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Alexandra Dellios Alexandra Dellios is a PhD candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is inter-ested in ethnic community involvement in heritage and other public history practices.

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Collective Memories and Multiculturalism:Representing the Australian Migrant Camp in Television and Film

Alexandra DelliosHistory

Since the 1970s, noticeable shifts have occurred in the filmic representation of the post-war migrant experience. In this article, I consider two such representations of the migrant experience of Reception and Training Centres (colloquially known as migrant camps): the 1984 feature film Silver City and the 1994 mini-series Bordertown. They are analysed in relation to the shifting cultural landscape of Australian public and political life, particularly the complex evolution and reception of multiculturalism, and the so-cial and economic development of post-war migrant communities. In these two examples, we witness a broadening of the spatial and metaphysical limits of the personal migrant journey as captured on film and television.

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The postwar migrant experience has been represented in Austral-ian television and film in many ways since the 1970s. It has been shown as intensely personal and tragic, with traumatic repercus-sions for subsequent generations (The Sound of One Hand Clap-ping, 1998); as communal and transitory, with the migrant camp featuring as a stepping stone (Silver City, 1984); as a mythical and melodramatic adventure (Bordertown, 1994); or as a slightly comical misadventure in which wronged refugees deal with their adverse situations (Dunera Boys, 1985). Familiar tropes arise – the migrant success story prominent among them. However, noticeable shifts have also occurred in the film representation of the migrant experi-ence throughout this period.

In this article, I consider two such representations of the migrant experience in Australian postwar migrant reception camps – the 1984 feature film Silver City and the 1994 mini-series Bordertown – in relation to the shifting cultural landscape of Australian public and political life. I view them in terms of the broadening spatial and metaphysical limits of the personal migrant journey, something that is mirrored in academic historiography and migrant literary imaginings, as well as in popular culture. Rather than a process towards assimilation or integration, the migrant experience in film has come to look both forwards and backwards in time and space: across nations and within personal and collective memory. In this developing schema of representations, motivations as well as outcomes in the migration process are laid bare; individual loss is acknowledged as well as individual gain. These shifts in filmic representations can be partly explained by the changing status of ‘ethnics’ in Australian public and political life from the 1970s, the complex evolution and reception of multiculturalism, and the social and economic development of postwar migrant communities, at the heart of which rests the social mobility and assertiveness of the second generation.

Through these two contrasting examples, I analyse how film and television have dealt with and conveyed the imagery of the camp and its evolution as a central and poignant space in the migrant experience. Silver City can be categorised as arthouse realism, while Bordertown is a melodramatic miniseries that attempts magical real-ism, and their genres inf luenced how their images were conveyed and received. Each solicited a particular response from segments of

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their audiences, both negative and positive, accepted or rejected as ref lective of the migrant journey.

Australian migrant reception and training centres, as they were officially called, were sites that had been used for army training dur-ing World War II. The Australian Army leased these sites to the Commonwealth Government in the postwar period. They provided modest and makeshift accommodation for Displaced Persons (DPs) and assisted migrants (who exchanged two years of their labour for assisted or free passage) during a period of severe housing short-ages. This system of migrant centres was administered by the Com-monwealth and the Department of Immigration. The centres – or camps, as they came to be known – were organising points from which to assign employment to the residents. From the central point of the remote migrant camp, migrants were dispersed throughout the Australian workforce.1 Initially, their movements were directed by an assimilationist rationale and postwar economic demands.

The migrant camp is a unique space in Australia’s migration his-tory, the true nature of which has only been made public in the last twenty or so years.2 Many negotiations occurred within the space of the migrant camp: between the newly arrived and the host society; between the subject migrant and the administrators of immigration policy; between different ethnicities and nationalities; between dif-ferent codes of behaviour and conduct; between the foreigner and his or her new spatial and physical environment; and between the memories of times past, aspirations for the future and the realities of the present. Perhaps this is why the camp endures as a poign-ant symbol for segments of the ethnic community and the second generation who continue to return to these sites or call on them in literary and filmic imaginings.

ColleCtive memory and using the visual In this article, I provide a close textual reading of Silver City and Bordertown. It is also important, however, to go beyond a textual reading to place the texts within the social practices and values sur-rounding them, and to ask why and how these depictions were con-structed at a particular time. Such an approach has proved fruitful in many recent studies into collective memory and popular culture.3

Accordingly, I draw on approaches taken by cultural historians

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to collective memory: analysing public forms of history – whether monument, museum or pop culture – and locating collective mem-ory (as a set of ideas and feelings about the past) within these shared resources. Particularly important is the work of Jan Assmann, who sometimes prefers the term cultural memory to collective memory. The latter term has received much criticism from psychologists and some sociologists, most of whom are concerned with memory as a cognitive process. Kerwin Lee Klein has stated that ‘careful schol-ars’ make ‘prefatory disclaimers to ward of charges that they might be indulging in mystical transpositions of individual psychological phenomena onto imaginary collectivities’.4 I contend that analysing the materiality of public history for insights into collective memory does not assume the existence of ‘imaginary collectives’ – that is, groups of people who ascribe to one version of a memory. Rather, any analysis of collective memory and its materiality comments on and responds to the subjective constructions of imaginary collec-tives. All collectives are essentially imagined, memory being but one mode through which this is achieved.

