‘It was just you and your child’: Single migrant mothers,generational storytelling and Australia’s migrant heritage

Defining heritage and memory

Heritage, like history and memory, is a cultural process rather than simply a physical artefact, a building or a site. When I take heritage as my subject, I am also concerning myself with history, representation and commemoration – which, as Rothberg (2009: 4) reminds us, concerns many scholars working in cultural studies. The individual and collective versions of the past that we construct and tell each other are intimately connected to cultural practice and power: as David C Harvey (2007) argues, heritage as a legislative practice and a personal orientation to the past is a ‘present-centred cultural practice and an instrument of cultural power’ (p. 29).

A possibly conflictual relationship exists between group-specific memory cultures that inscribe certain events and spaces with meaning, and official memory cultures that inscribe them into a canon and render them points of historical reference. However, we need not adopt a dichotomous understanding of group and official memory and how it functions and evolves in public culture–that is, in rending certain sites ‘heritage worthy’ or not. Existing heritage criteria have the power to exclude, silence and condition, and yet they also provide a framework through which individuals’ memories can gain wider meaning (Eyerman, 2011: 306). In the case study offered here, former child migrants are actively engaging with instruments of cultural power (that is, authorised heritage discourses (Smith, 2006)) to push their site and its associated stories into the public realm. In doing so, they have the potential to expand the boundaries of official memory cultures with alternative and sometimes subversive narratives about migration and settlement.

American public historian Michael Frisch (1990: 215) argues that we need to consider active interpretive processes that occur at public history sites, like Benalla, that disrupt our idea of the audience as passive receiver of knowledge. He speaks of both audience and presenters as complicit and co-dependant rather than distinguished from each other. Like Frisch, Glassberg (2001) also challenges scholars to look to the audience in considering official and vernacular expressions of heritage: ‘those who celebrate history at the grass roots tend to overlook the apparent spontaneity and depth of emotion associated with national histories’. That is, publics can and do draw on seemingly ‘official’ or institutional narratives for their own emotional, familial or collective needs, and this is a complex and active process that cannot be classified as either rejection or passive acceptance.

These calls have been heeded by scholars of cultural heritage, and Australian cultural heritage scholars Andrea Witcomb (2013), Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (2011), Laurajane Smith (2015) and Steven Cooke and Donna-Lee Frieze (2015) have analysed visitor affect and emotion within heritage and museum spaces. But what of those who not only interpret and engage with heritage sites but also attempt to make their alternative sites public in collusion (or collision) with hegemonic official heritage narratives (see Molden, 2016)? With the recent exception of Joy Damousi’s (2015) work and Agutter’s (2016) study of settlement in Adelaide, academic historiography on immigration has yet to examine how memories of settlement and adjustment are retold and remembered at the familial and intimate level of Australia’s migrant communities. ² How those family histories then become public is also worth exploring as a new avenue for the study of cultural heritage.

The commemorative context

Evidence provided to Heritage Victoria demonstrates that former residents and interested parties have an understanding of the heritage processes and the sanctions involved in gaining heritage status for their site. Former residents simultaneously engage in this language and push against its boundaries, extending the limits of the post-war migration narrative with their mothers’ stories. In doing so, they are implicated in the practice of making heritage. Indeed, they do more than implicating themselves in official heritage: they actively insert their family histories into its established frameworks. Public history is an interactive process in which many publics coordinate and contest their memories and, inevitably, in which the personal is always framed by a wider collective conception of the self – ethnic, familial, national and local (See Rowe et al., 2002).

Therefore, there is more than just generational awakening occurring in the retelling of these stories about working migrant mothers. For one, these retellings are made possible by the passage of time. The Australian heritage context is now more receptive to stories of grief and loss. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, Australia’s commemorative landscape has broadened to include those previously excluded – Vietnam veterans, the Stolen Generations, Forgotten Australians and other victims of institutionalised child abuse. Many of these histories focus on children: children removed and not afforded a right to family life. Child removal is a part of this post-war migration story too, but here, Benalla’s focus is on the single mother. Women, and especially migrant women, remain less represented in the commemorative landscape.

