British Migrants Research Articles

The hidden historiography of migration and Australian schooling

PurposeDespite Australia’s history as an exemplary migrant nation, there are gaps in the literature and a lack of explicit conceptualisation of either “migrants” or “migration” in the Australian historiography of schooling. The purpose of this paper is to seek out traces of migration history that nevertheless exist in the historiography, despite the apparent silences.Design/methodology/approachTwo foundational yet semi-forgotten twentieth-century historical monographs are re-interpreted to support a rethinking of the relationship between migration and settler colonialism in the history and historiography of Australian schooling.FindingsThese texts, from their different school system (state/Catholic) orientations, are, it is argued, replete with accounts of migration despite their apparent gaps, if read closely. Within them, nineteenth-century British migrants are represented as essentially entitled constituents of the protonation. This is a very different framing from twentieth century histories of migrants as minority or “other”.Originality/valueInstead of an academic reading practice that dismisses and simply supersedes old work, this paper proposes that fresh engagements with texts from the past can yield new insights into the connections between migration, schooling and colonialism. It argues that the historiography of Australian schooling should not simply be expanded to include or encompass the stories of “migrants” within a “minority studies” framework, although there is plenty of useful work yet to be accomplished in that area, but should be re-examined as having been about migration all along.

‘The History That Has Made You’. Ego-Histoire, Autobiography and Postcolonial History

ABSTRACTThis article takes inspiration from the methodology of ego-historie, where political or intellectual history, institutional affiliations and research trajectories are interwoven with personal reflection, to make connections between context and content. In his essay on ego-histoire (2014) John Docker writes of the ‘marrano-like’ figure, the stranger as evoked by Georg Simmel, both inside and outside a group, disturbing it by a kind of abstraction, a freedom to question what others in the group take as given. Here I employ my insider/outsider status as a British migrant and a ‘naturalised’ Australian to reflect on the ambivalent at best and deliberately ignorant, at worst, relationship between contemporary Britain and postcolonial Australia. As the child of immigrants to Australia, who has returned to the ‘mother-country’ as an adult, I use aspects of my autobiography to reconsider the dynamics of colonialism and post-colonialism in these two countries.

Conditional citizens and hostile environments: Polish migrants in pre-Brexit Britain

This article explores recent shifts in the governance of British migration and welfare regimes, considering how far a so called 'authoritarian turn' (Tyler, 2018) in immigration policy has reached into the everyday lives of Polish migrants – a population nominally protected by mobile EU citizenship status in the UK. Theoretically framed by debates about racialised governmentality, everyday bordering and conditionality, the discussion draws on a series of in-depth interviews undertaken with Poles in late 2017 into early 2018. Firstly, the article makes important contributions to understanding how broader hostile environment and welfare bordering policies are affecting people who hold more secure migration statuses – not only those deemed 'illegal' – and how this is in turn shaped both by whiteness and by socio-economic position. It also documents the relevance Brexit has to these developments and the future security of EU citizens. But it also underlines how the protections that freedom of movement extend are currently still significant, despite efforts to erode them. Hostile environment, welfare reforms, even Brexit – these were all present in our respondents' narratives, but not dominant. The discussions analysed here then bring a more nuanced appreciation of how different people come up against the state and the everyday border, as well as how these encounters are made sense of in an interview setting. They highlight the importance of acknowledging a wider range of the sources of power which shape everyday lives, from relationships to experiences in the workplace, in which hostile environment encounters and Brexit anxieties are contextualised.

Introduction to the Special Issue

AbstractIn the period 1815–1870, several thousand British workers and engineers went to the continent for work purposes, playing a decisive part in European industrialisation. Workers emigrated because they could market their skills at good value; or because their British employers sought to make the most of their technical lead by setting businesses up abroad, and by producing on the continent, they could avoid protective tariffs.Which social and cultural factors enabled British capital to flow to continental and indeed global enterprise, British skills to shape labour processes overseas, and British male and female labourers to seek and find overseas employment? This introduction to the Special Issue raises a series of questions on these flows. It asks what numbers went to the continent, in comparison with the large flows to the US and the British World. It addresses the legislative and economic aspects of these labour migrations and tries to relate these to the discussion on the supposed ‘high-wage economy’ of the British industrial revolution. It also focuses on the practicalities of migration. Last, it is also interested in the cultural, religious and associational life of the British migrants, as well as in the relations with the local populations.