Jan Assman, for his part, locates cultural (collective) memory in relation to the discursive ‘frames and needs of a given individual or society within a given present’.5 As a natural extension, Kansteiner argues that ‘extensive contextualisation’ links the facts of represen-tation (those on offer in film and television, for example) with the facts of reception (defined as their consumption, use and contes-tation by different publics). The focus of a memory study is kept on the ‘production, circulation, reception and reproduction of cul-tural or collective memory’ as manifest in the material.6 Therefore, despite cultural historians’ tendency to focus on public rather than private commemoration, popular rather than personal rituals, they cannot but consider the interactions between the individual and the collective. In one way or another, the discipline acknowledges that ‘private memories’ cannot be unscrambled from the effects of dominant historical discourses.7 For example, places like Bonegilla, Bathurst and Greta migrant camps are now recognisable names and, in Bonegilla’s case, national heritage sites. They are framed and understood within wider public discourses on the history of immigration and multiculturalism, as well as our national under-standing of what constitutes history and heritage. These wider con-textual considerations, the frames of reception, shape my analysis of

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Silver City and Bordertown. More specifically, the analysis of television and film needs fur-

ther theoretical grounding as a source for memory studies. Televi-sion and film have long relied on historical episodes for creative inspiration. While popular films and television series that attempt to represent history have been, according to cultural historians Ashton and Hamilton, subject to sceptical critique, they are also widely ‘consumed, enjoyed and discussed’ by diverse Australian publics.8 Indeed, Raphael Samuel argues that television ‘ought to have pride of place in any attempt to map the unofficial sources of historical knowledge’.9 The visual has an undeniable power to communicate and cement stereotypical views of certain groups and experiences – including framing the collective view of the ethnic ‘other’. Many peoples’ contact with the historical experience of post-war migrants (for example, of the infamous DP camps of postwar Europe) is framed through their consumption of visual representa-tions on the screen.

Film and television are rich sources for insights into collective memory. Edgerton argues that film-makers are akin to popular historians. Unlike text-based historians, they can use film – an interactive and engaging medium – to transform history into an ‘experience’ for the viewer in which the past becomes immediate and intimate. It is animated, made visual and almost tangible for an audience outside the initial ‘rememberers’. Indeed, as Erll aptly states, without ‘organic, autobiographical memories’ societies are dependent on media products to transmit and circulate experience and collective memory.10 In reference to Bonegilla this becomes particularly important, with ex-residents now ageing, if not elderly, or otherwise reluctant to speak. Similarly, for Kansteiner the privi-leged status of images in collective memory’s construction derives from their ability to close the gap ‘between first-hand experience and secondary witnesses’.11 Both Sliver City and Bordertown offer more than just the images and frames from which a disconnected public can reimagine a fading past. Both representations depict the act and process of remembering, albeit in very different ways. Silver City offers a whole and ideal past through the eyes of one character, a memory of a past that still impinges on her current identity and ability to feel at home in a present-day Australia – this, in accordance with the film’s realist genre. Bordertown draws on magical realism

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to suspend reality and offer the tragic or exciting experiences of new migrants isolated from any sense of politics or history. Between the two representations, memory and the act of remembering operates in very different ways. These differences ref lect the period in which they were made and the needs or desires of a changing multicul-tural Australia.

The responses Silver City and Bordertown garnered can also be understood within these contexts. Film and television are both starting points for, and participants in, contemporary discussions, as well as for the formation and reformation of narratives and memories. Like museum exhibitions or heritage parks, as ‘cultural apparatuses’ film and television are facilitators that once ref lect and assist the articulation of ‘matters that are most relevant and engag-ing to audiences in the present’.12 Silver City provided a realist, and subdued, canvas onto which some postwar Polish-Australian com-munities projected the minutiae of their memories in the 1980s. In this way, it was a starting point for sharing previously silenced memories of the migrant camp with the second generation. In the 1990s, Bordertown’s magical realism was an affront to some, the migrant camp having been a solemn symbol in postwar historiogra-phy and since the first reunions had occurred a decade earlier. The series thwarted the desire of those with a connection to the migrant experience to include it in a national history, to give it due historical context in a politically tumultuous time in which multiculturalism was under attack by Hansonite racism. On another level, Bordertown was innovative in its approach to the migrant experience, offering Australian audiences an unfamiliar and individualised migration narrative rather than a homogenised depiction of migrant pain and loss. The representations of migrant experience from both Silver City and Bordertown had a function within their respective contexts, and are linked to the evolution of Australia’s multiculturalism.

the migrant experienCe and the ‘ethniC’ in australian film and tv ‘Migrants’, ‘ethnics, or even ‘multicultural spaces’ did not ap-pear as subjects worthy of representation in Australian film until the 1970s. It was during this time that the final remnants of the White Australia Policy were dismantled, and the proportion of the

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Australian population born overseas reached 20 per cent.13 It was also a period when Australia’s postwar migrant community groups garnered some hard won political leverage. Indeed, the 1970s can be characterised by the efforts of larger ethnic community groups to secure adequate welfare support and citizenship rights from the government. Increasingly vocal groups – particularly the Greek and Italian communities of Melbourne – dominated the public debate over ethnic and minority rights and the provision of separate ser-vices for ethnic communities. Films attempting to represent the ethnic community, however, continued to rely on an assimilationist message (They’re a Weird Mob, 1966) or offered a simplistic depic-tion of cultural conflict and adaption (Toula, 1970). Furthermore, the most popular Australian films of the decade – those that were internationally acclaimed, such as George Miller’s Mad Max and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock – maintained an ‘iconic white’ (and generally masculine) version of Australianness.

Australian film industry did not receive extensive government support until the 1970s. From this time, the industry was funded through government subsidy, incentive and investment, which had wrought significant changes to the industry. Films became, more than ever, public texts re-presenting Australia to Australians, one among many exercises to define a national identity that occurred during this period. Different genres approached this task in dif-ferent ways. As Felicity Collins argues, popular Australian comedy since the 1970s has been dominated by ‘reinventions’ of the national type. She goes on to explore how ‘ethnically marked characters’ were represented in terms of this national type. For instance, the public appeal of Australian ‘wogboys’ lies in their ability to tap into the ‘long-standing national type [of the larrikin or ocker] without disturbing its key characteristic: aggressively hedonistic masculin-ity’.14 In this vein, ethnic characters in Australian film and televi-sion are often implicitly denied their own power, especially if they fail to assimilate and do not conform to the migrant success story by achieving social mobility and taking advantage of all the lucky country has to offer. Especially before the 1980s and 1990s, ethnic or migrant characters could derive little power from their ethnicity or their migrant backgrounds short of escaping from them.