On a personal level, those providing testimony are able to reflect on their own parents’ lives as they themselves have grown old or become parents. The collective community’s need to tell and the personal ability to speak cannot be separated. As the threat to demolish the remaining huts grew and as physical remnants of their parents’ pasts and their own childhood beginnings seemed to be receding, former residents were able to call on each other, and an existing heritage framework, to insist their familial, and previously marginalised, migration stories be made public. Formerly the realm of ‘dinner-table conversations’, as written by Glenda Sluga (1988: xi), stories about government-administered migrant centres have now extended beyond family memories, as the commemoration and national heritage listing of Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre in 2007 – Australia’s largest and longest running point of reception and processing centre – has demonstrated. While the particular stories of their migrant mothers have no public platform, former child residents are emboldened by Bonegilla’s success as a public history site and the strength of their community of camp rememberers.

Remembering single migrant mothers and post-war immigration

Notably, the examples examined here are those of women, daughters of mostly single, working migrant women. Initially this was not intentional. When I contacted the people behind Benalla’s efforts to be heritage listed, many chose to give me their hearing presentations or send me written recollections of their mothers’ stories. At least 10 expressed interest in participating in an oral history interview. Initially, women proved the most forthright in sharing their testimonies and in focussing on their mothers. Arguably, the ability to empathise with their mothers’ positions is stronger among daughters, their retrospective bond often formed by mutual understandings of being a woman in a discriminatory space. Most of these women saw substantial, social and political change to the status of women throughout their lifetimes, including the liberalisation of sexual mores and increasing social and economic autonomy for women in Western, industrialised societies. As one example, unmarried mothers (excluding widowers and deserted wives) were not eligible for the pension in Australia until 1973 (NAA, 1968b). A social system that privileged the patriarchal institution of marriage and the (white) nuclear family prevailed for most of their youth and into their adult lives. They understood that their mothers, the unmarried, were social pariahs (Quirk, 2016: 207–224).

As stated, the February heritage hearing became a platform for these former child migrants to emphasise the importance of the female migration story, which has remained unrecognised in mainstream and popular histories of the immigration scheme and specialised histories of spaces like Bonegilla. Importantly, their testimony attempts to reject historiographical efforts to cast downtrodden new arrivals as victims of government policies, instead they cast their mothers as resilient women who created a way to survive and raise children in difficult circumstances. Before delving into their testimony, I first provide further information about Benalla’s history in relation to the immigration scheme and prevailing ideas around women and migrants in post-war Australia.

Benalla was a holding centre (colloquially known among residents as ‘camps’) for those classified as ‘dependants’ of Commonwealth-assisted refugees and migrants from 1949 to 1967. The government’s classifications organised migrant men and women as productive or unproductive potential citizens. Men, whose documents read ‘breadwinners’ would work as ‘labourers’; they supported ‘dependents’, women and children. Women were to work as ‘domestics’, mainly in cleaning and carer positions. Before 1949, Australia accepted predominately single healthy men from the pool of International Refugee Organization (IRO) displaced persons (DPs) living in refugee camps in the wake of World War II. The first group of European refugees who found themselves displaced in Germany or Austria after the war were victims of concentration camps and voluntary or forced labourers. The remainder were old and new Soviet citizens who refused repatriation to their communist-ruled homelands (Persian, 2015: 82). They included Russians, Ukrainians and others from Soviet republics, as well as Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians fleeing Soviet incorporation and Polish and Yugoslavian refugees. Those accepted by the Australian government were expected to fulfil labour shortages. Australia was the only migrant-receiving nation that made IRO refugees sign a 2-year work contract, which assigned them work at the direction and discretion of the government. When this supply of refugees began to decline and competition for refugees with America and Canada increased, the government began accepting women and families. From February 1949 widows, deserted wives and unmarried mothers were accepted in recognition of the need to increase the nation’s population.

By 1954, Australia had received 170,000 DPs. As the IRO scheme ended and the DP problem in Europe eased, the government turned to new and previously spurned source nations for new immigrants. As a member of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), Australia signed agreements with Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Malta and Turkey. To accommodate these mass numbers, an experiment in nation building that Australia had never before attempted, the newly formed Department of Immigration turned to former military training establishments. Post-war Australia was in the middle of a severe housing shortage. These military training establishments were a temporary solution – sparse, Spartan and never intended to accommodate families or children. Along with employer-provided hostels and State government–sponsored centres, these camps accommodated hundreds of thousands of post-war migrants, right up until the 1970s.

