“Since , O Mazda from the beginning, Thou didst create soul and body, mental power and knowledge , and since Thou didst bestow to mankind the power to act , speak and guide , you wished that everyone should chose their own faith and path freely.”

Zaratostra - Yasna 31, Verse 11

One who always thinks of his own safety and profit, how can he love the joy-bringing Mother Earth? The righteous man that follows Asha's Law shall dwell in regions radiant with Thy Sun, the abode where wise ones dwell.”

Zaratostra Yasna, Verse 2

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Dr Sara Wills' Proposal for the Conference

The Vague Terrains of Our Otherness: Hostels as Sites (or Stages?) of Migrant Memory in Australia

This paper is about migrant hostels: about the accommodation, training, reception and holding centres set up by the government in the post-war years in Australia as a crucial feature of the post-war migration program.  Intended to provide temporary accommodation during an acute housing shortage, hostels provided a first home in Australia for hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, migrants and refugees in over 30 hostels and centres around the nation.  More particularly, however, this is a paper about ways of remembering migrant hostels and how some in particular have become sites of fascination, holding centres themselves of all sorts of displaced migrant memories, and sites that can perhaps put us in touch with repressed cultures of migrant memory in Australia - the ‘vague terrains of our otherness’.  Abandoned hostel sites in particular 'stage' migrant memories in Australia; this paper examines how we might explore some of these as 'waste site stories'.


Sara Wills obtained her PhD from the University of Melbourne and is currently the Associate Dean of Advancement in the Faculty of Arts and a senior lecturer in the Australian Studies program.  Sara's research specialties include migration and multicultural studies, with a particular interest in aspects of social memory as they relate to refugee issues and the meaning of hospitality and cosmopolitanism in an Australian context. Sara has received research support from the Australian Research Council and has published many journal articles related to her research.

No comments:

Post a Comment