Filmmakers from diverse cultural backgrounds entered the mainstream film industry during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite

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policies of multiculturalism being introduced as early as the late 1970s, films were slow to represent Australia’s (official) embrace of its inevitable heterogeneity. Cultural diversity did not become ‘mainstream’ until the 1990s, however absurd some of the comedic ethnic caricatures then introduced appeared.15 We can point to the introduction of SBS, and with it popular television shows like ABC’s Heartbreak High, as evidence that cultural and ethnic diversity were becoming less marginal on our screens. The new film-makers behind these productions were the socially mobile second genera-tion of migrant communities. They produced film and television that explored more than the perilous journey from the homeland or the initial trials of settlement. Instead they examined integration and adaptation, belonging and identity, and the spatial and meta-physical boundaries of the personal migrant journey that extends beyond initial settlement. They thus depicted the new concerns of the second generation of hyphenated Australians, issues that defined and complicated multiculturalism from the 1990s. These more adventurous and assertive filmic explorations problematise the us-and-them divide between the Anglo-Australian mainstream and the ethnic periphery – although the former still remained the inf luential core.

New representations contrasted with earlier attempts to repre-sent the experience of postwar migration and the plight of the newly arrived migrant, which had previously been only melancholically invoked.16 There are a number of films within this new genre of film-making, including Moving Out (1983), Fields of Fire (1997 mini-series), Velo Nero (1987), and Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship (1992), but few provide representations of migrant camps. Silver City and Bordertown are the obvious exceptions.17 These representa-tions, as I shall show, are quite different in approach and in affect, but both ref lect the national context in which they were made and received by different multicultural Australians.

Silver City: representing assimilation and the polish experienCe of migrant CampsSilver City, released in 1984 and directed by Polish-Australian So-phia Turkiewicz, is in essence a love story.18 But Silver City is also a contemporary commentary on the tensions between assimilation

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and ethnic maintenance, both within and outside the seminal space of the migrant camp. Questions of assimilation were particularly pertinent in 1980s’ Australia, which had recently embraced mul-ticulturalism as an official policy towards new arrivals in the com-munity. What did this embrace of multiculturalism mean for the social integration of migrants, both new and older arrivals?

Silver City is told through f lashback, drawing on what were at the time relatively novel film conventions using non-linear narra-tive structures to, among other things, represent memory and its construction. In 1962, Nina and Julian serendipitously reunite on a train to Sydney. They reminisce about their first meeting, and their love affair, of twelve years before, most of which played out in Silver City, the Department of Immigration camp that housed them dur-ing their first years in Australia. The camp represents Greta migrant camp in New South Wales, part of which was called ‘Silver City’. It was made up of the now-infamous Nissen huts, which housed Baltic DPs and other European assisted-migrants from 1949.

Initially, the viewer is positioned to accept a familiar and uncom-plicated narrative of assimilation: in 1962, Nina, a schoolteacher, announces she is ‘100 per cent Australian now’. The expected nar-rative would appear to support my previous content regarding film up until the 1980s, that ethnic or migrant characters could derive little power from their ethnicity or their migrant backgrounds short of escaping them. However, as Renata Murawska argues, Silver City throws light on the malleability and complexity of achieving assimilation. While Nina is the one that picks up Aussie slang, throws away the physical remnants of her painful wartime past, and achieves economic and social mobility – all the outward markers of having assimilated – she is also the only one to return to Silver City. She walks through the abandoned camp, overgrown with weeds, run-down and eerie, accompanied by the sound of an old Polish ballad. The place of Silver City is intimately connected to her personal past and present, a place that looks both forward and back-ward, a key marker in her migrant experience and identity. Hers is not a journey towards total assimilation with the host population, for she still walks forward with her head turned back. This posi-tions migration as a life-long process, one of both loss and gain. The loss involved in migration was not so readily acknowledged in early promotions of Australia’s immigration program, or indeed in

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the historiography of it up until the 1980s.19 Silver City was sensitive to the changing context of the 1980s, the slow but palpable public appearance of migrant voices and stories in politics, the press and academia. In Silver City, the migrant camp is a stepping stone in a complex process towards a subjective and provisional integration into Australian society, not a total assimilation and the erasure of migrants’ histories and customs.

Throughout the film, Turkiewicz attempts to capture and convey multiple aspects of the migrant experience of camp life from the perspective of the Polish DP – who, like Baltic DPs, had ‘suffered longer than most’ during and in the aftermath of World War II, in Nazi death camps and then in the face of Soviet invasion, to arrive in Australia under the International Refugee Organisation scheme. In some instances, Silver City is communal and optimistic. The women and children expectantly await the beginning of their ‘new lives’; yet they reluctantly stay behind in the camp as ‘all the men’ are sent away on seasonal work. As in other popular representations, there is a disjuncture between men’s and women’s experiences of camp life; in popular culture, the migrant journey is a gendered experience. As the men leave on an adventure, the women laze around a communal pool, minding each other’s children, reminiscing, and anxiously and somewhat fatalistically predicting their futures in Australia. In this scene, they are collectively represented as victims of govern-ment policies, contained and passive within the camp, rather than agents negotiating their settlement. These images mirror some of the Department of Immigration’s 1950s propaganda shots of ‘Bal-tic’ women within the migrant camp – which positioned women’s experiences as happily communal; they passively and patiently wait for their husbands’ return and the beginning of their ‘new lives’. But Turkiewicz proves aware of these ironic parallels to 1950s propa-ganda aimed at an anxious Anglo-Australian public. Silver City is not aimed at the same public, but a consciously multiethnic 1980s’ Australia. Therefore, the women who wait in the migrant camp also express the pain of separation that the labour contract with the Com-monwealth Government inf licted on countless families, the fear of the unknown as a reaction to this uncertain limbo period, and the active emotional response of individual women rendered powerless ‘domestics’ in the administrative space of the camp. Similar sto-ries and personal profiles of individual women had only begun to

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emerge in the Australian press in the 1980s, and especially around the time of Bonegilla’s first reunion in 1987.20 In this way, Silver City was participating in an emerging dialogue around the migrant camp, its new visibility and the new vocality of migrant women.

