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

Episode Transcript
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Amanda Wells (00:02):
Welcome to another History Council of New South
Wales podcast.
This podcast is a recording ofour Sydney Writers Festival
panel held on the 22nd of May2025 at History House in Sydney.
We acknowledge and pay respectsto the traditional owners of
the land that this podcast wasrecorded on the Gadigal people
who have cared for country overmillennia and who have witnessed

(00:23):
and participated in migrationslarge and small.
We hope you enjoy thisfascinating conversation between
our speakers, Dr Sophie-LoreWilson, Dr Yves Rees and our
Chair, Dr Peter Hobbins.

Catherine Shirley (00:40):
Good afternoon everyone.
Thank you so much for comingout in this dreadful weather.
We thought we'd probably onlyhave about six people along here
today, so we're absolutelythrilled and thank you for
coming.
Okay, so hello and welcome tothis Sydney Writers Festival

(01:00):
session, brought to you by theHistory Council of New South
Wales, Rethinking MigrationHistories, Australian
Perspectives and GlobalDirections.
My name is Catherine Shirleyand I'm the Executive and
Strategic Development Officer ofthe History Council of New
South Wales.
Today's session is acontinuation of the History

(01:20):
Council's support for, andparticipation in, many cultural
events in New South Wales,including the Sydney Writers'
Festival.
Please note that this sessionis being recorded and will be
published on our website in thenear future she says hopefully.
And so, with not much else todo, I'm going to hand you over

(01:43):
to Peter Hobbins and thewonderful Dr Peter Hobbins is
the Head of Knowledge at theAustralian National Maritime
Museum who will then introduceour speakers today.

Peter Hobbins (01:56):
Thanks, catherine , and welcome to all of you here
.
I really want to thank SydneyWriters Festival, the History
Council of New South Wales andalso the Royal Australian
Historical Society, whosewonderful history house we're in
, and this is a sold-out event.
So well done for scoring aticket and doubly well done for
being here.
I acknowledge that we meettoday on the Barmal and the
Badoo, or the lands and thewaters of the Gadigal people of

(02:19):
the Eora Nation, and I extend myrespects to their elders, past,
present and those awesome youngpeople who are emerging and
we'll be hearing a lot more fromthem next week through National
Reconciliation Week.
I extend that respect to eldersaround this country and
including their land and theirsea country as well.
Yeah, catherine's pointed out,I have the highly dubious job
title of Head of Knowledge.

(02:40):
You can't get much better thanthat, except if you put the word
big in front of it.
That means that I'm in chargeof the curators, the library and
the publications team at theAustralian National Maritime
Museum down in Darling Harbour,and one of our areas of research
is immigration, includingrefugee stories as well.
So we actually have aVietnamese refugee vessel in our

(03:02):
museum.
But having said that, I wasblindsided not that long ago by
one of my Aboriginal colleagueswho said to me what's your
cultural heritage, peter, noone's ever asked me that.
If you're a First Nationsperson, it gets asked all the
time.
If you're a first, second orthird generation immigrant, it
gets asked quite regularly, andsometimes intrusively.

(03:22):
I'd never even thought about it.
So that actually prompted me tostart doing a little bit of the
family history research,speaking to the old folks and
asking what are our origins aswell.
So I actually came to thissession today with that sort of
destabilisation in my own mind.
But today's not about me.
It's about these two wonderfulpeople sitting next to me.
I had the pleasure of meetingboth of them when we were all at

(03:43):
the University of Sydney abouta decade ago.
On my right is Dr Yves Rees,who's a prolific, thoughtful and
very generous writer who spansmany fields of achievement.
They're based at La TrobeUniversity down in Melbourne, so
they've dashed up to join ustoday and have written about
intellectual and transnationalhistory, including the ways that

(04:04):
both actors and ideas crossboundaries in time and space, as
exemplified in last year's bookTravelling to Tomorrow.
Yves's also written, bothpersonally and critically, about
gender diversity and beingrecognised through a huge number
of awards as a rising talent inthe literary and scholarly
fields.

Yves Rees (04:24):
Thanks, Peter, for that very generous introduction.
It's a pleasure to be heretoday.
On Gadigal Country, as Petermentioned, I've come up from
Wurundjeri land and so I want topay my respects to Wurundjeri
elders, past and present, andalso Gadigal elders, past and
present.
This land was stolen andsovereignty was never ceded.

Thanks, Yves, and Dr Sophie Loy Wilson has been
an inspiration for me for wellover a decade, and she knows
that's true.
She has an expansive embrace ofwhat the past means.
It encompasses cultures,languages, families, sources,
landscapes and prose, and everytime I enjoy one of Sophie's
conversations, her presentationsor her written expositions, I

(05:10):
come away feeling enriched.
And I don't just mean thatintellectually and creatively,
but she also has a way ofnourishing your soul and
providing that preciouscharacteristic that I think
unites all three of us here onstage today, which is curiosity.
Sophie, welcome.

Sophie Loy-Wilson (05:26):
Wow, I'm so touched.
Thank you all for coming outtoday in rainy Sydney.
I'm so honoured to be speakingto you and with my wonderful
fellow panellists.
I come to you from Gadigal land, from the University of Sydney
where I work.
I live on Wangal land too andI'd just like to acknowledge
that the University of Sydneyhas long been a Nala or a

(05:49):
meeting place for Eeyore peopleacross Sydney.
You know it was always on ahilltop overlooking this city
and many of the great kind ofdonkey paths down to Circular
Quay and up to Bondi.
You know kind of are.
You can see them from SydneyUniversity.
So I want to acknowledge thelong tradition of history making
at the University of Sydney.

Now I mentioned curiosity.
We also want to hear yourquestions as well, so I have to
be rigorous about keeping us totime.
So you've got a chance to alsoask the panel some of the
questions coming out of ourdiscussion today, which reminds
me time.
Check Right, we're going tostart with the basics.

(06:30):
This is a writer's festival.
Where and how do you?

Yves Rees (06:34):
write?
Great question.
I write in deep concentration,I would say I've recently
realised that I'm neurodiverseand I find the world often quite
overwhelming and informationdense and I've realised that

(07:00):
writing is the place I create.
That's a kind of little refugefrom the world where I can make
order and meaning and, hopefully, beauty.
Sometimes, so physically, Iwrite in my home office or in my
office at La Trobe University,but often it actually feels like

(07:21):
I'm quite dematerialised and Ikind of go into this intense
hyper focus where it's just mybrain and the words on the page
and we're kind of in thiswrestling match or dance where
I'm trying to kind of bring theideas inside my head, the
chaotic ideas, and convey themclearly and elegantly to a

(07:42):
reader.
It's the most satisfyingexperience I know in being alive
.
It's one of the hardest thingsI know.
Every morning when I get up andI know I have to write that day,
I feel terrified and Iprocrastinate and I often have a
very clean apartment on thosedays.
But there's actually no betterfeeling at the end of a day than

(08:08):
having written and feeling likeyou produced something
meaningful.
And then there's no.
And actually I was going to saythere's no better feeling, but
there is a better feeling it'swhen those words go out into the
world and they reach receptivereaders and they touch people
and they connect with your ideasand they reflect that back on
you.
So you know, for me, writing iscompletely my happy place and

(08:32):
the place where I try to makethe world more beautiful.

