Aanpassen and invisibility: being Dutch in post-war Australia

Peters, Nonja

doi:10.18352/tseg.377

Cited by 2 publications

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“…They argued that migration history had developed too many typologies, like forced and voluntary migration, that had evolved into fixed dichotomies and divided migratory experience and scholarship alike and that these conceptual walls had to be broken down to open up the field again (Smith, 2003, p. 18). From 1993 academia picked up that certain migrant communities experienced themselves as being invisible because as a result of strict assimilation policies little tangible heritage of them had been retained with which they could distinguish themselves (Walcker-Birckhead, 1988;Willems, 2001Willems, , 2003Coté, 2010, p. 122;Peters, 2010;Horne, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migrant visibility: Digitization and heritage policies

Faassen¹,

Hoekstra²

2022

Front. Hum. Dyn.

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Digitization and digital methods have had a big impact on migration history and history in general. The dispersed and fragmented nature of migration heritage that involves at least two countries and many cultural heritage institutions make it clear that migration history can be much improved by using digital means to connect collections. This makes it possible to overcome the biases that policy have introduced in private and public collections alike by selection and perspective. Digital methods are not immune to these biases and may even introduce new distortions because they often change heritage contextualizations. In this article, Van Faassen and Hoekstra argue that therefore they should be embedded in source criticism methodology. They use the example of post-world War II Dutch-Australian emigration to show how a migrant registration system can be used as a structural device to connect migrant heritage. They use methods from computer vision to assess the information distribution of the registration system. Together, connecting collections and information assessments give an encompassing view of the migrant visibility and invisibility in the heritage collections and perspectives for scholars to become aware of heritage biases.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migrant visibility: Digitization and heritage policies

Faassen¹,

Hoekstra²

2022

Front. Hum. Dyn.

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That's a different story: comparing letters and oral accounts of Dutch immigrants in New Zealand

Comello¹

2012

The History of the Family

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This paper examines how a combination of contemporary letters and retrospective interviews can shed light on the ways in which immigrants made and continue to make sense of their migration experiences. For immigrants of the later 20th century, research tends to focus on interviews, whereas contemporary egodocuments have often been overlooked. This paper aims to contribute to a reverse trend -recently initiated by historians of British emigration Angela McCarthy and Alistair Thomson -by means of a systematic analysis of letters alongside interviews using three theoretical notions derived from oral history debates: retrospectivity, composure and collective memory. In three case-studies of Dutch immigrants who moved to New Zealand in the 1950s and early 1960s, letter and interview materials will be compared and contrasted, focusing especially on the relationship between expectations and achievements. The combination of both types of sources offers a long-term perspective that makes clear that at various stages of the life course, different and sometimes even contradicting and ambiguous perspectives existed. But the value of these sources goes beyond the letters as an account of the past and interviews as an account of the present. They also complement each other by offering insights that help understand the information in the other sources. This study concludes that an integrated and systematic analysis of both sources can offer a rich perspective on the ways in which migrants try to make sense of their experiences, leading to better understanding of often contradictory accounts in which their own expectations, plans, successes and hardships -and those of others -play changing roles. It is well possible that a similar approach can also prove to be interesting for other topics in the field of migration studies, such as integration and identity-formation.

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Aanpassen and invisibility: being Dutch in post-war Australia

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Migrant visibility: Digitization and heritage policies

Migrant visibility: Digitization and heritage policies

That's a different story: comparing letters and oral accounts of Dutch immigrants in New Zealand

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