Over 60,000 passed through Benalla, which housed families and ‘unsupported’ dependents, that is, those without a male breadwinner: the widowed, divorced or deserted. They were referred by the Department, social workers and Commonwealth Employment Officers as ‘problem cases’. The subject of many welfare workers’ reports, they were also described as a ‘hard core of permanent residents’ with little chance of affording unsubsidised accommodation, ‘clogging up the system by staying indefinitely in what was meant to be temporary accommodation’ (National Archives of Australia (NAA), 1968a). They were difficult to place into independent homes and integrate within the community because they had young children, which made it difficult to fulfil their 2-year work contracts. They were often stuck within the hostel system for years and years. Furthermore, they were ineligible for the widows’ pension or Child Welfare Allowance until they became naturalised citizens, for which they could only apply after 5 years’ residence in Australia.

Benalla was one of the few camps that almost exclusively housed single mothers and their children – although a mix of families (sometimes with the breadwinner away on work allocations) and single women occupied the centre. Unlike other camps, people stayed for years, not days or weeks. For these reasons, its history and the stories it contains are distinct from other centres across the country. Unsupported women – or as Ann-Mari Jordens (1997: 64–65) prefers to call them ‘supporting women’ – were not exempt from their 2-year work contract. Indeed, many single mothers needed to work in order to pay the subsidised but still substantial cost of accommodating themselves and their children at Benalla camp. Most of the women ended up working in Benalla town, at the Latoof and Callil clothing factory or at Renold Chains, two of the main reasons why so many women were shunted to and concentrated together at Benalla. However, only those women who were young, able to walk the distance into town, capable of doing factory work, and with children older than 2 years – whom could be placed in the camp crèche – were able to work at these factories. Those unable to work – due to disability, unavailability of work or having children younger than 2 years – stayed at the centre accruing accommodation charges and years of debt.

Like many of the large Department of Immigration Holding Centres, Benalla was remote and rural. At the heart of the post-war immigration scheme was the government’s desire to maintain control over the dispersal and assimilation of migrants into the workforce and across the country. They were out of sight from populated urban centres in accordance with a union movement anxious over migrant labour and their competition with the Australian worker, were out of the competitive housing market (if temporarily) and were concealed from the expected backlash of an Anglo-population wary of non-British migration.

The stigma attached to single mothers at this time is clear. Bureaucratic justifications encouraging that children be placed in care speak of maintaining the moral welfare of women and children – in addition, relieving mothers ‘of the responsibility of looking after their children’ was encouraged so that they may be ‘free to engage in remunerative employment, in fact, they are obliged to do so’ (NAA, 1949). Their dependency is described as a fault of character, the shortcomings of single mothers themselves, rather than an inadequate system with unrealistic expectations. They were treated as a drain on the resources of Holding Centres and the Department and described as economic and social failures to assimilate. Despite evidence of poor standards in early accommodation centres (including lacking facilities for babies), failures are attached to individual migrant women themselves and their ‘unstable personalities’ and poor choices.

As indicated, single mothers experienced pressures from social workers and camp administration to place their children in state or institutional care so that they may find work and accommodation on their own outside the camp, and many social workers insisted them to find a husband. For many, the only way out of the camp, without placing their children in care, was marriage – lending new insight into Jill Matthews’s (1984) and Srebrenka Kunek’s (1993) arguments that women were ‘factory and marriage fodder’ rendered dependent and made subsidiary within the post-war immigration scheme. Eventually, however, some social workers began to air thoughts on the structural discrimination that worked against these women, recognising that their ‘noncompliance’ was not a reflection of their poor characters but a wanting in structures of care and access to non-discriminatory assistance that held these women back. The overwhelming difficulties of helping these women and children move out of the camp and integrate into the community, however, saw them universally described as a great ‘challenge’ (Agutter, 2016: 4).

In spite of the melancholy aspects of this history, Benalla camp was also a sanctuary for some, a space in which many children grew up among families in similar situations. Their mothers often had common histories of forced displacement, family separation, violence and loss. Those who offered testimony at the heritage hearing attempted to balance these melancholy narratives with their own memories of an adventurous childhood – mirroring the unspoken stories that shadowed their childhoods, an afterlife of their parents’ silenced pasts. Their sometimes fond memories of the camp are matched by their desire to speak about their mothers and the need to explain why these stories have been excluded and why they should be brought out of the shadows of Australia’s immigration history. They offer Benalla’s history as a counter-narrative to homogenous and more celebratory aspects of post-war settlement.