I love this question, peter.
So I feel like all writing andreading is in some ways a bit of
a connection and an act ofgenerosity.
Right, and you know, for me Ihave for a long time written in
an academic format.
That was how I was kind oftrained.
The recent project that I'mworking on has involved kind of

(08:58):
seeping myself in localhistorical societies, such as
the wonderful Historical Societyat Camden where Julie and Ian
work, but also I've had to kindof really steep myself in, kind
of like the words of ChineseAustralians from the kind of
gold rush period and decide howto ethically tell their stories.
And what kind of happened to mewhen I did that is I realised

(09:21):
that all writing is aconversation with place and
place making.
So there was this wonderfulthing that happened to me where
I finally kind of went.
This is a book about places inAustralia.
Yes, it's about the people andtheir voices, but actually what
unifies everything is the place.
And I need to somehow ethicallyas you know, a non-Indigenous
person evoke this place in a waythat is unifying and that is,

(09:45):
you know, going to connect topeople.
So lately, uh, peter and ease,I've been, I've been making
myself go to the actual placesand actually really try to sit
there and describe what it'slike to be in that place.

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

Strangeness to familiarity.
So all of us, all of us move,all of us are migrants in some
ways.
In this country we're allmigrants on stolen, indigenous
land.
So all of us have stories inour families, or maybe recent
stories, where the strange hasbecome familiar.
And in some ways this is thegreatest act of compassion

(10:36):
writers can do.
They can both make the familiarstrange and the strange
familiar, and all migration isabout that.
You know deep humiliation thatcomes from not knowing how to be
in a new place right and thenlearning skills in terms of
either surviving or being inthat place.
And in Australia that's beenvery much about the landscape

(10:58):
and very much about Indigenousknowledge, but it's also been
about acknowledging that that'san unequal experience.
Some people are given moretools to make the strange
familiar than others.

Yves Rees (11:13):
I think in many ways the migration experience is a
kind of extreme literalisationof the human experience.
You know, to be human, to bealive, is to be constantly in
transition, in flux, in motion.
You know, one of my other hats Iwear aside from a historian
who's concerned with mobilityand migration is that I'm also a

(11:34):
trans person and a trans writerwho's written about gender
transition.
And you know there are a lot ofparallels between the way in
which we think about and narratetransition across gender and
the way we think abouttransition.
You know the physical,geographical transition of
moving across borders and thatapplies to so many other parts
of human experience.

(11:55):
You know transition betweenvarious life stages, between,
you know, from childhood toadulthood and you know, going
into then, you know, parenthood,between being single and
married.
I think these kind of metaphorsof movement and that I love
what Sophie said about kind ofdefamiliarisation and the sort

(12:15):
of way in which it's a reallyhumbling process, that
defamiliarisation applies acrossso many domains and I think
maybe that's why one of thereasons why we're so fascinated
that defamiliarisation appliesacross so many domains and I
think maybe that's why one ofthe reasons why we're so
fascinated by migration andmigrant histories and stories
because it gives us a reallyobvious way to talk about the

(12:39):
broader ways in which movementand migration and change are so
fundamental to what it means tobe alive.

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

Yves Rees (13:00):
So I've always, as a historian, been fascinated by
Australia's relationship withthe rest of the world.
You know, I think there's sucha contradictory relationship,
like we narrate ourselves asbeing isolated and provincial
and having a cultural cringe andfeeling like we're at the
bottom of the world.
This is settler Australia, ofcourse, I'm talking about, but

(13:21):
we're also, you know,Australians have always been one
of the world's mostenthusiastic travellers.
There's an incredibly, you know, we're all settlers, as Sophie
said, unless we're Indigenous.
So we've all kind of, or ourancestors have migrated here
from elsewhere, but Australianshave always been to quote the
wonderful phrase used by JillMatthews unsettled settlers.
There's such a strong traditionof onwards migration, of moving

(13:45):
around Australia and betweenAustralia and New Zealand.
My work in particular focuses onAustralia's, the migration and
mobility of Australians to theUnited States and the way in
which the United States sort offunctioned as an alternative
metropole throughout the 20thcentury when, you know,

(14:07):
according to general wisdom,Australia was still very
oriented towards Britain.
So I have been very consciousof the way in which that story
of Australians kind of goinghome to the mother country is a
very familiar story inAustralian culture and
literature and history.
And I guess in my work I'vewanted to kind of tell the

(14:28):
counter story to that of.
You know what are theAustralians who turned their
back on Mother England and wentto America instead?
You know why did they make thatchoice?
What did they think they weregoing to find in America?
What did they actually findthere and what did they bring
back with them?

(14:50):
And you know, what my researchhas found is that it's a very
gendered story, that forAustralian women in particular,
the United States seemed likethe future, like the title of my
book is Travelling to Tomorrow,because they literally thought
they were going to tomorrow, andtomorrow in the sense of gender
relations that you know,compared to a very, very
misogynist Australian cultureand a pretty regressive English

(15:12):
culture, that the United Stateswas a place where women could
pursue education and careers andbest kind of fulfill their
potential.
So I'm a kind of funnyAustralian migration historian.
I don't normally call myselfthat because I'm essentially
looking at outwards migration.
You know, when we think aboutmigration in the Australian
context we talk about thebuilding of a multicultural

(15:33):
nation, but I'm looking atpeople who went the other way.

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

Wonderful, wonderful question.
Look, I was thinking hard aboutthis before this panel today
and I think, Peter, for me it'sabout the extent to which, as
communities, we can accommodatedifference and diversity.
Right, I think there's thisgrand question we have, you know
, in our erect communities, ourcities and our national
communities and our globalcommunity, which is about how do

(16:09):
we deal with difference?
What is it in us that meansthat we can't cope with some
kinds of difference?
And when is it possible to livein a place that accommodates
lots of diversity of being, ofthe experience that encapsulates
the diverse experience of beinghuman?
Right?
And for me, this is, you know, Isuppose something that comes

(16:30):
from childhood, where, you know,I was the daughter of a
diplomat and you know I was kindof thrown into these strange
experiences, kind of growing upliving in Russia and China in
the 90s and 2000s, and you know,at that time, you know what I
found when I was in these placesat that time is there was a
real kind of need to locate mewith people they wanted to know

(16:53):
where I was from, right, aquestion I couldn't really
answer, to be honest with you.
You know you gestured to thisearlier, Peter.
The question that you know mostAnglophone people don't get
asked in Australia, which iswhat is your ethnicity?
And I was asked this a lotoverseas all the time and I
would say Australian, and inboth the countries I lived in
they would say well, that justmeans you're a lackey of America
.
You know this was the 90s.
Right in 2000s, particularly inChina, it was well, that's.

