of writing this multicultural policy. When I began speaking to some of my Chinese-Australian friends and people I research, families I talk to in Sydney, I had a startling encounter with a young man, you know, from Beijing and he lived in Chinatown, in Haymarket in Sydney, and he was studying multiculturalism and I asked him what he thought he was like. Well, it wasn't fair, was it? And I said what do you mean? And I asked him what he thought he was like. Well, it wasn't fair, was it? And I said what do you mean? And he said well, you know, surely the funding went to people who could speak English the best. This was his perception. He was quite blunt with me. He said you know, if in Australia, in the period when multicultural funding was being distributed, you could say the right things and you could speak and engage, you were more likely to get funding, and he was, like my research shows, this created inequalities politically in the community. So maybe this was this was just early.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

I'm not saying this was the motivation in any sense. I do think the policies suffered from and I'm not the only person to say this a lack of historicism, right, a lack of a sense of what you know is the kind of history of a particular community and the kind of divides within that community, right? So how do you provide funding that supports a multicultural nation without you know, also producing unintended inequalities, right, and political divides within that community? So I thought that was striking as well. And the other thing I would say about all of this is that, you know, I am someone who has been a recipient of the incredible archives that were created in that moment. So, just as there were some inequalities created, there was also a time where incredible archives were preserved because of this funding. So there was good and bad in that moment, but I do think it suffered from a lack of historicity.

Yves Rees:

Yeah, I mean, I think, similarly to Sophie, I was kind of raised in the heyday of multiculturalist discourse and it, you know, very much infused my worldview and you know is in so many ways like a laudable aspiration, particularly coming out of the white Australia policy. But I guess, as I've been thinking about these questions in recent years, I think more and more what we called multiculturalism and still do was in practice a very assimilationist policy by another name. That there was kind of an appetite for the veneer of multiculturalism, for the kind of aesthetics of it, for the food you know, as Ghassan Hajj has sort of so evocatively written, that we want the food but not the actual human difference and there has been yet less of an appetite to kind of actually reckon with what it means for Australia to no longer be a kind of hegemonically white British culture and actually accommodate real human difference and the complexities of that. I'm reminded here of, you know, the work of the great Australian and British feminist philosopher, Sarah Ahmed, who's written about diversity, work in the university context and the way in which kind of the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion often kind of functions as a sort of stopgap or a replacement for the actual hard work of making it happen, and I think that's kind of true of what's happened with multiculturalism in Australia. You know, we do have a diverse population, we like to think of ourselves as a multicultural nation, but that really hasn't. That difference hasn't trickled down into our government, into our institutions, into academia, into how we narrate our histories of ourselves.

Yves Rees:

I was rudely reminded of this fact just last night. I've been staying in central Sydney for the last few days for the Sydney Writers' Festival and really enjoying being in a neighbourhood with a large, you know, Chinese student population and you know hearing different languages spoken on the street and you know feeling in amongst you know, a human melting pot. And I was just kind of in a pink cloud of enjoying this last night walking along George Street and then I saw an Anglo-Australian man really quite violently racially abuse a group of Chinese students and I couldn't hear the full detail of his tirade but it ended by him saying this is Australia, I am Australian, which was a very clear statement that they were not, and that not, entitled to be here. All of which is to say we haven't done the work, it's still contested and we have a long way to go.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

I had one quick thing, Peter. So to build on what Yves has said, accommodating difference means ceding power and privilege. This is the problem, right, and I do believe that you know we haven't come to terms with this particular challenge of difference, which means you have to cede some of your power and privilege. Part of that could just simply be recognising that not everyone speaks English right, and that simple act of recognising that you shouldn't expect everyone to speak English. But I think that's an example of how what multiculturalism did, exactly as is so beautifully said, is, in some ways, like reified our own sense of ourselves as being good people, good welcoming people.

Yves Rees:

Yeah, it was good for white Australians to think of ourselves as progressive.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

But you know and I speak for myself too here it's very difficult to then say I'm going to accommodate diversity and difference by giving up some of my comfort, by giving up some of my privilege. That's a whole different question.