In what follows, I focus on two women’s testimonies – both the hearing testimonies they provided to Heritage Victoria and the subsequent oral histories they shared with me. They each cover their mothers’ pre-migration lives, their migration journeys and express longitudinal understandings of settlement and adjustment in Australia. These stories are a performance and construction of familial, individual and communal identity. Testimony and oral history as a medium lends itself to narratives that emphasise the agency of the individuals. Memory is a process of making sense of the past, an active and present-centred practice of identity formation. People are rarely described as being solely acted upon, even in cases of exploitation and trauma. And yet, in these testimonies, former child migrants do away with first-person narration and instead attempt to explain their mothers’ journeys from a third-person perspective – an implicit acknowledgement that while empathy may not be entirely possible, a respective responsiveness should be sought when approaching the sometimes difficult stories of the mothers they are attempting to publicly remember. Their subjecthood is often denied in an attempt to recover their mothers’ silencing and place them at the centre of their narratives. These recollections also make clear that their mothers’ memories and retellings, which were only uncovered later in life or pieced together from a range of voices, have come to shape and reshape their own political and historical considerations of Australia’s history of settlement and migration, into which they make an assertive intervention by insisting on Benalla’s inclusion.

Velta

In the opening paragraphs of her testimony, Velta describes her account, ‘A Latvian Woman’s Story’ (Fellowes, 2016), as her mother’s ‘experience of making history’. She attributes her mother with an agency that seemed denied during her displacement and then settlement. Her mother, Marija, was a Latvian DP who made her way to Australia under the auspices of the International Refugee Organization. She had two daughters, born in wartime Germany, after she fled the Russian invasion of Latvia with her husband. They left her family behind. Her husband then left her and two young daughters in a refugee camp, although this is not stated explicitly in Velta’s story about her mother. The focus is very much on Marija’s ability to fend for herself and her daughters without assistance. Like many, Velta is conscious of her mother’s exclusion, the silence and shame often attached in her mother’s lifetime to being an ‘unsupported’ migrant woman. She tempers this perception with tropes of survival, persistence and strength. I do not mean resilience in Olick’s (2016) use of Hall and Lamont’s sense of the word: as ‘a modern form of theodicy’ in a neo-liberal context (p. 316). Rather, Velta uses resilience to overcome a vulnerability that is not in the ‘private or voluntary sphere’, but a vulnerability in Fineman’s (2008) sense of the word, a vulnerability that is universal and constant and intimately tied to the structures and institutions in place to manage or exacerbate our vulnerabilities. In her testimony, Velta stated, ‘It is often easier to judge than to understand, thus perhaps by explaining her travels, her journey, one can have insight into how a person adapts, and survives any given situation’. This situation saw Marija directed to Benalla, labelled a ‘problem case’, and reliant on Commonwealth-sanctioned work in order to fulfil the requirements of her contract and cover the cost of holding centre accommodation.

Marija stayed at Benalla with her two daughters and found work as a kitchen hand at Benalla hospital, where she remained until she retired in 1985. She and her daughters lived at that camp from 1950, when they arrived, to 1967, when the camp closed. Velta, the third child, was born at Benalla in 1955, an ‘illegitimate child’, she says. This is how she describes her birth as part of her mother’s story: ‘Against much pressure Marija would not relinquish her child’. It was not only migrant women who faced this pressure but all unmarried mothers. As Christin Quirk (2016: 210) explores in post-war Australia, it was believed that the mother should want to be rid of her child and that salvation could be gained through the sacrifice of adoption. Within this context of censure and blame, it was the only way for an unmarried woman to ‘regain her respectability’ (Swain and Home cited in Quirk: 211). As ‘single girls’, unmarried women were considered ‘immature’ and decisions were therefore made on their behalf – by social workers, medical professionals and centre staff. In the state of Victoria in 1948, approximately 68% of never-married mothers were separated from their babies (Quirk: 212). In this context, Marija’s resistance to these official pressures to have Velta adopted is all the more remarkable.