“Placing” Space: Exploring the Sociospatial Impacts of Cosmopolitan Place-Marketing Approaches on British Migrants in Spain

This article explores the sociospatial underpinnings of cosmopolitan place-marketing narratives and their impacts on British migrants living in Sitges, an affluent tourist town in Spain. Sitges’ place-marketing suggests that moving there automatically fosters a cosmopolitan identity. For British migrants in Sitges, this was understood to be exemplified through integration into the local community. Yet the vast majority found such integration impossible, not least because this conceptualization of cosmopolitanism overlooked the subjectivity of locals themselves, by whom they were most often rejected. It is argued that this mismatch between British migrants’ experiences and Sitges’ cosmopolitan place-marketing occurs because it relies on an understanding of subjective identity as generated locationally, enacted via movement to a specific “type” of place that incorporates particular understandings of space, place, and culture in relation to that identity. This overrides the necessity of relationality, undermining the ideal of reflexive identity-making on which cosmopolitan place-marketing narratives rely.

18세기 영국의 대서양 노예무역과 아프리카 음식의 월경(越境)

18세기 영국의 대서양 노예무역과 아프리카 음식의 월경(越境)

The Welsh and the medieval world by Patricia Skinner (review)

106 North American journal of Celtic Studies ation. One aspect of this concerns kingship; in Chapter Four, Adomnán is shown to have presented Columba as a new Samuel to try to shape the concept of kingship among the Picts in the late seventh and early eighth centuries (169–173). By the time of Uunust son of Uurgust, king of the Picts and probable commissioner of the St. Andrews sarcophagus (d. 761), Márkus suggests that the Pictish kings had adopted this Christian model to the extent that he wonders ‘if Psalm 44 had become a kind of royal anthem in Pictland’ (251). The process continued through the ninth century, with the adoption of the name Constantine by the kings of the Picts/Alba being presented as a sign that they had adopted the first Christian Roman emperor ‘as a paradigm for the proper behavior of a ruler in church affairs’ (275). Having dismissed the idea that Scotland was born out of ethnic conflict , Márkus seems, thus, to suggest that Christianity and the institutional Church offer an alternative framework within which to understand the conception of the kingdom. Whether this argument will win favor is yet to be seen. What is clear currently is that Márkus has written a book that is both accessible and thought-provoking. With this addition to two other recent works on early Scotland—James Fraser’s From Caledonia to Pictland. Scotland to 795 and Alex Woolf’s From Pictland to Alba. 789–1070—students of the early medieval history of northern Britain are exceptionally well provisioned to take on the unique problems of the discipline. The Welsh and the medieval world, ed. Patricia Skinner. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018. ISBN 978–1–78683–189–7. xiii + 336 pages. ₤29.99 (paperback). Joshua Byron Smith University of Arkansas The Welsh and the medieval world explores ‘how the Welsh interacted with and made their mark on the medieval world through their expertise, creativity, and enterprise’ (1). This clear, yet broad, theme lends these chapters a coherence too often not found in edited collections. Patricia Skinner deserves commendation for drawing on experts in literature , history, and archeology to compile a volume that surely will offer something new to any reader, regardless of discipline. Moreover, The Welsh and the medieval world shows that Wales has much to contribute to recent scholarly conversations about the global and transnational Middle Ages. Part I concerns the Welsh and their immediate neighbors, the English. Janet Kay’s opening chapter, ‘Moving from Wales and the west in the fifth century. Isotope evidence for eastward migration in Britain’, unsettles some old paradigms about British migration in the long fifth century. Using the analysis of stable isotopes found in skeletal remains, she shows that the unidirectional narrative of migration—in which the native British flee Joshua Byron Smith [jbs016@​ uark​ .edu] is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas . He is the author of Walter Map and the matter of Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). His research focuses on the multilingual literature of high medieval Britain. Reviews 107 westwards, pushed by the arrival of Germanic peoples from the continent—is in serious need of revision. Surprisingly, in some parts of fifth-century Britain, ‘the dominant migration narrative was one of movements from Wales and the west to the eastern lowlands , rather than the other way around’ (38). Aristocratic migration is the topic of Emma Cavell’s chapter, ‘Emma d’Audley and the clash of laws in thirteenth-century northern Powys’, which is a welcome study of Emma d’Audley, a Marcher noblewoman who married into a ruling Welsh family. Cavell focuses on the later part of Emma’s life, when she found herself widowed and embroiled in legal proceedings that pitted her against her own children and Welsh relatives. Emma, Cavell argues, helped further connections between Wales and England, and she was also an agent of change herself, pursuing justice through an innovative mix of English and Welsh law. Moving from gentry to clergy, Rhun Emlyn’s following chapter, ‘Migration and integration. Welsh secular clergy in England in the fifteenth century’, uses the ordination lists of bishops’ registers to...