In the character o Nina, we also glimpse moments of personal empowerment. This can be seen when she finally ventures out alone after bribing the camp authorities to assign her to a more comfortable position as a domestic worker in a nursing home: after her Anglo-Australian colleagues make it clear that Nina (as the eth-nic other) is not wanted, she dismisses their rejections and trumps them at their own pastime of darts. Her self-satisfaction is torn away, however, when she becomes is sexualually harassed by the men from the town in which she now works. Outside the camp com-munity, general Anglo-Australian prejudice is rampant and inci-dences of sexual harassment towards vulnerable and unprotected single female DPs are accepted. After suffering a nervous break-down, Nina returns to the relative safety of another migrant camp, surrounded and protected by other Polish DPs. In this instance, the film seems to suggest two things. First, unlike the men, and because of her premature departure from Silver City, Nina was not prepared for her adventure outside the migrant camp and commu-nity. The events also suggest that social and economic integration is a long, fraught, and emotionally draining process – and that initially the distinct ethnic community provides protection for the newly arrived. Again, the space of migrant camp is a safe haven, a place cut off from the worst injustices of Australian discrimination in the 1950s. The migrant camp exists in a discriminatory national framework and therefore denies the possibility of reviving national self-esteem for the present-day national audience. The camp is not, as Pennay would have it, a place indicative of the ‘national cuddle’, but of the very opposite. Yet Silver City offers its Australian audi-ence some solace, even as it interrogates the very recent dark past of postwar migration. The film implicitly sets up a contrast between Australian society in the 1980s that of the 1950s. It posits a narrative of progress that mirrors the one promoted in multicultural celebra-tions, bicentennial tropes and official Bonegilla reunions and herit-age listings.

Nina’s return comments on the importance of the migrant community as a support network, and ref lects more contemporary

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1980s concerns over the maintenance of ethnic difference in a newly multicultural Australia (albeit ethnic difference conceived as static and trivial) and the institutional and political power held by separate ethnic organisations. For ethnic communities this is a particularly receptive notion, and perhaps an explicit affront to complaints over the ‘ghettoisation’ of Australian cities. Silver City positions the camp not only as a sanctuary or refuge, but also as a possible site of migrant adaptability. The migrant camp features as an ideal stepping stone into a new society.

This positive assessment of the important role of the migrant camp as a place of adaptability is also tempered by less optimistic glimpses of the camp as a place where migrants have their first con-tact with Australia and Australians. In this case, Silver City points to the ongoing divide between Anglo and non-Anglo Australians. Crass administrative bigotry and insensitivity is explicit, a far cry from the ethics of care depicted in the Department of Immigra-tion’s 1950s propaganda, and, on a different level, the trivial and celebratory rhetoric surrounding 1980s multiculturalism. The camp director, a brash ex-army official, advocates assimilation, will not tolerate complaints and insists that ‘compared to Europe, this place is a luxury hotel’. While the camp operates as a necessary space of adaptation in Nina’s memory, it is spatially and physically barren and incomplete – a place from which she must eventually be expunged. Julian and the other Polish DPs express mild frustration with the level of accommodation, thwarted promises of immediate employment, the food and the separation of the sexes. These images of frustration mirror some of the sense of injustice still felt by some migrant groups (particularly the Italians and the Dutch) at their treatment by former Australian governments in camps like Bon-egilla or Bathurst. For example, reference to protests at the camps, such as the 1952 and 1961 riots at Bonegilla, can still prove potent, and continue to be nostalgically and defiantly voiced in the media by public figures like Giovanni Sgro.

Silver City therefore re-presents the migrant, and specifically Polish, response to Australia’s former policy of enforced assimila-tion in a context of barely concealed bigotry. Assimilation was an unsavoury aspect of Australia’s very recent past, and was especially seen to be so in a bicentennial decade that sporadically attempted to celebrate multicultural nationhood. In one instance, the camp

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residents collectively reject assimilation: as ‘God Save the Queen’ is played over the camp’s loudspeakers, the group defiantly sing the Polish national anthem. Attributing agency to the migrant body was a novel convention in Australian film, though it built on trends established in the late 1970s. Furthermore, Nina’s outward signs of assimilation – her opting for a ‘shandy’, the gradual appear-ance of Australian jargon in her speech and her rebellion against Polish-Catholic mores – are positioned as superficial.21 Hers is not an either/or transformation. As mentioned, Nina is the one who remembers; her memories are the basis for the entire film’s narra-tive. At the film’s conclusion, the train arrives, but the story has no resolution. When Julian ref lects on those who have achieved social and economic mobility, he tells Nina that she is ‘one of the lucky ones’. She reticently replies with ‘maybe’, capturing and conveying the impossibility of communicating the process of settlement and integration. Nina and Julian’s story, the ‘migrant experience’, does not mirror the train’s journey: it is not an inexorable progression towards, and arrival at, a preordained destination. The tensions between assimilation and ethnic maintenance are ongoing and do not end once the migrant camp is left behind.