In one of the few academic accounts of DP mothers, Karen Agutter (2016) uses archival records to explore the experience of mothers forced to place their children in institutional care. She concludes that ‘one is struck by the impersonal nature and lack of consideration given to these women and their children’ (p. 62). Their situations were incompatible with the stipulations of the immigration scheme: the need to work off 2-year work contracts, movement out of the accommodation centres system and speedy assimilation into the ill-defined ‘Australian way of life’. To understand her mother’s experience and to successfully articulate it to an audience of former residents and heritage officials, Velta draws not only on her perception of her mother’s resilience but also on subsequently acquired knowledge of what has been excluded from popular understandings of the migration scheme and systems of reception and accommodation. She persistently and implicitly asks, ‘where was our welcome?’. A question rendered still prescient – where is our welcome? – in the current heritage context in Victoria and Australia.

Sophia Turkiewicz’s (2013) recent autobiographical documentary, Once My Mother, directly addresses this issue too. Her mother was a Polish DP, who arrived as a single mother with a young Sophia in the 1950s. Unable to support herself and her daughter, Sophia’s mother eventually placed Sophia in a Catholic orphanage in Adelaide, where Sophia stayed for a number of years, until her mother married and was able to retrieve her and bring her into their new home. At the beginning of Once My Mother, Turkiewicz mentions the ‘lies’ of historians: ‘the chapter on your story is missing’, she says directly to her mother, referring to her trials during and after the war, her epic journey across Russia and in various refugee camps, and her difficult integration into Australia society. Academics have pointed to the more assertive and socially mobile second generation, the children of post-war migrants or those who arrived as children, like Turkiewicz. A multi-ethnic second generation became more present in popular culture and academia from the 1980s. Films from this time, like Turkiewicz’s 1984 Silver City, moved us beyond the journey of migration, for so long a focus of popular representations of migration in Australia. Instead they posited migration and adjustment as a life-long process that extends beyond initial settlement and one that involved looking both forwards and backwards. It had fallen on this generation to ‘rescue’ their parents’ stories from an uncaring past. The act of ‘going back’ to a place one has only visited through the stories of parents encapsulates this relationship – and I was particularly struck by the curiosity, sense of discovery and eventual familiarity with which Turkiewicz seemed to move through Polish spaces that contained so much meaning for her mother.

This is more than an insular and meditative process: it is about situating parents’ and one’s own stories within a wider context, attributing significance and new meaning, attempting to explain inexplicable hardship and understanding impossible choices in the face of bureaucratic callousness. Part of this task is to explain ourselves, as Turkiewicz says: ‘they’re my stories. They tell me who I am’. In this instance, Turkiewicz, who also signed the petition to have Benalla heritage listed, and the others who spoke at the hearing recognise the importance of public history and express a collaborative need to share publicly and have these idiosyncratic stories be part of wider narratives of migration. They believe heritage listings are one way of achieving this goal.

As stated, the migrant camp offered a safe haven for some – this is the case for Velta, quite literally. She was never to spend time in a state or church institution. They were able to stay together as a family at Benalla. While Velta does not elaborate in her hearing testimony, she later spoke fondly to me of the community of women and children that raised her and of the friendships her mother formed within that group: ‘the women all stayed together, bonded by friendship and hardship, I suppose’ (Velta, interview with the author, 21 July 2016). It was a safe if Spartan space in which to bring up her children. As Velta says it was ‘not the standard she [Marija] herself grew up with, but none-the-less a survivable option’.

Velta’s childhood experiences of Benalla are shelved in this emotive written account, in favour of her understanding of her mother’s emotions and experiences, which she admitted to me later, she was only able to gather through persistent questioning and in ‘bits and pieces’. Like Helen (Helen, interview with the author, 7 April 2016), another contributor, the exercise is to get into their mothers’ heads as a means to ‘honour’ ideas around migrant women’s perseverance and resilience in the face of structural discrimination in post-war Australia. They have searched for examples of their mothers’ migrant stories in popular or official accounts of post-war migration, and they fail to find it. In Velta’s case, her mother never found a way out of the camp and into private accommodation as a single working woman with three daughters. She re-married once, but stayed in the relationship very briefly, and continued to live at Benalla – perhaps, as films like Silver City imply, because it provided a sense of community, a separate fringe city (from the main and Anglo-Australian town of Benalla), and a camp community of women and children. It was where she first found some stability in Australia, albeit one in which she was labelled, from the Department of Immigration and social workers’ point of view, as a problem case. Even social workers cannot deny the ‘high morale’ evident among women and children within the camp, although they argued that this high morale may be fruitfully redirected towards seeking re-marriage (NAA, 1951a, 1951b).

