This paper discusses approaches to exhibiting diversity explored in an Australian Research Council Linkage project called Migration Memories: Creating and analysing collaborative museum representations of Australian migration histories. The project was based at The Australian National University in partnership with the National Museum of Australia (NMA) from 2005 to 2008. It explored alternatives to the ‘celebration of diversity’ paradigm typical of multicultural discourse and the individualisation of difference required by the ‘consensus’ model promoted in social cohesion policy. Drawing on the research, I suggest reframing diversity as an interaction between different social-historical positions and experiences. I argue that it can be achieved through interventions in the practice of exhibition-making, such as those tried in Migration Memories.^[2]

Migration Memories’ interventions rested on ‘undoing’ ethnicity as the established category of difference in migration exhibitions and asserting other aspects of distinction and potential engagement. The exhibitions created in the research process investigated the use of the historical, the local and the personal as distinct vantage points from which migration might be seen and felt in many different ways across time and place. As my discussion shows, they did this primarily by working with agency, collaboration and imagination as key elements of exhibition development and design.

My discussion, as with the Migration Memories research itself, is offered in the spirit of contributing to a museum exhibition practice that has grown from the aspirations of multiculturalism as an alternative to monoculturalism and assimilationist policies.^[3] My investigation of alternative forms of exhibiting diversity, while critiquing aspects of this practice, has the same intentions to democratise interpretations of Australian history and culture. The first part of my paper provides a brief overview of the research project and situates it within the wider history of multiculturalist discourses and their impact on Australian migration exhibitions. It also sets out the theoretical underpinnings of the research and shows how these have been taken up in practice. The second part concentrates on the critical aspects of practice I have identified as agency, collaboration and imagination, and discusses aspects of working with the personal in historical context, the personal meaning of objects and the local as a frame of reference. In conclusion, I draw together key threads of the research to highlight the practical dimensions of exhibiting diversity as an interaction between different social-historical positions and experiences.

My role in the Migration Memories project was that of project researcher and curator of the three exhibitions made as part of the research. I came to the project as a curator of social history, with a historian’s interest in narrative and an oral historian’s interest in what individuals made of their experience; the stories they told and the discourses they drew on. I also brought a writer’s perspective to the shaping of story and the selection of strategies for engaging an audience’s imagination. My interest was in establishing a collaborative approach to research in which the knowledge and experience of all participants produced what was discovered and made. In the exhibitions, the active role of the participants who developed their stories with me for display was made clear by using text that was distinctly authored by them and by me. In this way, their personal experience and point of view were voiced independently rather than as ‘quotations’. In the same spirit, I use pieces from the participants’ exhibition texts throughout this paper to give a sense of the material that informs it, but does not exist for it or within its frame.^[4] My intention is to provide a glimpse of the voices and stories that made Migration Memories. In the context of this paper, it is a subtle dialogue—more poetic than literal—a reminder of conversation rather than a performance of it.