The migrant camp does not always hold negative connotations in Silver City. It appeals to a wide cross-section of migrant camp memories – both the fond and melancholy. Silver City thus becomes a discussion of a place. The film is also a starting point for the con-testation and reconstruction of collective memories of the migrant camp. According to Turkiewicz, the ‘background detail’ of Silver City also mirrors the individual subject positions of many Polish migrants:

in the 80s, Polish family and friends would not shut up when watching the film. They were interested in all the background de-tail. Every frame was a trigger for reminding them of their own experience. That’s the ultimate impact of a documentary aspect of Silver City.22

This is a group with the desire to see their experiences made palpable and significant through a form of collective mediation, to have others ‘experience’ their histories, which film enables us to do, however stereotypically. Film is ‘culturally processed’ in a

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number of contexts, and by a number of ‘subgroups’.23 In this case, the subject of the film, Polish-Australians, are but one subgroup who have actively responded to their filmic representation, on the basis of Turkiewicz’s statement, as a positive means to navigate and remember their own pasts and to have others experience it in turn.

Some others have also expressed how the film resonates with their memories of the migrant camp, even drawing on its imagery to make others understand. Andrew Alwast, for example, arrived at Bonegilla as a Polish DP in 1949 at the age of nine. Here is how he tries to convey his experience:

Bonegilla at that stage, I don’t know if you saw the Silver City, so you have some idea. But it was somewhat removed from that in the real sense because the barracks were those tin, metal, half-circle sort of barracks which hadn’t at that stage been subdivided into apart-ments or little units. They were in fact dormitories. There were thirty women in these tin barracks if you like. There was no lining on the walls. And it was hot as hell. And women had the children with them as well.24

Bonegilla did not in fact have Nissen huts, like the holding centres of Greta (Silver City). Despite this, the Nissen hut itself has become a pervasive image of the Australia post-war migrant camp. Alwast moved on from Bonegilla to one of these holding centres, which housed women and children. Alwast’s conflation of these two sepa-rate physical settings is not only indicative of visual and complex nature of remembering, but also how films have a role to play in shaping memories.

As Murawska has commented, the Polish experience has been underrepresented, or at least homogenised, in popular discourses on postwar immigration, despite Poles being one of the largest postwar migrant groups to settle in Australia. Turkiewicz herself was obviously intimately connected to narratives of migration and receptive to the Polish migrant voice. The playing out of postwar tensions in an Australian context is one that is still misunderstood – indeed, this latter point succinctly ref lects the popular and schol-arly disregard of the impact of ‘premigration’ lives on the settlement process. In this regard, Silver City makes a contribution to public understandings of the Polish experience of migrant camps – in

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particular, the administrative naivety regarding national and ethnic tensions between former enemy nationals housed together. In a few instances in Silver City, the confrontations between Nazi collabora-tors and Polish DPs, thrown together in the confined space of the migrant camp, erupt into outright brawls. This is a representative example of an existing and silenced aspect of our migration his-tory. Less representative are the simplified depictions of elderly Polish DPs as devoutly Catholic, and Polish men as universally anti-communist. This plays on other stereotypes of Polish migrants in Australia. Despite this, some scholars saw Silver City as a ‘righteous counter-reaction’ to the otherwise crude perception of migrants pre-viously proffered in the media, a perception that concealed more unsavoury aspects of the migrant experience.25 Silver City offered and engaged in a comparatively more complex narrative of the migrant experience, one that looks both forward and backward. Nina’s becoming a ‘New Australian’ is provisional, malleable and escapes classification. Silver City does this even while ascribing to and re-presenting gendered and Polish stereotypes of the migrant experience. Launching pad or stepping stone, the migrant camp of Silver City is reconstituted as a significant site of migrant memory, a ‘beginning place’ in the same way that the Bonegilla was and is now often marketed.

Bordertown: mainstreaming the migrant otherThe 1995 ABC miniseries Bordertown used and reconstructed popu-lar ideas about the postwar migrant camp, particularly Bonegilla, in a less conventional way than Silver City. The fictional 1950s ‘Baringa Migrant Camp’, the setting of Bordertown, is located in some unspecified part of rural Australia and forms the backdrop for the unravelling tragedies and romances of a handful of eccentric characters. In many ways, Bordertown is indicative of the broaden-ing representation of the spatial and metaphysical narration of the migrant journey – personalised, exploring loss and gain across time and space. In some respects, the parallel and multiple narra-tives offered in Bordertown are a clear departure from early1980s’ depictions of the more melancholy migrant experience and of the process towards (or away from) assimilation. Bordertown therefore offers a wider canvas than Silver City for multiple, personal and

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idiosyncratic experiences, including the possibility of migrant loss and mourning. It is able to show the inability of some individuals to move forward and ‘settle’, which, try as it might, the intimate communality of the migrant camp is unable to allay. So, despite its spurning of a realist genre, the melodramatic Bordertown offers a complex mediation on migration and settlement. The multiplicity of Bordertown’s narratives and the audience’s inability to pin down the series’ message hints of the emerging and contested debates over the nation’s uneasy multicultural identity and the dissatisfaction of an imagined mainstream. Bordertown avoids all allusions to histori-cal and political context by divorcing these individual migrant sto-ries from the immigration scheme and the attitudes of Australian society.