(17:15):
The answer was often what isthe difference between being
American and being you?
I found this so confronting.
You know, that I had to explainthis.
I could see how, if you were ayoung Chinese person, the era of
spy planes coming down overChina, it seemed a natural
response.
So the only way I had tountangle this provocation was
history, right, because it's inhistory that we construct the

(17:37):
stories that connect ourmobility to our identity.
Right?
It's in that space between youknow, the movement of our
ancestors, or our own movement,and the stories of place that
nations tell that we haveidentity, and I think we have
power over those stories and canchange them and that if we tell
them differently, more peoplecan be included in those stories

(17:59):
.
I do believe that.

So you've both alluded in ways to the nation
and the stories about why peoplecome to Australia and why they
leave.
Do you find that there are sortof authorised narratives or
that there are acceptednarratives of migration?
I mean, you've already said,like you know, when we say
migration, actually we meanimmigration, not emigration.
Who would ever dare leave ourcountry?

(18:23):
You know, and could you bothtalk a little bit about that
theme?
Are there stories that you feelthat should be received and
there are stories that you feelshould be challenged, about that
movement of people, aboutmigration as a process, not as
an end point?

Yves Rees (18:39):
Yeah, I mean, as we all know, the modern history
profession developed hand inhand with the nation state.
You know we often talk abouthistorians as handmaidens to the
nation state and you know, foranyone who's read Benedict
Anderson and his work onimagining communities, we know
that the work of narrating thehistory of a nation was a core

(19:00):
way of building a sense ofnational identity.
And I think one of the ways inwhich that's played out in the
Australian context is throughtelling very particular types of
migration history and migrationnarratives where, as you've
just said, peter, it's kind ofthis vision you know of
particularly post-World War IImigration of, you know,

(19:22):
displaced people from World WarII coming from Europe and our
kind of joyful emergence fromwhite Australia into a kind of,
you know, multicultural nation.
And that narrative is very neatand celebratory and it kind of
fits within a national frameworkand I mean there's obviously

(19:44):
some truth to that.
That was a vast movement ofpeople and the legacies of that
are still with us today.
But I think that kind ofrequirement to tell migration
histories that exist in serviceof the nation have made it
difficult to see other types ofhuman mobility, the fact that
Australians left, because ofcourse you know we love this

(20:07):
vision of Australia as the luckycountry, as a place of, you
know, sunshine and affluence andretreat and reprieve from war
and poverty of the old world.
But you know, we know that alot of people found those same
troubles here in Australia.
Some of the research I've doneon my work between Australians
and the US has been looking atparticularly economic mobility

(20:32):
and economic opportunism amongstAustralians who moved to the US
.
You know we think of as peoplecoming to Australia to make
money.
You know, because we oftenboast we had, you know, some of
the highest wages in the worldthe great union movement, the
harvester judgment.
But actually I found all thisevidence in the world the great
union movement, the harvesterjudgment, but actually I found
all this evidence in the early20th century People were

(20:54):
struggling, working, people werestruggling to make ends meet
here and they were deliberatelygoing to the US because they saw
that as a land of opportunity,the land of affluence and a
place for a better life forthemselves.
And that kind of mobility wentin peaks and troughs, sort of
depending on economic conditions.
But particularly during theGreat Depression there was a

(21:16):
huge kind of outflow of peoplegoing to the US for this reason.
But we don't tell these storiesbecause they're inconvenient
and there are so many other kindof forms of transnationalism
and, you know, mobility thatfall between the cracks of
national narratives for similarreasons, and Sophie could tell
us about some of them.

Yeah, I have kind of you know, two stories
that I hope you know speak tothese brilliant points here.
And you know one is that one ofthe populations I studied for
quite a while was thispopulation of Chinese
Australians that made their wayto Republican era China, that is
, China in the 1920s and 1930s.
And in fact you know, for thoseof you that have maybe been to
Shanghai, if you go downShanghai's most famous street,

(21:59):
Nanjing Road, the four largestkind of buildings on that road
were built by ChineseAustralians.
They are four very bigdepartment stores and they were
built by Chinese Australians.
And in fact they said that, youknow, in the 1930s it's been
said, you know, if you walk downthat street in Shanghai in the
30s, you heard a particulardialect from a place called
Zhongshan.
This is an area of South Chinawhere many, many migrants

(22:19):
migrated to Sydney.
Okay, so it's actually a bigproject at Western Sydney
University called the HeritageCorridor linking Zhongshan with
Sydney.
So it said that you heard thisdialect in Shanghai.
And you know I rememberthinking why did all these
people kind of go from beautifulAustralia to Shanghai in the
1930s?

Yves Rees (22:37):
Why would you ever leave?

Why would you do
that in the Great Depression,and when I looked into it, it
wasn't just Chinese Australians,there was a large community of
actually quite impoverishedAustralians, like white
Australians, that had come tothis city.
In fact there were so many thatthere were these, like you know
, consular letters betweendifferent British consuls saying
, like what are we doing withall these like poor Australians
that are rocking up in Shanghaion ships looking for work?

(23:00):
But the Great Depression hadmotivated them right.
They thought we need to findwork, we're going to go.
There's all these shippinglines and I thought it's so
interesting that I would neverhave thought that migration went
the other direction.
You know I'm so used tostudying anti-Chinese, you know
kind of xenophobia in Australia,this notion that you know that
Australia was a place of desirefor Chinese migrants, that it

(23:20):
did not occur to me that in factimpoverished white Australians
would cause a problem, like youknow, a precariat in Shanghai in
the 30s.
So that was a big prompt to meto kind of question my own
internalisation of, I suppose,national ideas of migration.

Yeah, In fact, as I understand, the recession we
had to have of the 90s also sawan overall net out-migration of
Greek Australians back to Greece, where there were much better
economic opportunities, eventhough there might be second or
even third generation GreekAustralians as well.
So it's certainly a reallyinteresting tie between
economics and mobility as well.
So we talked a bit aboutauthorised narratives.