Peter Hobbins:

There's a different sort of homogenisation in migration that we don't often talk about, which is around First Nations.

Peter Hobbins:

So if you're an Australian South Sea Islander or if you're a Pacifica community member, you tend to be put into the First Nations category rather than being classed as an immigrant, whereas that wouldn't be the case if you were, say, from El Salvador or South America, or Latvia or Laos. Is that something that you've had to struggle with in your writing about that sort of homogenisation around First Nations narratives and exactly where people who are Indigenous to a particular place or a particular area are seen to be incorporated into our First Nations community as opposed to being seen as migrants?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

I love this question. There's an anecdote about Bendigo in which you know Bendigo, huge amount of gold mined from Bendigo also a town deeply associated with Chinese migration, a town where there's been, you know, attacks on the dragon recently, kind of vandalism on their Chinese dragon. Bendigo was also the place where a group of Indigenous people mined a very important rock for arrowheads and for kind of you know various weapons. So it was a place that has always been associated with mining and value. And this particular group, frank Kluane, you know various weapons. So it was a place that has always been associated with mining and value. And this particular group Frank Clune the historian argues this Indigenous group was actually quite responsible for Europeans finding gold in Bendigo.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

So the classic story of you know, in the gold rushes, it actually was Indigenous knowledge of the land that led to gold being discovered. The story goes that a group of Scottish women were kind of in a creek near Bendigo, white Creek, and they were with their stockings. They were washing their stockings and gold came into their stockings and they immediately knew they'd found some gold. They'd been told by Indigenous people that there was gold here. According to Frank Clune, a group of men come down. These women are terrified. They want to hide you know, the gold that they found. A group of men come down.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

One of the men speaks to one of the women in Scots Gaelic. She's never met him before but he's using their you know their history of migration. He recognises her as probably being Scottish Maybe he heard her speak. She answers him in English, you know. So she refuses to say we have kinship here. And Frank Clooney uses this story to show kind of the complexity of Australian kind of national history, that there's a particular Indigenous knowledge to this group right of the land, you know, and this group of Indigenous people were apparently quite powerful because they traded this particular rock and this leads to, you know, this gold rush which is terrible for these Indigenous people. And he shows how we lose these intricate stories of kinship that are actually quite important and powerful, you know, when we kind of, you know, zoom out and nationalise migration. But I love that story. I think it encapsulates so much of the complexity of Australian history.

Yves Rees:

This is a brilliant question and it's something I feel like I'm only just beginning to think about myself, my own work, and you know, partly because I don't sort of work primarily in First Nations history, but I think through some of my own research I've begun, I guess, to understand one of you know the many traumas of invasion and colonisation as kind of forced internal migration and being taken off country. One example that has really stayed with me from my own work is I've written about a white Australian novelist called Dorothy Cottrell, who in many ways was a really kind of heroic, remarkable woman. She was a wheelchair user in the early 20th century who became a best-selling novelist and moved to the United States where she was a kind of celebrity for her writing and one of the first Australians to be published in the US. You know, incredibly kind of plucky, bold woman discovered a dark side to her story, which is that shortly before she moved to the US in 1928, she went on a road trip to the Northern Territory and while she was there she travelled through a First Nations mission and effectively stole a child. She encountered a child who was about four or five, a little girl that she was charmed by. The girl was with her mother, living with her mother, but under colonial law at the time was under, kind of effectively, a ward of the state. So Dorothy sought permission from the protector of Aborigines and was permitted to take the child within a few days away from the protector of Aborigines and was permitted to take the child, you know, within a few days away from the mother, which is such a horrific story on so many levels.