Baringa, unlike Silver City, is not a camp of transient migrants. It does not contain the tensions of interethnic animosities, the migrant frustrations with the strictures of assimilation and the injustice of the contract system, or the desperation and alienation in the face of strange and isolating surrounds. Rather, Baringa is ‘a place, once in a blue moon, of miracles’, a ‘place were dreams begin, and sometimes end’.26 Ethnic stereotypes abound in this dream-like place: the Italians are roaming Casanovas, the Dutch are restrained and reticent and the Yugoslavs affronting and aggressive. Overall, Baringa is a little village rather than a migrant camp, with a small, permanent resident population. Tragedy and melodrama dominate; there are broken marriages, infidelity, new romances, pregnancies, a wedding, an abortion, an attempted suicide, manic episodes, a prostitution ring, a murder, visions and hallucinations, deaths and a burial.27 As the press so rightly recognised, Baringa was more than just fictional, it was ‘mythical’, as journalist Matt Condon claimed in a story written at the time.28 According to the series’ scriptwrit-ers, the migrant settlement experience is communicated through ‘magic realism’. This involves more than just tempering tragedy with humour, and occasionally suspending reality: they transfer a ‘dream-like quality’ on camp life.29 By the 1990s, Bonegilla, in particular, had lost some of its connotations as a ‘place of no hope’ in the mainstream media. Its significance for the second genera-tion and for ex-residents who had been children at Bonegilla, also increased. This detachment from the lived memory of Bonegilla, and the public extension of its heritage significance, translates to a

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more dream-like space in Bordertown.Evidently, the writers and director were aiming to appeal to

an audience wider than ex-residents of Bonegilla; and the ABC, of course, targets a national audience. Actor Hugo Weaving, who played the role of Baringa’s English-born teacher, argued in Con-don’s story, ‘We need to express our own voice here’, which the journalist interpreted as meaning the series conveyed ‘a story, the kernel if you like, of our multi-cultural present. It is our own story.’30 This nationalist narrative of the successful realisation of multiculturalism does not come across powerfully in the isolated tragedies and romances of Baringa. Instead, Condon’s assumption that Bordertown is a collective story, one which ‘we’ own, rests on the series’ isolation of the very migration stories that might complicate the narrative of successful multiculturalism.

In one sense, to perceive and represent the ‘migrant journey’ in a ‘dream-like’ way nullifies much of its contemporary resonance. The makers of the miniseries considered their approach to the migrant subject cutting-edge and unique. The ABC assiduously promoted it, and the popular press responded in turn with enthusiasm. Pro-ducer Steve Knapman insisted that ‘no one’s done a series like this before on Australian television’.31 Co-writer Sue Smith felt there had ‘already been enough stories about migrants using the social-realist approach’, referring to Sliver City, The Dunera Boys and Displaced Persons.32 Perhaps this explains why Knapman stated: ‘I’m not inter-ested in the period ... Throw the period away; people will watch the show for the story and the characters.’33 The audience thus received a depoliticised and decontextualised version of the migrant expe-rience of Bonegilla. In the context of the 1990s, it was a populist expression that set itself against the supposedly politically correct, guilt-inducing view of our history for which liberal academic histo-rians were accused.

The characters are compelling for their personal pasts, which occasionally include their wartime experiences, their pre-migration lives, and their individual reasons for migrating. Bordertown reveals their loss. In doing so, the series constitutes an expansion of the traditional metaphysical limits of the migrant journey as explored in Australian historiography and popular culture. We have tradi-tionally looked forward to the process of integration, to the ‘pull’ factors, rather than the ‘push’, as Sara Wills describes.34 However,

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Bordertown relies on a narrative convention that isolates, and grossly misrepresents, the migrant experience in time and space. As Hutch-ison contends, by focusing on the idiosyncratic, we are left with little sense of the wider historical context of migrations. Most impor-tantly, such an approach denies an understanding of the complex-ity of migration experiences, erasing this experience from history – from its very status as ‘History’ – by individualising it. This is not to say that we do not have much to gain from an understanding of individual migration experiences, but rather that those experiences can only be fully understood and rendered human and complex, if aligned with wider (and admittedly multiple) historical contexts, outcomes and processes – ’showing the connection between indi-vidual experience and historical circumstances’.35

The same newspapers that gave enthusiastic promotional cover-age to Bordertown also gave a voice to ex-camp-residents whose expe-riences differed from those represented in the miniseries, and who felt such a show should reconstruct their experiences for a wider audience. The popular press did more than just temper Bordertown with the ‘reality’ of life in a migrant camp. It presented oppositional voices, people who had passed from the system of migrant camps in the postwar period and found themselves either offended or dismissive of the series. Journalist Jane Freeman offered one ex-resident’s critique:

Bonegilla is the inspiration for Bordertown, the ABC drama series which shows a migrant camp as a glamorous combination of green grass, shiny white huts and sophisticated Europeans. While the drama doesn’t claim to be a ‘docu-drama’, Eugenia Bakaitis says she can’t watch it; she is still too disturbed by the gap between her expe-rience and the television fantasy. For a start, Bonegilla was huge, not the intimate community of friendly folk encountered on television … ‘There was not a tree, not a f lower, just army barracks; an empty, hot, dusty place,’ Eugenia remembers. ‘I felt so far from anywhere, so isolated, there was not even anywhere to go for a walk. There was barbed wire around the camp, like a German concentration camp ... And the heat – the supervisor used to tell us to bring bucket after bucket of cold water and pour it on the f loor and then we would all sit in it. We just felt this enormous sense of deepening isolation. We did not know where we were, we just knew there was no way

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back.”36

Freeman’s article recounts the alternative experiences of other migrant camps and hostels, complicating the image provided in Bordertown. The memories of Bakaitis and others are clearly op-posed to this idealised image. In particular, these former camp residents take issue with the series’ depiction of harmonious com-munal life. While the miniseries was open and honest about its intention to ‘enthral rather than educate’, the television depiction of Baringa could be an affront to the personal memories of those with connections to postwar migrant camps, those who still held on to the narrative of ‘a place of no hope’, and those who for whom the contemporary political debate surrounding multicultural Australia proved discomforting.37

Stephen Vaneck, also an ex-resident, wrote an emotive article on the series. He outlines his high expectations for Bordertown and then demonstrates an anger similar to Bakaitis’:

I was looking forward to the mini-series Bordertown. I think most migrants were. At last here was an opportunity to identify with a program and be represented. I assumed, from its name … that they were basing the series on Bonegilla … Having migrated from Eu-rope myself, and having lived in Bonegilla, I thought, here at last they were going to make a program of some significance which will touch the hearts of all Australians I wanted to like this se-ries very much. It meant a great deal to me…What we saw on the television screen was a cliché Australian version of how they see Italians, Poles, Slavs, etc … they just don’t understand them …You can’t bastardise such a mammoth historical event, without people protesting. Too many migrants are still around who remember the real story … From the beginning Bordertown looked wrong and unbelievable. Nothing rang true. The neat organised camp bore no resemblance to the real thing … Were [sic] was the chaos, and overcrowding for instance? The confusion? The constant fight-ing amongst different nationalities? The low morale of waiting for work? The fear of not knowing where the hell you were going to be sent to … [the Australian staff were] unrealistic… people running the camps were overworked … Yet in Bordertown the staff was con-siderate and understanding. More like a hotel than a camp. [As for

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the local towns-people] the reality was, that they were full of preju-dice… Migrants felt different and isolated, scared and insecure. Bor-dertown never really gave you those feelings. There was harmony in all their conflicts. And actors pretending to be certain nationalities they weren’t. In a multicultural society like Australia, it’s very hard to get away with that any more. It only makes viewers angry … Over-all Bordertown was unrealistic and boring. Whereas the real story is not.38

This article was Vaneck’s ‘protest’ against this depiction of his past, a past which he also places alongside a collective ‘migrant’ past. His desire for an imagined mainstream Australia to know the ‘real story’ is the root of his anger. Vaneck’s article also raises questions about the contentiousness of collective memory. Who has rights to the ‘real story’ and how it is depicted? Is Bonegilla now ‘for all of us’, as more recent heritage discourses profess? Should television even be expected to take on the role of conveying ‘the real story’? How does the ABC reconcile the opposing needs of its audiences?

As part of a continuing public dialogue on the migrant camp, Bordertown succeeded in evoking impassioned responses from individual ex-residents. But it failed to establish the same type of collective identification from segments of the migrant community that Silver City did with Polish migrants. Indeed, the group of ex-res-ident Dutch migrants involved in Bonnegilla’s fiftieth anniversary in 1997 disparagingly nicknamed Bordertown ‘Boredom Town’.39 There was a clear disconnection between their personal experi-ences and the experience represented in Bordertown. The series, by the very nature of its mythical and fragmentary presentation, denied a shared framework of remembrance for ex-residents. It did not provide ex-residents, like Bakaitis and Vaneck, with a canvas on which to project and communicate their memories. This is another example of how film operates as a ‘facilitator’ of collective memory rather than a ‘colonising’ agent of memory. Bordertown spawned a reassertion of opposite histories of Bonegilla in the public arena: the desperation and isolation and sense of frustration in the face of official constraints, memories which Bordertown sidelined.

On the other hand, one ex-resident also labelled the series ‘degrading for migrants, who were depicted as idiots and criminals, even murderers’.40Under Kantseiner’s theory of collective memory’s

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‘use-value’, Bordertown attempted to contribute to a collective mem-ory, but ‘failed’, for it was not ‘anchored in the life-worlds of individ-uals’ (of several communities: families, ethnic, regional groups). It offered a ‘failed’ collective memory even as it drew on the ‘inventory of signs and symbols’ that makes up the national public’s perception of the migrant experience (as, for example, in the ethnic stereotypes outlined above).41 In this way, Bordertown was timely, a ref lection of the status of multiculturalism in the 1990s – but it spoke for, rather than to, ex-residents.

As a popular and widely televised series, Bordertown contained many ideological implications about the ways the dominant Anglo-Australian public conceived and received both the history of post-war migration and the place of the migrant or ‘ethnic’ in 1990s society. At a time when multiculturalism was publicly criticised by Hanson’s One Nation Party, and sidelined as a policy by the Howard government, the producers desired to ‘go beyond’ multi-culturalism, which they saw as associated with migrants and their “problems.” Co-writer Sue Smith made it clear: ‘this was not going to be a docu-drama about the problems of migrants’ – the implica-tion being that audiences would not be and are not interested in migrant ‘problems’.42The migrant experience, for too long seeped in ‘realism’, needed tweaking for a 1990s audience, segments of which were frustrated with the ‘political correctness’ surrounding the contentious issue of multiculturalism, the ‘favours’ they believed were received by ethnic organisations, and the incompatibility of these ideas with the emerging narrative of second-generation social mobility and the success stories of postwar migrants. As a site iso-lated in time and space, existing in a dream, the migrant camp in Bordertown is neither a place that continues to evoke melancholy or fond memories (like Silver City), nor a fragment of ex-resident’s ‘migrant journeys’. At its worst, Bordertown denied the political and historical potency of this narrative; at its best, it gave audiences an individualised and complex depiction of the migrant other and loss migrants experience on leaving their home countries.

Film and television are important mediums to consider in this exploration of public and collective memories of the migrant camp. Acting as more than ref lections or colonising agents, film and tele-vision are facilitators through which groups understand and project their own and other people’s pasts – here, specifically, the history

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of the postwar immigration scheme and the migrant camp. These are contentious spaces – both in Silver City and Bordertown – that warrant lengthy attention. The migrant camps, and their depictions in these two films, incite reactions from different publics, who in turn operate within a particular time and space. Tracing these two representations of the migrant camp also gives us an understand-ing of the public evolution and articulation of multiculturalism in Australia – or at least one facet of the complex political and social discourse that surrounded the policy and ideology of multicultural-ism from the 1980s to the 1990s.

Notes

1 Catherine Panich, Santuary?: Remembering Postwar Immigration (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 187.

2 I refer to the publication, in 1988, of Glenda Sluga’s Bonegilla: A Place of No Hope (Melbourne: History Department, The University of Melbourne) and the emergence during this time of camp reunions.

3 See, for example, Marita Sturken, Tangled Memory The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007); Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994); Michelle Arrow, ‘Broadcasting the Past: Australian Television Histories’. History Australia 8, no. 1 (April 2011): 223–46.