‘Swimming instruction trust of America’: the Cavill family, borderlands and decentring Australia sport history

ABSTRACTThe Cavill family of swimmers has been recognised as the ‘first family of Australian swimming’ because of their reputation and achievements as competitive swimmers and for their contributions to swimming promotion, stroke development and instruction in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. As a family of British migrants based in Sydney, their memory focuses on Anglo-Australian connections. This emphasis overlooks the American dimension of the Cavill legacy – several family members lived, and died, in the USA and made important contributions to swimming in that country, where they were also celebrated as preeminent figures. This article adopts a transnational perspective, particularly borderlands history approaches, to examine this American connection, viewing the, trans-Pacific crossing from Sydney to San Francisco as an under-appreciated sport border zone. The focus is on contributions made to swimming coaching and teaching, with a biographical spotlight on Percy and Sid Cavill, siblings who contributed in these areas over two decades on both sides of the country. By repositioning Australia and the USA in the Cavill swimming narrative, this article contributes to decentring the nation in this realm of sport history.

The portability of social rights of the United Kingdom with the European Union: Facts, issues, and prospects

The portability of social benefits – such as the state pension, child allowances and unemployment benefits – for international migrants is regulated by social security agreements concluded between countries or at supra-national level, such as within the European Economic Area (EEA). Focusing on the United Kingdom, this article aims at capturing the main issues that have been recently raised by such agreements, with particular emphasis on the case of migration between the UK and Europe. The first part of the paper summarises the main consideration researchers and policy makers should bear in mind in looking at portability. Using data from the 2013 World Bank migration matrix, the second part of the paper compares the stock of British migrants residing abroad and the stock of foreigners living in the United Kingdom. The third part of the paper summarises the main issues that were raised in relation to the EEA multilateral agreement including the notion of residence, the state pension, family allowances, and the portability of health care benefits. The conclusions highlight the main concerns and options that lie ahead following the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union.

Regimes of language, whiteness and social class: The negotiation of sociolinguistic privileges by British migrants in rural France

This ethnographic study of British migration in rural Brittany (France) reveals that the British benefit from positive attitudes towards their language, opening opportunities for them to access resources in English – a rare exception to the local monolingual ideology. The paper argues that the English language owes its specific place not only to its supranational status, but also to the consubstantial articulation of whiteness and class categorizations by migrants and the local population. Here, white privilege is built on the sharing of ideologies concerning language, ‘integration’ and otherness, enabling rearrangements of the language regime.

(Un)settling home during the Brexit process

AbstractBuilding upon extensive literature on the concept of home, this article uses narrative interviews to argue that home can be (un)settled. The process of (un)settling home can occur in relation to various circumstances such as widowhood, ill health, or geopolitical changes. This article presents (un)settling home as a process constituted by three intertwined dimensions; practical and material, emotional, and temporal. This article explores how the Brexit process is (un)settling home for older British migrants, a population of lifestyle migrants, living in Spain. This geopolitical event has an ongoing destabilising and unsettling effect upon individual's sense of home and belonging. Brexit is a process experienced simultaneously by older British migrants living across the European Union. Consequently, this article provides useful insights into how these relatively privileged migrants negotiate an unprecedented shift in their status, their uncertain future as lifestyle migrants, and their understandings of home in this shifting geopolitical context.