(23:55):
Are there non-authorisednarratives?
Are there naughty stories, thestories we're not supposed to
tell about migration, and how doyou deal with those, Sophie?

Oh, I love this.
So for a long time, as some ofyou will know, you know I worked
with the archives of the WhiteAustralia Policy.
So the White Australia Policy,as many scholars have shown,
created this huge archivebecause all these people had to
be documented and watched.
So we have a lot of informationon the people that the White
Australia Policy targeted.

(24:23):
And I realised, you know, aftera while talking to families and
reading oral historytranscripts and listening to
them, that in fact what peoplewere telling the immigration
officials wasn't necessarily thewhole story, right.
So you know, I began to realisethat there were these
incredibly clever tactics thatmigrants use to survive and to

(24:47):
live outside the what I began tocall the surveillance archive,
right, that they had this wholeworld of families selling
documents to each other and, youknow, kind of like making sure
that a lot of their lives andwork could not be tracked so
easily by the white Australiapolicy, which was so intent on
tracking their lives and work.
And you know, you know, forexample, like there were
incredible ways in Melbourne'sChinatown in which you could

(25:11):
kind of get immigrationdocuments at certain times right
.
These are problematic storiesbecause they play into
stereotypes, but they showedsuch ingenuity and I was able to
track these through court cases.
Okay, so I could only evertrack these particular secret
worlds.
When things fell apart Say,someone didn't pay someone else
the money they were supposed topay them, or the documents
didn't eventuate or the persondidn't arrive, there would be a

(25:34):
court case.
And in the field that I work in, Chinese Australians use the
Australian petticoats more thanany other non-Anglo migrant
group, and I think that's veryinteresting.
And so I was able to kind oftrack what I call this kind of
ghost world ofChinese-Australian life, and
what it showed is that laws areone thing, policies are one

(25:54):
thing, survival and ingenuity,and, you know, human rebellion
and resistance is a whole otherstory, and migration has that
flip side, I think.

Yves Rees (26:06):
Yeah, I also uncovered some stories of kind
of people of people I guess onthe wrong side of the law which
also relates to another kind ofyou know unpermitted narrative
that I love, which is of whiteAustralians as undesirable
migrants.
Going back to Sophie's pointbefore about the impoverished,
the impoverished hordes of whiteAustralians in Depression-era

(26:28):
Shanghai, there were sort offascinatingly similar dynamics
that played out in the US whichrelate to the kind of weird
intricacies of US border policy.
So we all know about thehistory of the white Australia
policy and you know the way inwhich it was very effective,
apart from when people cheatedit at restricting non-white

(26:51):
immigration In the early 20thcentury.
The United States was inspiredby the Australian model to
basically emulate that becausethere was concerns in the US
about the huge numbers ofmigrants from Southern and
Eastern Europe that had come inin the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
So the US developed a veryelaborate system that they

(27:14):
explicitly say is modelled onthe Australian example, to have
a kind of veneer of scientific,logical, kind of non-racist,
even-handed treatment of allnations.
But he's actually very, verydeeply racially motivated and it
was a quota system where eachsending nation had an allocated

(27:36):
number of migrants they couldsend per year to the United
States.
Now, due to the intricacies ofthe way in which this system was
designed, Australia had a very,very tiny quota, which meant in
practice so this was only about100 people a year, from the 20s
onwards, could migrate to theUS.

(27:56):
So in practice it often meantthat white Australians who were
used to thinking of the world astheir oyster and them, as you
know, incredibly desirablepeople to have anywhere,
suddenly found themselves on thewrong side of US immigration
law and, you know, illegalaliens, quite literally.
So there are many cases Iuncovered and this regime went

(28:17):
from the 1920s to the 1960s,when there was a big overhaul of
US immigration policy, ofAustralians arriving at Ellis
Island in New York or at AngelIsland in San Francisco,
expecting just to kind of waltzthrough immigration control and,
you know, be welcomed with openarms by Uncle Sam, only to be
told, no, sorry, you know, youhaven't got a quota place,

(28:41):
you've got the wrong visa.
And they were quite ofteneither like turned around, like
quite literally put on a boatback to Australia or, in some
cases, put in immigrationdetention, potentially for weeks
or in a few cases, even formonths.
See this sense of sort of whiteentitlement and privilege kind

(29:11):
of rub up against the realitiesof US border control and sort of
see the kind of unintendedfallout of the way in which you
know the US attempt to emulatewhite Australia actually kind of
ended up, you know, hurtingindividual white Australians.

Reminds me of a story from Van Diemen's Land in
1829 when a group of convictshijacked a boat and sailed it.
They said to Japan I think theywere heading for China actually
.
They get to Japan and whathappens?
Turn back the boats.
They were illegal immigrantscoming into a country that
didn't want foreigners.
They were actually criminalsand they were basically sent

(29:44):
packing, even though they wereflying a prominent Union Jack.
They were actually fired at andsent out of the country.
So it was kind of a reverserefugee story.
That's not the sort of story weexpect to hear as Australians.
Thank you for these wonderful,thoughtful responses.
We've talked a little bitaround the edges of
multiculturalism and I think youknow, even this morning I was
watching some video footagedigitised video footage of the

(30:08):
1980s immigration,multiculturalism moment.
Is that mentality still with us, that idea that we as a society
will accept all manner ofimmigrants and incorporate them
into our society and respecttheir differences on their own
grounds?
Was that a laudable goal in thefirst place?

(30:29):
And 50 years on from the 70swhen it was introduced, where
are we now?
Who wants to turn to thatquestion?

Yeah, I mean I still find this moment
inspiring.
You know I really do.
If we think about theintroduction of the Racial
Discrimination Act, you know,under Whitlam we think about,
you know, the migration ofIndo-Chinese refugees that came
in the late 70s, very importantfor the history of Sydney, of

(30:59):
course, and the history ofAustralia.
These were inspiring momentsand I grew up with these people
who were kind of part of writingthis multicultural policy.
When I began speaking to someof my Chinese-Australian friends
and people I research, familiesI talk to in Sydney, I had a
startling encounter with a youngman, you know, from Beijing and
he lived in Chinatown, inHaymarket in Sydney, and he was

(31:21):
studying multiculturalism and Iasked him what he thought he was
like.
Well, it wasn't fair, was it?
And I said what do you mean?
And I asked him what he thoughthe was like.
Well, it wasn't fair, was it?
And I said what do you mean?
And he said well, you know,surely the funding went to
people who could speak Englishthe best.
This was his perception.
He was quite blunt with me.
He said you know, if inAustralia, in the period when
multicultural funding was beingdistributed, you could say the

(31:42):
right things and you could speakand engage, you were more
likely to get funding, and hewas, like my research shows,
this created inequalitiespolitically in the community.
So maybe this was this was justearly.
I'm not saying this was themotivation in any sense.
I do think the policiessuffered from and I'm not the
only person to say this a lackof historicism, right, a lack of

(32:02):
a sense of what you know is thekind of history of a particular
community and the kind ofdivides within that community,
right?
So how do you provide fundingthat supports a multicultural
nation without you know, alsoproducing unintended
inequalities, right, andpolitical divides within that
community?
So I thought that was strikingas well.