Yves Rees:

And I've really kind of wrestled with how to incorporate this story within the broader story of Dorothy Cottrell's life. But to go back to your point, peter, I think as I was writing this story into my book it sort of at one point really clicked for me that one of the traumas that this child underwent was this forced migration. I mean, she was taken from her mother and her family. But she was also taken from her country because she went first to Queensland where Dorothy had a family farm, but then spent most of her childhood in Sydney and I think a few years ago I just would have sort of seen that as all Australia. But now I'm kind of beginning and I will never fully understand this, I know, but beginning to glimpse this as very different nations going from the Northern Territory to Sydney and how alien that landscape must have felt for this child. And you know, we know, that that child, you know, went on to become a fashion model. She moved to the Netherlands, she married a Dutchman, you know.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Clearly in some ways she had a good life but as far as we know she never was returned to her country or her mother and I've spent a lot of time thinking about what that might have meant for her that you know that forced migration as such a young child, let's add one thing quickly, peter there's an exhibition now at the National Museum in Canberra by a man called Zhou Xiaoping about Chinese-Indigenous relationships and you know, part of what he is highlighting here is that actually there were many, you know, Chinese-Indigenous relationships and we're uncovering, you know quite a few families who you know brought their Chinese-Indigenous children back to South China. So I've talked to families in Cairns who would say to me yeah, you know, we grew up with little kids both in China and Cairns, you know who were Chinese-Indigenous kids, and I think imagine that story, imagine being able to tell that story of those children, Chinese Indigenous kids, who were brought up in both China and Cairns, you know, and apparently there's quite a significant community that is now being kind of documented.

Peter Hobbins:

I promise to stick to time, and it's nearly time for your questions, so I'm going to finish on a happy note, I hope, which is I'm going to ask each of you to think about how much is hope central to our stories of migration and how much does that feature in your writing about people's movement, Sophie?

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Oh, wow, it's absolutely central. All migration is an act of faith in the collective human experience. Right, all of it. Even today, when you know migration seems in collective human experience. Right, all of it. Even today, when you know migration seems in some ways easy.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Right, getting on a plane, it's not because leaving the place that you know is frightening, even if you say it's not. We call it exhilaration, but actually it's fear. Leaving the place that you know, it's an act of faith that you will be received, you know, with some kind of grace, in your destination. It's an act of faith because you can choose to stay. So the choice to go is an act of, I think, faith in the collective human experience. It's saying I believe in human beings that they're not going to damage me when I get to that next place, which is why I think we find it so moving right, because anyone that comes here, you know they've committed to an act of faith in us, and I think that's why it is one of the most beautiful stories to tell the migration story, because it is about the collective human experience and it's about our belief that we will be welcomed wherever we go.

Yves Rees:

I love this question. I hadn't thought about my interest in migration in those terms before, but now you've said it I realise that's why I am so fascinated by these people. You know, I completely agree with everything Sophie said. There's something so intoxicating, I think, particularly, you know, in the era before planes, you know, before commercial aviation, you know, when people went on steamships had to, you know, write letters home. That would take months. Just the act of trust and optimism and bravery to get on a ship, knowing you know there wasn't going to be anyone there that was familiar.

Yves Rees:

On the other side, one of the women I've written about is a swimmer called Isabel Latham, who did many extraordinary things, one of which.

Yves Rees:

She was just a Sydney teenager, didn't come from a particularly wealthy family. In the middle of World War I she got on a boat to America by herself with hardly any money, like really just enough to kind of get her there and keep her alive for a few weeks. She didn't know anyone in America really. She didn't have a job lined up, she didn't have any plans, she was a kid, and I just think there's something so intoxicating about that sense of, you know, faith in humanity, as Sophie said, but also that desire to ask for more, that curiosity, that refusal to accept the kind of fairly limited scope of what Isabel's life was expected to be you know, getting married and having kids in the northern suburbs of Sydney, the way in which she said no and demanded something better for herself. And I guess at core, I think you know, history and human change is driven by those people who are curious and ask for more and I'm just, you know, inevitably, inexhaustibly fascinated by them.

Peter Hobbins:

Well, that was a cheery note to finish on from our prepared discussion, which, you know, none of them knew my questions and they don't know your questions. Who would like to ask something of Yves or Sophie, or both? Oh, thank you.

Audience Member 1:

Thanks. This is really just an observation I was discussing with a few friends the other day, but I'm Irish. Well, my family heritage is cultural heritage, is Irish and we were talking about this with my dad last week who, in my opinion, is quite racist to some of the new migratory cultures coming out, and we were talking about that. When the Irish arrived in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they had a very hard time by the British, so much so to use a common trope the paddy wagon was named after so much crime and, I guess, discrimination against the Irish. You mentioned the Chinese and the goldfields. My dad's best friend is Italian and he still talks about the racism that he experienced at school.