4 Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations 69 (2000): 135.

5 Jan Assman, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffry K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213.

6 Paul Ashton, ‘The Birthplace of Australian Multiculturalism?’ Retrospective Commemoration, Participatory Memorialisation and Official Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 15, no. 5 (September 2009): 383.

7 We might in this instance return to Halbwachs’ ‘social frameworks of remembering’. In many ways this is a diluted version of Halbwachs’ ideas.

8 Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2007), 21.

9 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), 13.10 Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction’, in A Companion

to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Ansgar Nunning and Astrid Erll (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010).

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11 Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002).

12 Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996), 21. According to film scholar Tom O’Regan, Australian cinema inspects, evaluates, describes and projects society and all its ‘psychic dispositions’, neuroses and fears. Inevitably, films are ‘fashioned from available national and international discursive repertoires’.

13 Post-war docudramas are a notable exception, although they were propagandist films directed both at a nervous Anglo-Australian public and the newly arrived European refugees and assisted migrants. These films, like Mike and Stephani, while often encouraging mutual understanding between host society and the newly arrived, also promoted migrant assimilation and the abandonment of ‘ethnic’ markers.

14 Felicity Collins, ‘Wogboy Comedies and the Australia National Type’, in Diasporas of Australian Cinema, ed, Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2009), 82.

15 ‘Mainstreaming multiculturalism’, in O’Regan, 23.16 O’Regan, 1517 Louis Nowra’s 1984 television play Displaced Persons is also a notable

example. The refugees in Displaced Persons feature collectively as damaged victims of Europe, a common trope in Hollywood cinema. In Displaced Persons, Australia offers them an escape from this collective identity. The question of their futures hovers over all they do, but it remains undefined. The emotional pull of their war-time experiences and their extended stays in displaced persons’ camps in Germany is a constant phantom presence. Many facets of Displaced Persons echo Mike and Stephani(1952), one of the earliest depictions of the refugee experience in Australian film – namely, their traumatic war-time experiences, their epic efforts to escape post-war Europe, and their arrival in Australia with the full knowledge that a return to their homelands is not an option. The temporary accommodation provided at the quarantine centre in Sydney is by no means a parallel to the DP camp, however. Rather, the DPs are in limbo. They are depicted as suspended between their old and new lives, between their former lives in a ruined Europe, and their future lives in an indistinct Australia. Despite these nuanced representations, the melancholic play ultimately contains an assimilationist message, akin to most early filmic depictions of the newly arrived. They must, and want to, forget their pasts. This must be achieved in order for progress to be possible: ‘we must [forget]’ are the last words said. In Displaced Persons this translates to an individual process that requires little empathetic change on the part of the host society or government. In this way, the us-and-them divide prevails.

18 Silver City, dir. Sophia Turkiewicz, wr. Thomas Keneally, Limelight Productions, 1984.

19 See J. Richard, B. Bosworth and Janis Wilton, ‘A Lost History?: The Study of European Migration to Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 27, no. 2 (1981): 222.

20 As just a few examples: R. Ashbourne, ‘Migrant relives “the Bad Old Days”’, Sunday Mail (SA), 10 February 1980; Pamela Bone, ‘The Chosen People’, The Age, 28 November 1987; ‘Ref lecting on a Better Life’, Border Morning Mail, 7 December 1987; ‘It Was Far from Home, but It

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Was Where the Heart Was’, Settlement News, November 1987, 8–9; Ken Edwards, ‘Bitter Symbols’, Time Australia 11 (March 1988).

21 ‘This country is changing you. You would never have argued with a priest back in Poland’, Silver City.

22 Renata Murawska, ‘Sophia Turkiewicz: Australianizing Poles, or ‘Bloddy Nuts and Balts’ in Silver City (1984)’, in Diasporas of Australian Cinema, ed. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2009), 141.

23 Steve Anderson, ‘Loafing in the Garden of Knowledge: History TV and Popular Memory’, Film and History 30, no. 1 (March 2000).

24 National Library of Australia, Polish-Australian Oral History project .25 Dermody and Jacka cited in Murawska, ‘Sophia Turkiewicz’, 139.26 Ian Gilmour, ‘Bordertown’, in Bordertown, ed. Ian Gilmour (Australia:

ABC Books, 1995).27 Samuel, Theatres of Memory.28 Matt Condon, ‘Weaving Wonders Home’, Sun Herald, 1 October 1995.29 Ibid.30 Ibid.31 Knapman cited in Jane Freeman, ‘The Buzz on the Border’, Sydney

Morning Herald, 19 June 1995.32 Smith cited in Freeman.33 Knapman cited in Freeman.34 Sara Wills, ‘Finding Room for Loss: Ref lections on Melbourne’s

Immigration Museum in the Light of the Tampa Affair’, Meanjin 60, no. 4 (2001).

35 Mary Hutchison, ‘Dimensions for a Folding Exhibition: Exhibiting Diversity in Theory and Practice in the Migration Memories Exhibitions’, Humanities Research 15, no. 2 (2009): 81.

36 Jane Freeman, ‘Living in Bordertown’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 October 1995 (emphasis added).

37 Sue Williams, ‘Strangers in a Very Strange Land’, The Australian, 4 October 1995.

38 ‘Bordertown: A look at the recent ABC drama series by Stephen Vaneck’, Newsletter no 10, March – May 1996, Bonegilla Collection, Albury Library Museum.

39 Dirk and MarijkeEysbertse, Where Waters Meet: Bonegilla: The Dutch Migrant Experience (Melbourne: the Erasmus Foundation, 1997), 38.

40 Ibid.41 Kansteiner, 188.42 Sue Smith cited in Barbara Hooks, ‘Bordertown Explores Life in a Holding

Pattern’, The Age, 28 September 1995.

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