(32:23):
And the other thing I would sayabout all of this is that, you
know, I am someone who has beena recipient of the incredible
archives that were created inthat moment.
So, just as there were someinequalities created, there was
also a time where incrediblearchives were preserved because
of this funding.
So there was good and bad inthat moment, but I do think it

(32:45):
suffered from a lack ofhistoricity.

Yves Rees (32:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think , similarly to Sophie, I was
kind of raised in the heyday ofmulticulturalist discourse and
it, you know, very much infusedmy worldview and you know is in
so many ways like a laudableaspiration, particularly coming
out of the white Australiapolicy.
But I guess, as I've beenthinking about these questions

(33:09):
in recent years, I think moreand more what we called
multiculturalism and still dowas in practice a very
assimilationist policy byanother name.
That there was kind of anappetite for the veneer of
multiculturalism, for the kindof aesthetics of it, for the
food you know, as Ghassan Hajjhas sort of so evocatively

(33:33):
written, that we want the foodbut not the actual human
difference and there has beenyet less of an appetite to kind
of actually reckon with what itmeans for Australia to no longer
be a kind of hegemonicallywhite British culture and
actually accommodate real humandifference and the complexities

(33:56):
of that.
I'm reminded here of, you know,the work of the great
Australian and British feministphilosopher, Sarah Ahmed, who's
written about diversity, work inthe university context and the
way in which kind of therhetoric of diversity and
inclusion often kind offunctions as a sort of stopgap

(34:18):
or a replacement for the actualhard work of making it happen,
and I think that's kind of trueof what's happened with
multiculturalism in Australia.
You know, we do have a diversepopulation, we like to think of
ourselves as a multiculturalnation, but that really hasn't.
That difference hasn't trickleddown into our government, into

(34:39):
our institutions, into academia,into how we narrate our
histories of ourselves.
I was rudely reminded of thisfact just last night.
I've been staying in centralSydney for the last few days for
the Sydney Writers' Festivaland really enjoying being in a
neighbourhood with a large, youknow, Chinese student population

(34:59):
and you know hearing differentlanguages spoken on the street
and you know feeling in amongstyou know, a human melting pot.
And I was just kind of in apink cloud of enjoying this last
night walking along GeorgeStreet and then I saw an
Anglo-Australian man reallyquite violently racially abuse a
group of Chinese students and Icouldn't hear the full detail

(35:20):
of his tirade but it ended byhim saying this is Australia, I
am Australian, which was a veryclear statement that they were
not, and that not, entitled tobe here.
All of which is to say wehaven't done the work, it's
still contested and we have along way to go.

I had one quick thing, Peter.
So to build on what Yves hassaid, accommodating difference
means ceding power and privilege.
This is the problem, right, andI do believe that you know we
haven't come to terms with thisparticular challenge of
difference, which means you haveto cede some of your power and
privilege.
Part of that could just simplybe recognising that not everyone

(36:02):
speaks English right, and thatsimple act of recognising that
you shouldn't expect everyone tospeak English.
But I think that's an exampleof how what multiculturalism did
, exactly as is so beautifullysaid, is, in some ways, like
reified our own sense ofourselves as being good people,
good welcoming people.

Yves Rees (36:19):
Yeah, it was good for white Australians to think of
ourselves as progressive.

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

There's a different sort of homogenisation
in migration that we don'toften talk about, which is
around First Nations.
So if you're an Australian SouthSea Islander or if you're a
Pacifica community member, youtend to be put into the First
Nations category rather thanbeing classed as an immigrant,
whereas that wouldn't be thecase if you were, say, from El
Salvador or South America, orLatvia or Laos.

(36:54):
Is that something that you'vehad to struggle with in your
writing about that sort ofhomogenisation around First
Nations narratives and exactlywhere people who are Indigenous
to a particular place or aparticular area are seen to be
incorporated into our FirstNations community as opposed to
being seen as migrants?

I love this question.
There's an anecdote aboutBendigo in which you know
Bendigo, huge amount of goldmined from Bendigo also a town
deeply associated with Chinesemigration, a town where there's
been, you know, attacks on thedragon recently, kind of
vandalism on their Chinesedragon.
Bendigo was also the placewhere a group of Indigenous

(37:38):
people mined a very importantrock for arrowheads and for kind
of you know various weapons.
So it was a place that hasalways been associated with
mining and value.
And this particular group,frank Kluane, you know various
weapons.
So it was a place that hasalways been associated with
mining and value.
And this particular group FrankClune the historian argues this
Indigenous group was actuallyquite responsible for Europeans
finding gold in Bendigo.
So the classic story of you know, in the gold rushes, it

(37:59):
actually was Indigenousknowledge of the land that led
to gold being discovered.
The story goes that a group ofScottish women were kind of in a
creek near Bendigo, white Creek, and they were with their
stockings.
They were washing theirstockings and gold came into
their stockings and theyimmediately knew they'd found
some gold.
They'd been told by Indigenouspeople that there was gold here.
According to Frank Clune, agroup of men come down.

(38:23):
These women are terrified.
They want to hide you know, thegold that they found.
A group of men come down.
One of the men speaks to one ofthe women in Scots Gaelic.
She's never met him before buthe's using their you know their
history of migration.
He recognises her as probablybeing Scottish Maybe he heard
her speak.
She answers him in English, youknow.
So she refuses to say we havekinship here.
And Frank Clooney uses thisstory to show kind of the

(38:46):
complexity of Australian kind ofnational history, that there's
a particular Indigenousknowledge to this group right of
the land, you know, and thisgroup of Indigenous people were
apparently quite powerfulbecause they traded this
particular rock and this leadsto, you know, this gold rush
which is terrible for theseIndigenous people.
And he shows how we lose theseintricate stories of kinship

(39:09):
that are actually quiteimportant and powerful, you know
, when we kind of, you know,zoom out and nationalise
migration.
But I love that story.
I think it encapsulates so muchof the complexity of Australian
history.