Audience Member 1:

You know I went to school in the 80s and 90s with Vietnamese kids who had a really hard time. You know the generalisations around war-torn brutalists. You know, therefore, they had a violent background and you know associations with a violent background and you know associations with heroin addiction and all these sorts of tropes from Cabra matta etc. Why do Australians give each of these sort of chapters of migratory people a really hard time and and it seems to me, until their kids talk with an Australian accent, that really there's this sort of gruelling initiation that each chapter has to go through. Do you think that's true, and if so, what does that stem from? It's a loaded question and more just an observation.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Yeah, Peter was saying is that uniquely Australian? I have a go I think about this a lot to use an Australianism. There's sort of two ways that I've tried to answer this question. I think about this all the time. My ex-husband was Sri Lankan Australian and dedicated his life to getting the best Australian accent you've ever heard. It is far better than mine. He plays cricket rugby better than any Australian and he is the first to tell you this was a defensive measure. He felt that to survive here he needed to do that. And there's me saying to him embrace your heritage, embrace your past, tell everyone you're Hindu. And he was like you have not lived here. You don't understand. I was at risk, I felt unsafe. You don't understand. I was at risk, I felt unsafe. You know I have two.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

One of my mentors answers that question in the following way. Her name is May Nye and she said it's about resources, that when people perceive that their resources will be diluted, that their resources are at risk, that there will be less resources to go around, whether it be housing, whether it be money, whether it be jobs when they perceive this, they are much more likely to enact that response. And as there are less and less resources. She argues. With the changes in the economy and climate change, we will just see more of this right.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

The second answer that you know others give and I think it's a very powerful one is that we are on stolen land. We know we don't really belong here. We know this is not our land. So we have a fragile claim to being here in the first place and, like any person who feels defensive and fragile, we lash out because we don't have that claim to this place. You know, and we haven't reckoned with the ways in which we treated the people that were here for you know, 60 million years before we came. So these are the two answers that are given right. But the kind of honest answer to your question is I don't know. I've spent so much time studying this and in every archive I look at where there is, in terrible racial violence, there is incredible human kindness. In every single archive, every anti-Chinese massacre I've studied, there is also someone in a massacre that goes around handing out blankets or giving out water, right, and so human beings act in unpredictable ways and I don't know how to direct that towards kindness and goodness.

Yves Rees:

I completely agree with everything Sophie has said and I, you know, would not attempt to provide a definitive answer either, but I just, in response to what you've said, I just wanted to add a sort of small reflection of my own, which is that, you know, one of my overriding historical interests is this concept of whiteness and who is white and who isn't, and the way in which you know, in the Australian and the American context, that plays out into you know who belongs and who doesn't. And one of the things that's so fascinating to me about it is the way in which the definitions and the boundaries of whiteness are constantly changing. You know, as you've gestured towards, the Irish were not considered white in the past. You know they were a racialised group, they were likened to people from Africa. There was a lot of racist imagery around that. And you know, now, when we think of Irishness as sort of peak whiteness, that seems kind of absurd, but it was very much the case and I think a similar trajectory has happened with Italian and other European migrant groups that, of course, when they first came to Australia in the post-war decades, they were not seen as white, they were not seen as belonging. There was a huge amount of racism towards them and that still exists in pockets.

Yves Rees:

But I think to a large extent the kind of category of whiteness in the Australian context, and in the US as well, has kind of expanded to accommodate those kind of Western European identities.

Yves Rees:

And I've spoken to historian colleagues of Sophie and mine who are second generation migrants from Europe and they've talked about how odd it was that when they were kids at school they were subjected to slurs and now they're professors, they're seen as the white establishment you know, they're the insiders that the like people like us are kind of saying you know, you're the gatekeepers and we're trying to break things down. So all of which is to say, I guess that this just goes to show how fake these categories all are. You know, race is invented, whiteness is invented. It's constantly being, you know, renegotiated and reimagined to suit the kind of needs of the moment which, as Sophia said, are connected to questions of you know, politics and resources, questions of you know, politics and resources. And with that historical understanding of how fake and invented these are, I think we can start to trust them less and sort of denaturalise them and see them for the artifices they really are.