The narrator, the daughter, is not a subject included the testimony. The mother–daughter relationship remains ambiguous if not elusive, reflecting the manner in which these former child migrants came to know their mothers’ pasts: in bits and pieces, as they grew older, and with insistent questioning. Indeed, the silences in the wartime stories of this generation of women reflects the way in which these working migrant women appear in the popular historiography on Australian immigration. Velta ends her mother’s story with dramatic flair, and it is the first time she directly contrasts her own childhood experience of Benalla with Marija’s experience of Benalla. In this instance, she uses personal pronouns: in this last paragraph, ‘our’ is suddenly inserted into the text. Here, she ties her mother’s story to wider histories, insisting that she and all others are deserving of recognition for being:

the epitome of triumph over adversity, of a woman who happened to live through extraordinary times. To remain a kind and caring person despite being witness of man’s inhumanity to man. Marija is in fact a heroine and well deserving of any and all recognition as do all the displaced persons who arrived and still arrive in Australia.

Helen

Helen’s testimony to the VHR hearing directly addresses heritage criteria and its neglect of post-war migration and the families ‘who lived, not just passed through, but lived’ in Benalla. Here, she is directly addressing the Executive Director’s decision not to include Benalla on the VHR due to the existent listing of Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre, a centre that processed approximately 320,000 migrants over a 24-year period. Benalla had a distinctly separate function to Reception and Training Centres – families without male breadwinners lived there for years.

Helen makes a direct challenge to the boundaries of ‘authorised heritage discourses’ and draws on commissioned reports in 2011, which called on Heritage Victoria to give more credence to post-war places and objects of migrant significance. Helen’s understanding of heritage is worth exploring. She distinguishes between mainstream and community heritage; the gap between the two is patently obvious – the former privileges what she calls dominant cultural groups over marginal ones (namely, migrants and women) (Topor, 2016). Helen also displays an understanding of how the intangible has only recently and somewhat uncomfortably been included in Australian heritage legislation through changes to the Burra Charter. By the intangible, I mean the use, associations and meanings attached to a place rather than considerations of its aesthetic, physical and practical structures. The Burra Charter focuses on material preservation and the importance of ‘interpretation in communicating significance’ (Winkworth, 2005: 48). The Charter’s approach to sites of significance reflects that taken in both state and national listings today: places become ‘tangible expressions of Australian identity and experience … [that] reflect the diversity of our communities, tell us about who we are and the past that has formed us’ (Australia ICOMOS Inc, 2013: 1). However, whose heritage is preserved and the limits of the ‘diversity’ identified is arbitrary. Heritage sites are approved for listing and subsequently funded by the State and therefore conform to a narrative seen to promote unity and, for National Listings, patriotism and progress.

The 2013 additional ‘Practice Note’ on ‘Interpretation’ partially acknowledges intangible heritage by listing an ‘inventory’ of resources that underpin interpretation, including the place itself, related sites, movable objects associated with the place, documentary materials, oral histories, visual media and people with knowledge about or associations with the place. ³ The intangible is therefore considered, but the definition of interpretation continues to reinforce a limited, contradictory view: it is the explanation of a place’s cultural significance, and ultimately cultural significance is ‘embodied in the place itself, its fabric … the physical location’ (2013: 2–4). ⁴ Neither the earlier nor the latest Charters extend to including people in ‘interpretation’ of on-site heritage or the more intangible aspects of heritage (of oral traditions and folkloric customs, for example). The nature of visitor engagement is not explored, and the act of ‘interpreting’ a site is placed firmly in the hands of heritage managers (i.e. the ‘experts’ to whom Laurajane Smith (2006: 12, 35) refers in her definition of an Authorised Heritage Discourse). ‘Community engagement’ is mentioned but not as a form of intangible heritage making in and of itself. The revisions to the Charter assume a passive role for visitors and the meanings they bring to the site; however, they are wide enough to admit different meanings for different communities.