Tense and the other: Temporality and urban multiculture in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Expressions of concern about the national future, or the surfacing of history through postcolonial melancholia and nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, illustrate how temporality and tense have been absorbed into discourses, affective attachments and practices of cultural recognition and national belonging. First, this paper aims to develop the discussion of urban multiculture in human geography in an original direction through a theoretically‐driven argument for the significance of social divisions of tense. It contributes new knowledge about the availability of this discursive field when the issue of cultural recognition arises. Second, through considering the relational dynamics between settler, Indigenous and exogenous peoples together, the paper ties together debate on migration and ethnicity with indigeneity and colonialism. Third, the paper emphasises the importance of careful attention to local histories, contexts and oppressions when researching conviviality and multiculture in a settler colonial context. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with first‐generation British migrants in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand to examine several illustrative encounters of British migrants with Māori, the Indigenous peoples, and exogenous alterity, a term used to refer to migrants and racialised citizens deemed “foreign.”

National belonging post‐referendum: Britons living in other EU Member States respond to “Brexit”

Following the EU Referendum, this paper tracks how pro‐Remain British migrants living in other EU Member States expressed a sense of shame and dislocation in relation to their national identity. Developed from a survey of 909 British nationals living in other EU Member States, it hopes to make a timely intervention into wider debates about privileged migration, Britishness, citizenship and belonging. First, it outlines a new articulation of the “bad Britain” discourse among emigrants, who saw the UK as increasingly characterised by xenophobia and insularity. Second, it seeks to understand how their national identity and sense of belonging was being renegotiated post‐referendum through a lens attentive to the cultural politics of emotion and innocence as an operation of whiteness.

Selection, adaptation and advantage. Later-life health and wellbeing of English migrants to Australia

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the long-term impact of English adult migration to Australia by comparing health and wellbeing outcomes in later life of English migrants to their counterparts who remained in England (non-migrants) and to native-born Australians. It traces the influence of selection, adaptation and advantage as three mechanisms that can influence migrant health in later life. The analysis utilises data for a cohort aged 60–64 years from the Australian Life Histories and Health (LHH) survey (n = 1088), a sub-study of the Australian 45 and Up Study, in combination with a matched cohort from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) (n = 1139). Social rather than health characteristics were found to play a role in the selection of English migrants. English migrants reported higher subjective quality of life than English non-migrants, and better physical health than the Australian-born, but their mental health outcomes did not significantly differ from the other cohorts. The comparatively better later-life outcomes for the English migrants can partly be linked to advantage, as they hold higher prestige jobs than the Australian-born at lower levels of education.

Australia's Northern Safari

[Extract] Filmed during a 1955 family trip from Perth to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Keith Adams’s Northern Safari showed to packed houses across Australia, and in some overseas locations, across three decades. Essentially a home movie, initially accompanied by live commentary and subsequently by a homemade sound track, it tapped into audiences’ sense of Australia’s north as a place of adventure. In the film Adams interacts with the animals of northern Australia (often by killing them), and while by 1971 the violence apparent in the film was attracting criticism in letters to newspapers, the film remained popular through to the mid-1980s, and was later shown on television in Australia and the United States (Cowan 2; Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 261). A DVD is at present available for purchase from the website of the same name (Northern Safari). Adams and his supporters credited the film’s success to the rugged and adventurous landscape of northern Australia (Northeast vii), characterised by dangerous animals, including venomous spiders, sharks and crocodiles (see Adams, “Aussie”; “Crocodile”). The notion of Australia’s north as a place of rugged adventure was not born with Adams’s film, and that film was certainly not the last production to exploit the region and its wildlife as a source of excitement. Rather, Northern Safari belongs to a long list of adventure narratives whose hunting exploits have helped define the north of Australian as a distinct region and contrast it with the temperate south where most Australians make their lives. This article explores the connection between adventure in Australia’s north and the large animals of the region. Adams’s film capitalised on popular interest in natural history, but his film is only one link in a chain of representations of the Australian north as a place of dangerous and charismatic megafauna. While over time interest shifted from being largely concentrated on the presence of buffalo in the Northern Territory to a fascination with the saltwater crocodiles found more widely in northern Australia that interest in dangerous prey animals is significant to Australia’s northern imaginary.

Rednecks, Norteños, and the Next American Melting Pot?