Peter Hobbins:

And if I can offer a slight counterpoint. So my partner was born in New Zealand. Yeah, her parents are ethnically Chinese but grew up in Malaysia, in fact were born there, and I've been speaking recently with her father, who's in his 80s. They left Malaysia because they were discriminated against by the Malays. So, as ethnically Chinese, they were seen as lesser Asians than the local Malays.

Peter Hobbins:

And he has said to my face he thinks the best thing that's ever happened in Malaysia is that the British came and colonised it and brought civilisation. And they are his words. He's the Chinese man who's prospered in the British system but felt discriminated against by the local Malay people and ended up in New Zealand and then ultimately coming to Australia as well. So it's certainly complicated. I know that's an answer to your question but, yeah, sometimes we can imbibe these narratives and sometimes they work for us, and I think it does come down a lot to this question of the resources you end up with and whose resources you are taking and whose you all seem to be taking away. We have maybe time for one more question, please.

Audience Member 2:

I'd like to come back to the idea of multiculturalism, and I could have many discussions with you about that, but where I'd like to go as the last question is the idea that we still seem to frame multiculturalism as other cultures relating to a white culture, rather than many of the cultures that are in Australia relating to each other, and you only need to be in Western Sydney to see that you've got local events where their histories are created and being made in Australia, as Indians with Lebanese, Vietnamese with Chinese, and yet we still seem very preoccupied with the idea that multiculturalism has to be mediated through white culture. What would you say, please?

Yves Rees:

Yeah, I would just wholeheartedly agree with you. Yeah, I would just wholeheartedly agree with you. I mean, I think this is exactly Sophie's point before about the failure of white culture to cede power and privilege and dominance. You know, we see this in so many areas. I think of Australian cultural life that you know like.

Yves Rees:

I work in academia, obviously, but I also have a bit to do with the publishing, literary world, and both spaces love to think of themselves as very progressive, very woke, but they're still dominated by white people. You know, which I say as a white person who you know, want to bring in other voices, diverse voices, but kind of, you know, the white people are always the gatekeepers, they're the publishers, they're the editors, they're the senior professors, they're the people who are still controlling how those stories are told, who gets to tell them, who is anointed as the face of a particular community and who isn't. And you know, to go back to your point, what needs to change is that the assumed and naturalised centrality and hegemony of white culture needs to fundamentally shift. And until that happens, until we no longer take for granted that the head of any cultural organisation or any branch of government in this country is going to be a white person, particularly a white man. Until that changes, we'll keep having this problem, I think.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

I totally second what Isa said. I completely agree. I might just add to that that, as we're all storytellers here, if you're here interested in kind of telling stories, you know brave storytellers expose power right and they understand the secret ways that power works that Yves's gesturing towards. It's difficult sometimes to discuss, right, how things actually work. We're uncomfortable with that, particularly if, in my case, you're a beneficiary of how things actually work right and I feel like you know we have new generations now of, say, storytellers from Cabramatta.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

You know, all that I have is a wonderful book about life in Cabramatta in the 90s that exposes and skewers exactly that lie, the heart of multicultural Australia right, which is that you can come here but we're not going to give up the power we have over you. You know we're still going to make you jump through the hoops that are going to be harder for you to jump through because your parents are working long shifts at night, you don't grow up in an English-speaking household, you don't come with networks and you don't inherit real estate. So every time we expose the stories of how power actually works in our city and our community, we help that issue because we expose the challenges that migrants face when they come here that it is not an equal playing field. So I think that might help. Multiculturalism telling stories about how power works more clearly.

Yves Rees:

And I guess, yeah, just fully agree and just sharing, like I suppose communicating that knowledge I think can be a really like to up-and-coming people and kind of breaking down the mistake can be really powerful.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

This is how it actually works, yeah.