Listing processes for the VHR still overwhelmingly focus on the fabric of a place and important events that occurred within those structures rather than emotional, familial or community attachments. Helen rightly argues that Heritage Victoria do not draw on diverse forms of knowledge and cultural perspectives. This brought to the fore what was so unique about those 2 hearing days in Benalla. Helen makes the charge, against previous dismissals of Benalla’s heritage significance, that this subset of migrant women and children cannot be rendered doubly invisible – then as they are now. That the Department of Immigration was uniquely challenged in how to address the needs of this particularly vulnerable group is a part of post-war migration history.

Helen also provided an epic and fictionalised account of her mother’s migration and lifetime at Benalla. Like Velta, there are gaps in the facts she knows. In exploring her mother’s emotional responses, Helen has granted herself literary licence; this part of her mother’s story excites her most. In crafting a longer narrative for her mother, the project becomes almost a form of narrative therapy, to story and re-story herself and her mother. She’s embarked on a literary journey that allows her to make sense of and honour her mother. Like Velta, she’s adopting her mother’s voice in a leap of empathy that subsumes or attempts to ignore her subjecthood.

There’s a lot of admiration for her mother in the account she provided to the hearing, again like Velta’s written account. And she repeatedly refers to resilience and her mother’s ability to ‘stay afloat’. Like many children of DPs who arrived under a 2-year work contract in post-war Australia, Helen and her siblings passed through a number of camps: first Bathurst, then Parkes, Cowra and Scheyville, and finally Benalla, where she lived for 7 years. Her attachment and nostalgia for the site of Benalla, her outrage and shock that many of the huts no longer exist and her desire to see the remainder listed compelled her to provide testimony at the hearing. These aims permeate her efforts to access her mother’s perspective on Benalla, which are noticeably less nostalgic and positive than her own experiences. Despite recalling a happy childhood, she maintains sympathy for what she calls the women who were ‘herded’ into factory jobs and treated less than children by authority figures.

The last part of her presentation at the hearing was an incisive critique of Benalla as a ‘system failure’, arguing that Benalla has the ‘unenviable reputation of epitomising the system’s structural problems’. This raises questions about Heritage Victoria’s public function and professed aims: can such an institution acknowledge that the achievements of multiculturalism – a favoured narrative in describing the VHR’s only other post-war migrant remnant, Bonegilla – was not arrived at harmoniously or easily. Like Velta, Helen’s testimony presented a challenge to established heritage discourses: was Heritage Victoria ready to implicitly question the grand achievements of post-war migration and its masculinist rhetoric of planned, industrious economic success?

Like Velta, Helen too gave her mother agency in other ways – she does so on a wider scale, implying that these migrant women and their situations compelled policy change in the way we assist supporting unsupported mothers: ‘The provision of government-sponsored childcare has been documented as a radical departure from prevailing cultural norms. It demonstrated the effectiveness of involuntary non-compliance to force structural change’ (Topor, 2016).

As stated, Helen is continuing her endeavour to make sense of her mother’s life and lifetime by writing a partly fictionalised account of her migration and settlement – an imaginative leap that seeks to reconcile complex emotions related to injustice, pride and sadness. Her testimony was a forceful argument in favour of not only inserting these women’s stories into an established history of migration but also breaking down many of the limits, myths and silences that abound within it.

The other 16 who gave oral testimonies over the hearing’s 2 days offered similarly complex emotional accounts of the personal and collective need to have Benalla recognised as heritage. I regret that there is no space to discuss them here, but I will offer Jim Klopsteins’ reflections. He argued that the remaining huts at Benalla ‘anchor the stories’ of former child migrants. In drawing on Jim’s reflections, the final VHR report states,

[many] use the Place to assist them in reflecting on their personal and family histories. Many of the former residents acknowledged the relatively poor state of the buildings within the Place but emphasised that the remaining structures allow interpretation of the Place as a sanctuary where migrants transitioned out of traumatic pasts and into becoming Australian. Furthermore, many former residents and their descendants asserted the significance of the Place as a site of remembrance, mourning, healing and reflection, where complex intergenerational experiences of both trauma and pride are negotiated in the present. (Klopsteins, cited in Heritage Council Registrations Committee 2016: 8)

