Child Migration and Stolen Generations in Popular Historical Consciousness
In the mid-1990s, harrowing stories emerged of child migrants and Stolen Generations who had been taken from their families. Side-by-side, these narratives produced unprecedented responses in public discourse, yet scholars have struggled to make sense of the cacophony of debate, the millions of marching feet and the mountain of writing inspired by these histories. Tim Calabria’s project will assess the extensive papers left by Sir Ronald Wilson, president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission during this period, and seek to contribute to the understanding of this profound moment of social change in Australia, as people concurrently engaged in the Reconciliation movement and grappled with the bleak outcomes of child migration for many institutionalised children.
Guide to selected collections
The National Library s collections range in date from the eleventh century to the present, take in every country in the world and are exceptionally broad in format and subject. They consist of books, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera, maps, manuscripts, private archives, music scores, pictures, microform and digital materials.
A significant proportion of what the Library holds, including some of the rarest and most valuable material, was acquired as collections. Some were built up by individual collectors, families, booksellers and learned societies, often over a long period (formed collections). Other collections have been assembled from various sources by the Library itself in an effort to achieve great strength in particular subject areas (subject collections). Many of the collections have outstanding research value.
CBRLife = 堪 生 活 is now being received through legal deposit. Published by a group of young Chinese Australians, it is a ‘magazine for Chinese Australians living in Canberra, recording their lives and memories with connection of this City .
While many multicultural publishers are pleased to deposit their works with the Library, others can be less responsive to the Library’s standard ‘official’ approach. There was a good example recently with the acquisition of three volumes of
Aodaliya hua ren nian jian = Yearbook of Chinese in Australia, which we believe to be the first Chinese language yearbooks published in Australia. The acquisition was achieved indirectly, as the publisher did not respond to direct approaches requesting deposit. One of the Library’s volunteers made contact with the editor via his personal network, at which point the volumes were deposited. In these situations, the ‘community-based’ collecting approach is liable to be more successful, and
‘What use is ruin?’ asks Emily Wilkes, protagonist of
I’m Dying Laughing, the posthumous novel by the Australian Marxist author Christina Stead. ‘Communists should not be ruined: they should stay on top.’ Unfortunately for Emily, ruin is the abiding theme of Stead’s impressive and neglected oeuvre. Her last novel, left unfinished and assembled from drafts by her literary trustee after her death in 1983, occupied her for at least the final thirty years of her life. Its incompleteness is a testament to the difficulty of capturing the full ruinous extent of the lives of its characters: mid-century members of the American Communist Party.
In Christina Stead’s The Little Hotel
, the guests cannot escape each other. They are like people sealed in a pandemic pod. Set after the Second World War, the multinational set of characters in this novel don’t know what changed world will await them when they creep out of their “fourth class” Swiss hotel by Lake Geneva. For some of them, the scale of the unknowns is so paralyzing they choose to hole up for years to avoid finding out. Stead wrests great psychological insight from the growing restlessness and affections of her characters, who are outrageous and great fun to read about. This sly, concise novel packs in quite a number of dark truths, too, about the prejudices that immobilized postwar Europe and continue to immobilize in our present era.