Yves Rees:

Yeah, I mean where. The university I teach at is La Trobe University in Melbourne, as Peter mentioned, which is very different to the universities I was educated at. It's like I you know I'm the child of lawyers and academics. You know I went, I was educated at Group of Eight universities. Like I arrived at university knowing how it worked. I knew what an honours year was. I knew what a PhD was. You know I had that kind of knowledge and cultural capital that meant I could navigate the system with ease.

Yves Rees:

What has been so interesting for me at La Trobe University, where a really high proportion of my students are first in family university students are the children of migrants.

Yves Rees:

They're often incredibly smart, they're so politically engaged, They've got really important perspectives. They don't know what an honours year is, so they're not going to do an honours year because they've, like, never heard of it before and no one's explained it to them. So I often feel like some of the most important and powerful educational work I do is not like the formal tutorial teaching. It's like the conversation I have with a student who got a high distinction on their essay and I say, if you want to do a PhD, this is what a PhD is you need to think about what supervisor you want and email them and have a conversation with them and really breaking down those steps that no one actually tells you. That's not written on any university website about how to apply for a PhD, and I think that's actually one practical way that white people like us can do a tiny little bit of work. To cede power is actually expose the kind of unwritten rules of how you get power.

Sophie Loy-Wilson:

Perfectly put.

Peter Hobbins:

I'm going to ask you to keep your hands apart for a second because I'd like you to join me in thanking these two brilliant people on stage with me, Dr Sophie Loy- Wilson, Dr Yves Rees. Thank the Royal Australian Historical Society, the History Council of New South Wales and Sydney Writers Festival for this wonderful conversation today, and also thank you both for those awesome questions as well. So give it up, folks, thank you.

Catherine Shirley:

What a fantastic session. Thank you very much, Yves, Peter and Sophie. It was absolutely phenomenal and I think it's given us all a lot of food for thought and moved our historical perspectives on a little bit more. From this moment in time, I'd also like to say I'd like to pass on my sincere thanks to the Sydney Writers' Festival organisers, who have been fantastic in their support. We didn't know that they were sending a team today, and they did, which is just wonderful to support such a small organisation as ours. I'd also like to thank the RAHS, the Royal Australian Historical Society, in this wonderful venue that we're using today, which is great.

Catherine Shirley:

I'd like to thank my team as well. You know, I do have a team who works very hard to actually make these things happen, and so there's Amanda Wells in South Australia. She lives and works in South Australia and does these fantastic graphics and does some fabulous organising. We've got Jadzia Stranell, who's there in the audience, our new First Nations Project Officer. Thank you, Jadzia, for being here today, it's fantastic. And Laura Sale, who is our communications person, who is also at uni. We seem to have this fantastic number of uni students who work for us, which is brilliant. Um, okay, so, um, oh yes, the Sydney writers festival have asked me to ask you that, if you'd like a copy of any of the books, they've put a QR code on the table out there that if you take a photo of that with your phone you can then get through to the website. They also want me to say that Yves is going to be in other sessions at Carriageworks this weekend, as I understand it. I'm not sure, Sophie, whether you're going to be. No, okay.

Yves Rees:

Yeah, I'll be interviewing Tori Peters, who's an incredible trans novelist, on Saturday at Carriageworks at 5.30pm. She's American, she's brilliant. You should definitely come and on, I think, 4.30pm on Sunday, I'll be doing a live recording of my history podcast, if you want more history content. That's a podcast called Archive Fever that I co-host with Professor Claire Wright, also from La Trobe University. We'll be doing a live recording on stage about family archives, so it's going to be very, very nerdy in the best possible way.

Catherine Shirley:

Thank you very much. It's been fantastic. Thank you.

Amanda Wells:

Thanks for tuning in. The History Council of New South Wales would like to thank the session speakers and our cultural partners the University of Newcastle School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences. The City of Sydney, Macquarie University Faculty of Arts. Museums of History New South Wales, the National Archives of Australia Placemaking New South Wales. The National Archives of Australia Placemaking New South Wales, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the University of New England School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of New South Wales School of History and Philosophy and the UTS Australian Centre for Public History. The History Council of New South Wales is supported by the New South Wales Government through Create New South Wales. To find out more about the History Council of New South Wales or to become a member, please visit us online at historycouncilnsw. org. au.