Conclusion

In the process of writing this article, an outcome was reached on the listing of Benalla. The Committee determined that the remaining remnants of Benalla are ‘of cultural significance and should be included in the Heritage Register’. As stated, the Executive Director had previously argued that ‘other more intact sites, namely Block 19 at the former Bonegilla Migrant Camp and the former Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel, more clearly demonstrate the associations with post-war migration than the Place and are already included in the VHR’ (Heritage Council Registrations Committee, 2016). All former residents offering testimony explicitly disagreed with this assessment of Benalla’s significance, many choosing to relate their family histories and honour their mothers’ stories to elucidate the unique function of Benalla in receiving and housing working mothers and their children. The attachments the site retains are different ‘and in some ways stronger’ than those of comparable sites like Bonegilla, many argued. A large portion of the report, however, focuses on the remaining fabric and the fact that Benalla ‘is one of only two substantial remnants in Victoria of a former network of 23 camps’ (Heritage Council Registrations Committee, 2016).

The overwhelming majority of former residents’ testimony argued that Benalla’s role in accommodating unsupported women and children, and its subsequent implications for government standards of care and a sense of migrant community, are not currently represented in the VHR. In response, and in acknowledgement of their attempts to offer alternative narratives to the existing discussions around post-war migrant heritage, the report conceded: ‘The Committee accepts the arguments put by Dr Pennay and other objecting submitters that the Place served a purpose which significantly differed from that of either Bonegilla or Maribyrnong’ (Heritage Council Registrations Committee, 2016). However, comments on Benalla’s ‘special role in the accommodation of unsupported women and their children’ appear only as a ‘qualifier’ rather than the central reason for which the site was listed. Benalla’s ability to fulfil criterion A clinched its listing, namely its association to a phase ‘of great significance to the course and pattern of Victoria’s history’, which is ‘evident in the physical fabric of the Place and through the oral histories and documentary resources’. By privlegding archeolgical factors, the Statement of Significance also underplays the prominence of women’s stories to this history. Benalla appears as significant because of its function within the immigration system, ‘an example of one of only a small number of surviving centres which had been part of a network of camps that were established and used to accommodate migrants throughout Victoria and Australia’. The stories of the amorphously labelled ‘vulnerable groups’ that Benalla housed are not mentioned.

Nonetheless, in pushing against the boundaries of established heritage discourses while attempting to work within their wider frameworks, former residents’ inevitable challenge to the obvious limits of Victorian heritage assessments, particularly the exclusion of migrant heritage and women’s history, did appear in some form in the final report. It was conceded that the Executive Director’s recommendation was too focused on fabric, and Dr Pennay’s testimony emphasising the location of the camp as illustrative of the residents’ geographical and social isolation was also included. Obtaining ‘official heritage’ recognition is important to these former residents. As Anna Clark argues, we seek to place our lives and the stories we share among ourselves into wider historical context (Clark, 2016). Both Helen and Velta expressed a desire to draw on shared narrative frameworks that lend their memories and the trials of their loved ones further significance. In a practical sense, recognition of Benalla as heritage (with a capital H) will boost efforts to collect and add to the growing archive of memory pieces held by Benalla Migrant Camp Inc. and strengthen efforts to garner funding for its physical preservation and maintenance as a visitor space.

The efforts of Benalla’s former child residents, in my mind, constitute grassroots heritage making at its best, most subversive and effective. Benalla is an illuminating case study for tracing the interplay between mutual or conflicting definitions of official and unofficial heritage. In honouring their mothers’ struggles, as working migrant women, they are challenging and subverting accepted narratives about post-war migration and post-war migrants. As ‘problem cases’, their mothers were considered unlikely to make a contribution to the workforce or society and were rendered wholly invisible when shunted to Benalla. Their children’s current insistence that this place contains important family histories and even epic stories of survival, works to undo that long-standing silence surrounding Benalla. Their mothers’ stories, they argue, are worth commemorating because they disturb the order of public narratives around post-war migration and family settlement. The listing therefore harbours the possibility of bringing new and alternative migration stories to light, ones which commemorate women and children’s migration and settlement stories. Those who gave testimony expressed emotional, familial and vernacular expressions of heritage that challenged and indeed attempted to speak to, extend or even align with sanctioned or official definitions of heritage. And they did so with affect and sophistication, motivated by a familial and generational need to testify, to give evidence and to emote publicly.