Yves Rees (39:21):
This is a brilliant question and it's something I
feel like I'm only justbeginning to think about myself,
my own work, and you know,partly because I don't sort of
work primarily in First Nationshistory, but I think through
some of my own research I'vebegun, I guess, to understand
one of you know the many traumasof invasion and colonisation as

(39:42):
kind of forced internalmigration and being taken off
country.
One example that has reallystayed with me from my own work
is I've written about a whiteAustralian novelist called
Dorothy Cottrell, who in manyways was a really kind of heroic
, remarkable woman.

(40:03):
She was a wheelchair user inthe early 20th century who
became a best-selling novelistand moved to the United States
where she was a kind ofcelebrity for her writing and
one of the first Australians tobe published in the US.
You know, incredibly kind ofplucky, bold woman discovered a

(40:23):
dark side to her story, which isthat shortly before she moved
to the US in 1928, she went on aroad trip to the Northern
Territory and while she wasthere she travelled through a
First Nations mission andeffectively stole a child.
She encountered a child who wasabout four or five, a little

(40:48):
girl that she was charmed by.
The girl was with her mother,living with her mother, but
under colonial law at the timewas under, kind of effectively,
a ward of the state.
So Dorothy sought permissionfrom the protector of Aborigines
and was permitted to take thechild within a few days away
from the protector of Aboriginesand was permitted to take the
child, you know, within a fewdays away from the mother, which

(41:11):
is such a horrific story on somany levels.
And I've really kind of wrestledwith how to incorporate this
story within the broader storyof Dorothy Cottrell's life.
But to go back to your point,peter, I think as I was writing
this story into my book it sortof at one point really clicked
for me that one of the traumasthat this child underwent was

(41:34):
this forced migration.
I mean, she was taken from hermother and her family.
But she was also taken from hercountry because she went first
to Queensland where Dorothy hada family farm, but then spent
most of her childhood in Sydneyand I think a few years ago I
just would have sort of seenthat as all Australia.
But now I'm kind of beginningand I will never fully

(41:55):
understand this, I know, butbeginning to glimpse this as
very different nations goingfrom the Northern Territory to
Sydney and how alien thatlandscape must have felt for
this child.
And you know, we know, thatthat child, you know, went on to
become a fashion model.
She moved to the Netherlands,she married a Dutchman, you know

(42:16):
.

Clearly in some ways she had a good life
but as far as we know she neverwas returned to her country or
her mother and I've spent a lotof time thinking about what that
might have meant for her thatyou know that forced migration
as such a young child, let's addone thing quickly, peter
there's an exhibition now at theNational Museum in Canberra by

(42:40):
a man called Zhou Xiaoping aboutChinese-Indigenous
relationships and you know, partof what he is highlighting here
is that actually there weremany, you know,
Chinese-Indigenous relationshipsand we're uncovering, you know
quite a few families who youknow brought their
Chinese-Indigenous children backto South China.
So I've talked to families inCairns who would say to me yeah,
you know, we grew up withlittle kids both in China and

(43:02):
Cairns, you know who wereChinese-Indigenous kids, and I
think imagine that story,imagine being able to tell that
story of those children, ChineseIndigenous kids, who were
brought up in both China andCairns, you know, and apparently
there's quite a significantcommunity that is now being kind
of documented.

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

Oh, wow, it's absolutely central.
All migration is an act offaith in the collective human
experience.
Right, all of it.
Even today, when you knowmigration seems in collective
human experience.
Right, all of it.
Even today, when you knowmigration seems in some ways
easy.
Right, getting on a plane, it'snot because leaving the place
that you know is frightening,even if you say it's not.
We call it exhilaration, butactually it's fear.

(44:00):
Leaving the place that you know, it's an act of faith that you
will be received, you know, withsome kind of grace, in your
destination.
It's an act of faith becauseyou can choose to stay.
So the choice to go is an actof, I think, faith in the
collective human experience.
It's saying I believe in humanbeings that they're not going to
damage me when I get to thatnext place, which is why I think
we find it so moving right,because anyone that comes here,

(44:20):
you know they've committed to anact of faith in us, and I think
that's why it is one of themost beautiful stories to tell
the migration story, because itis about the collective human
experience and it's about ourbelief that we will be welcomed
wherever we go.

Yves Rees (44:34):
I love this question.
I hadn't thought about myinterest in migration in those
terms before, but now you'vesaid it I realise that's why I
am so fascinated by these people.
You know, I completely agreewith everything Sophie said.
There's something sointoxicating, I think,
particularly, you know, in theera before planes, you know,

(44:59):
before commercial aviation, youknow, when people went on
steamships had to, you know,write letters home.
That would take months.
Just the act of trust andoptimism and bravery to get on a
ship, knowing you know therewasn't going to be anyone there
that was familiar.
On the other side, one of thewomen I've written about is a

(45:20):
swimmer called Isabel Latham,who did many extraordinary
things, one of which.
She was just a Sydney teenager,didn't come from a particularly
wealthy family.
In the middle of World War Ishe got on a boat to America by
herself with hardly any money,like really just enough to kind
of get her there and keep heralive for a few weeks.

(45:42):
She didn't know anyone inAmerica really.
She didn't have a job lined up,she didn't have any plans, she
was a kid, and I just thinkthere's something so
intoxicating about that sense of, you know, faith in humanity,
as Sophie said, but also thatdesire to ask for more, that

(46:06):
curiosity, that refusal toaccept the kind of fairly
limited scope of what Isabel'slife was expected to be you know
, getting married and havingkids in the northern suburbs of
Sydney, the way in which shesaid no and demanded something
better for herself.
And I guess at core, I thinkyou know, history and human
change is driven by those peoplewho are curious and ask for

(46:28):
more and I'm just, you know,inevitably, inexhaustibly
fascinated by them.

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

Audience Member 1 (46:53):
Thanks.
This is really just anobservation I was discussing
with a few friends the other day, but I'm Irish.
Well, my family heritage iscultural heritage, is Irish and
we were talking about this withmy dad last week who, in my
opinion, is quite racist to someof the new migratory cultures

(47:14):
coming out, and we were talkingabout that.
When the Irish arrived in thelate 1800s, early 1900s, they
had a very hard time by theBritish, so much so to use a
common trope the paddy wagon wasnamed after so much crime and,
I guess, discrimination againstthe Irish.
You mentioned the Chinese andthe goldfields.

(47:35):
My dad's best friend is Italianand he still talks about the
racism that he experienced atschool.
You know I went to school in the80s and 90s with Vietnamese
kids who had a really hard time.
You know the generalisationsaround war-torn brutalists.
You know, therefore, they had aviolent background and you know
associations with a violentbackground and you know
associations with heroinaddiction and all these sorts of

(47:57):
tropes from Cabra matta etc.
Why do Australians give each ofthese sort of chapters of
migratory people a really hardtime and and it seems to me,
until their kids talk with anAustralian accent, that really
there's this sort of gruellinginitiation that each chapter has

(48:18):
to go through.
Do you think that's true, andif so, what does that stem from?
It's a loaded question and morejust an observation.

Yeah, Peter was saying is that uniquely
Australian?
I have a go I think about thisa lot to use an Australianism.
There's sort of two ways thatI've tried to answer this
question.
I think about this all the time.
My ex-husband was Sri LankanAustralian and dedicated his
life to getting the bestAustralian accent you've ever
heard.
It is far better than mine.

(48:52):
He plays cricket rugby betterthan any Australian and he is
the first to tell you this was adefensive measure.
He felt that to survive here heneeded to do that.
And there's me saying to himembrace your heritage, embrace
your past, tell everyone you'reHindu.
And he was like you have notlived here.
You don't understand.
I was at risk, I felt unsafe.

(49:12):
You don't understand.
I was at risk, I felt unsafe.
You know I have two.
One of my mentors answers thatquestion in the following way.
Her name is May Nye and shesaid it's about resources, that
when people perceive that theirresources will be diluted, that
their resources are at risk,that there will be less
resources to go around, whetherit be housing, whether it be
money, whether it be jobs whenthey perceive this, they are

(49:33):
much more likely to enact thatresponse.
And as there are less and lessresources.
She argues.
With the changes in the economyand climate change, we will
just see more of this right.
The second answer that you knowothers give and I think it's a
very powerful one is that we areon stolen land.
We know we don't really belonghere.
We know this is not our land.
So we have a fragile claim tobeing here in the first place

(49:55):
and, like any person who feelsdefensive and fragile, we lash
out because we don't have thatclaim to this place.
You know, and we haven'treckoned with the ways in which
we treated the people that werehere for you know, 60 million
years before we came.
So these are the two answersthat are given right.
But the kind of honest answerto your question is I don't know
.
I've spent so much timestudying this and in every

(50:17):
archive I look at where there is, in terrible racial violence,
there is incredible humankindness.
In every single archive, everyanti-Chinese massacre I've
studied, there is also someonein a massacre that goes around
handing out blankets or givingout water, right, and so human
beings act in unpredictable waysand I don't know how to direct
that towards kindness andgoodness.

Yves Rees (50:38):
I completely agree with everything Sophie has said
and I, you know, would notattempt to provide a definitive
answer either, but I just, inresponse to what you've said, I
just wanted to add a sort ofsmall reflection of my own,
which is that, you know, one ofmy overriding historical
interests is this concept ofwhiteness and who is white and
who isn't, and the way in whichyou know, in the Australian and

(50:59):
the American context, that playsout into you know who belongs
and who doesn't.
And one of the things that's sofascinating to me about it is
the way in which the definitionsand the boundaries of whiteness
are constantly changing.
You know, as you've gesturedtowards, the Irish were not
considered white in the past.
You know they were a racialisedgroup, they were likened to

(51:22):
people from Africa.
There was a lot of racistimagery around that.
And you know, now, when wethink of Irishness as sort of
peak whiteness, that seems kindof absurd, but it was very much
the case and I think a similartrajectory has happened with
Italian and other Europeanmigrant groups that, of course,
when they first came toAustralia in the post-war

(51:43):
decades, they were not seen aswhite, they were not seen as
belonging.
There was a huge amount ofracism towards them and that
still exists in pockets.
But I think to a large extentthe kind of category of
whiteness in the Australiancontext, and in the US as well,
has kind of expanded toaccommodate those kind of
Western European identities.

(52:04):
And I've spoken to historiancolleagues of Sophie and mine
who are second generationmigrants from Europe and they've
talked about how odd it wasthat when they were kids at
school they were subjected toslurs and now they're professors
, they're seen as the whiteestablishment you know, they're
the insiders that the likepeople like us are kind of

(52:25):
saying you know, you're thegatekeepers and we're trying to
break things down.
So all of which is to say, Iguess that this just goes to
show how fake these categoriesall are.
You know, race is invented,whiteness is invented.
It's constantly being, you know, renegotiated and reimagined to
suit the kind of needs of themoment which, as Sophia said,

(52:49):
are connected to questions ofyou know, politics and resources
, questions of you know,politics and resources.
And with that historicalunderstanding of how fake and
invented these are, I think wecan start to trust them less and
sort of denaturalise them andsee them for the artifices they
really are.

And if I can offer a slight counterpoint.
So my partner was born in NewZealand.
Yeah, her parents areethnically Chinese but grew up
in Malaysia, in fact were bornthere, and I've been speaking
recently with her father, who'sin his 80s.
They left Malaysia because theywere discriminated against by

(53:25):
the Malays.
So, as ethnically Chinese, theywere seen as lesser Asians than
the local Malays.
And he has said to my face hethinks the best thing that's
ever happened in Malaysia isthat the British came and
colonised it and broughtcivilisation.
And they are his words.
He's the Chinese man who'sprospered in the British system
but felt discriminated againstby the local Malay people and

(53:46):
ended up in New Zealand and thenultimately coming to Australia
as well.
So it's certainly complicated.
I know that's an answer to yourquestion but, yeah, sometimes
we can imbibe these narrativesand sometimes they work for us,
and I think it does come down alot to this question of the
resources you end up with andwhose resources you are taking
and whose you all seem to betaking away.
We have maybe time for one morequestion, please.

Audience Member 2 (54:11):
I'd like to come back to the idea of
multiculturalism, and I couldhave many discussions with you
about that, but where I'd liketo go as the last question is
the idea that we still seem toframe multiculturalism as other
cultures relating to a whiteculture, rather than many of the

(54:36):
cultures that are in Australiarelating to each other, and you
only need to be in WesternSydney to see that you've got
local events where theirhistories are created and being
made in Australia, as Indianswith Lebanese, Vietnamese with

(54:56):
Chinese, and yet we still seemvery preoccupied with the idea
that multiculturalism has to bemediated through white culture.
What would you say, please?

Yves Rees (55:11):
Yeah, I would just wholeheartedly agree with you.
Yeah, I would justwholeheartedly agree with you.
I mean, I think this is exactlySophie's point before about the
failure of white culture tocede power and privilege and
dominance.
You know, we see this in somany areas.
I think of Australian culturallife that you know like.

(55:33):
I work in academia, obviously,but I also have a bit to do with
the publishing, literary world,and both spaces love to think
of themselves as veryprogressive, very woke, but
they're still dominated by whitepeople.
You know, which I say as awhite person who you know, want
to bring in other voices,diverse voices, but kind of, you

(55:56):
know, the white people arealways the gatekeepers, they're
the publishers, they're theeditors, they're the senior
professors, they're the peoplewho are still controlling how
those stories are told, who getsto tell them, who is anointed
as the face of a particularcommunity and who isn't.
And you know, to go back toyour point, what needs to change
is that the assumed andnaturalised centrality and

(56:21):
hegemony of white culture needsto fundamentally shift.
And until that happens, untilwe no longer take for granted
that the head of any culturalorganisation or any branch of
government in this country isgoing to be a white person,
particularly a white man.
Until that changes, we'll keephaving this problem, I think.

I totally second what Isa said.
I completely agree.
I might just add to that that,as we're all storytellers here,
if you're here interested inkind of telling stories, you
know brave storytellers exposepower right and they understand
the secret ways that power worksthat Yves's gesturing towards.
It's difficult sometimes todiscuss, right, how things
actually work.
We're uncomfortable with that,particularly if, in my case,

(57:02):
you're a beneficiary of howthings actually work right and I
feel like you know we have newgenerations now of, say,
storytellers from Cabramatta.
You know, all that I have is awonderful book about life in
Cabramatta in the 90s thatexposes and skewers exactly that
lie, the heart of multiculturalAustralia right, which is that
you can come here but we're notgoing to give up the power we

(57:26):
have over you.
You know we're still going tomake you jump through the hoops
that are going to be harder foryou to jump through because your
parents are working long shiftsat night, you don't grow up in
an English-speaking household,you don't come with networks and
you don't inherit real estate.
So every time we expose thestories of how power actually
works in our city and ourcommunity, we help that issue

(57:47):
because we expose the challengesthat migrants face when they
come here that it is not anequal playing field.
So I think that might help.
Multiculturalism tellingstories about how power works
more clearly.

Yves Rees (57:58):
And I guess, yeah, just fully agree and just
sharing, like I supposecommunicating that knowledge I
think can be a really like toup-and-coming people and kind of
breaking down the mistake canbe really powerful.

This is how it actually works, yeah.

Yves Rees (58:13):
Yeah, I mean where.
The university I teach at is LaTrobe University in Melbourne,
as Peter mentioned, which isvery different to the
universities I was educated at.
It's like I you know I'm thechild of lawyers and academics.
You know I went, I was educatedat Group of Eight universities.
Like I arrived at universityknowing how it worked.
I knew what an honours year was.

(58:34):
I knew what a PhD was.
You know I had that kind ofknowledge and cultural capital
that meant I could navigate thesystem with ease.
What has been so interesting forme at La Trobe University,
where a really high proportionof my students are first in
family university students arethe children of migrants.
They're often incredibly smart,they're so politically engaged,

(58:56):
They've got really importantperspectives.
They don't know what an honoursyear is, so they're not going
to do an honours year becausethey've, like, never heard of it
before and no one's explainedit to them.
So I often feel like some ofthe most important and powerful
educational work I do is notlike the formal tutorial
teaching.
It's like the conversation Ihave with a student who got a
high distinction on their essayand I say, if you want to do a

(59:18):
PhD, this is what a PhD is youneed to think about what
supervisor you want and emailthem and have a conversation
with them and really breakingdown those steps that no one
actually tells you.
That's not written on anyuniversity website about how to
apply for a PhD, and I thinkthat's actually one practical
way that white people like uscan do a tiny little bit of work

(59:40):
.
To cede power is actuallyexpose the kind of unwritten
rules of how you get power.

Perfectly put .

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

(01:00:10):
So give it up, folks, thank you.

Catherine Shirley (01:00:21):
What a fantastic session.
Thank you very much, Yves,Peter and Sophie.
It was absolutely phenomenaland I think it's given us all a
lot of food for thought andmoved our historical
perspectives on a little bitmore.
From this moment in time, I'dalso like to say I'd like to

(01:00:41):
pass on my sincere thanks to theSydney Writers' Festival
organisers, who have beenfantastic in their support.
We didn't know that they weresending a team today, and they
did, which is just wonderful tosupport such a small
organisation as ours.
I'd also like to thank the RAHS, the Royal Australian

(01:01:05):
Historical Society, in thiswonderful venue that we're using
today, which is great.
I'd like to thank my team aswell.
You know, I do have a team whoworks very hard to actually make
these things happen, and sothere's Amanda Wells in South
Australia.
She lives and works in SouthAustralia and does these

(01:01:28):
fantastic graphics and does somefabulous organising.
We've got Jadzia Stranell,who's there in the audience, our
new First Nations ProjectOfficer.
Thank you, Jadzia, for beinghere today, it's fantastic.
And Laura Sale, who is ourcommunications person, who is
also at uni.

(01:01:49):
We seem to have this fantasticnumber of uni students who work
for us, which is brilliant.
Um, okay, so, um, oh yes, theSydney writers festival have
asked me to ask you that, ifyou'd like a copy of any of the
books, they've put a QR code onthe table out there that if you

(01:02:10):
take a photo of that with yourphone you can then get through
to the website.
They also want me to say thatYves is going to be in other
sessions at Carriageworks thisweekend, as I understand it.
I'm not sure, Sophie, whetheryou're going to be.
No, okay.

Yves Rees (01:02:27):
Yeah, I'll be interviewing Tori Peters, who's
an incredible trans novelist, onSaturday at Carriageworks at
5.30pm.
She's American, she's brilliant.
You should definitely come andon, I think, 4.30pm on Sunday,
I'll be doing a live recordingof my history podcast, if you
want more history content.
That's a podcast called ArchiveFever that I co-host with

(01:02:49):
Professor Claire Wright, alsofrom La Trobe University.
We'll be doing a live recordingon stage about family archives,
so it's going to be very, verynerdy in the best possible way.

Catherine Shirley (01:03:02):
Thank you very much.
It's been fantastic.
Thank you.

Amanda Wells (01:03:14):
Thanks for tuning in.
The History Council of NewSouth Wales would like to thank
the session speakers and ourcultural partners the University
of Newcastle School ofHumanities, Creative Industries
and Social Sciences.
The City of Sydney, MacquarieUniversity Faculty of Arts.
Museums of History New SouthWales, the National Archives of
Australia Placemaking New SouthWales.

(01:03:35):
The National Archives ofAustralia Placemaking New South
Wales, the Reserve Bank ofAustralia, the State Library of
New South Wales, the Universityof New England School of Arts,
Humanities and Social Sciences,the University of New South
Wales School of History andPhilosophy and the UTS
Australian Centre for PublicHistory.
The History Council of NewSouth Wales is supported by the
New South Wales Governmentthrough Create New South Wales.

(01:03:56):
To find out more about theHistory Council of New South
Wales or to become a member,please visit us online at
historycouncilnsw.
org.
au.

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