When Americans are frightened by ethnic or racial polarization, one response is the melting pot, a metaphor for intermarriage. Marriage across ethnic or racial lines turns distrustful groups into contributors to each other’s demographic future. Melting pots have been multiple in American history. While they often have been constrained by racial prejudice, racial intermarriage is now on a slow but steady upswing. Two groups that bear watching are Rednecks, who descend from British migration to what is now the United States, and Nortenos, a term I use to refer to Mexican migration streams that, like Rednecks, have become a cultural model for a wider spectrum of Americans. Both Rednecks and Nortenos originated as frontier populations in which the struggle for survival selected for self-reliance, distrust of government and the family-first principle. While both are beset by pejorative imagery of machismo, racism and criminality, their strong sense of kinship is a sign that they have more in common than might appear. Just as it is a mistake to reduce all relationships between white and black Americans to racism, it is also a mistake to assume that Nortenos and Rednecks are necessarily hostile to each other. Despite the limitations of the melting pot metaphor, it does provide a plausible alternative to racialism.

Negotiating an agentive identity in a British lifestyle migration context: A narrative positioning analysis

This paper presents an analysis of agency and positioning in a context of British migration in the Ariège département of south‐west France. A narrative positioning framework is used to explore the relationship between local discursive positioning and broader social obligations, specifically by integrating data from an online forum for British residents with an interview carried out with two forum users. Although there is thematic coherence across the datasets, particularly in relation to the social obligation to be the ‘right kind’ of migrant, the two speakers in the joint interview represent their actions using conflicting approaches. The analysis of agentive positioning shows the strategic use of both agentive and inagentive language where the narrated actions did not align with those of the ‘right kind’ of migrant constructed by forum members. The study shows how attempts at positive self‐representation can reflect awareness of the ideological context but can nevertheless be interpreted in very different ways. The paper concludes that we should not restrict ourselves to seeking recurrent and stable patterns when exploring indexical links between micro contexts and wider social reality, particularly when the interactional context is overshadowed by a broader moral landscape.

Lifestyle migration and settler colonialism: The imaginative geographies of British migrants to Aotearoa New Zealand

AbstractThis paper explores the imaginative geographies of relatively privileged migrants living in settler societies for their colonial continuities. It responds to a recent call to historicise the cultural significance attached to migration and destinations in lifestyle migration research through an exploration of some of the potential synergies between the newly emergent field of settler colonial studies and lifestyle migration. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with British migrants living in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. First, it examines the ambivalent affective associations of “islandness” and distance, as both insulating and isolating. Second, the paper explores the twinned appreciation of spectacular, empty natural surroundings, and a perception of a “lack” of culture and history. It is argued, first, that the geographical and historical interpellation of the country as “at the end of the world” and as “young” recentres distant Euro‐colonial cultures and decentres Māori cultures. And, second, that the intersections of contemporary lifestyle migration and settler colonialism are an important avenue for future research.

Salvage: Locating Lives in the Migration Museum

ABSTRACTThe ‘Locating Lives’ conference in Adelaide in December 2015 included two off-campus expeditions in its programme: a visit to the Adelaide Migration Museum, and a beach walk to Glenelg. Given the unique oceanic imaginary attached to the Asia Pacific region, museums, beaches and boats are key sites for locating life narratives here. A series of life narratives that feature memories of child migration to Australia in the early sixties are featured here: Jimmy Barnes’ memoir Working Class Boy; the testimonies in the ‘On Their Own – Britain’s Child Migrants’ exhibition that has featured in migration museums in Britain and Australia; Joe Sacco’s essay ‘The Unwanted’; and my own recollections as a British child migrant. Late last century, a turn to ‘human rights museology’ and ‘history from below’ facilitated new migration museums and exhibition spaces such as the Adelaide Migration Museum, that are open to personal testimony and artefacts that locate lives more intimately and experientially. On display, artefacts become evocative objects open to multiple stories of migration, both past and present.

The British on the Costa del Sol Twenty Years On: <i>A story of liquids and sediments</i>

This paper is based on ethnographic research with British migrants in Spain over a 20-year period: a period of mass migration and some return migration. British in Spain, who became a mass media and academic phenomenon during this time, have often been understood as performing liquid or mobile mobilities, and little attention has been given to the long-term impacts of their migration. This paper examines environmental and infrastructural changes in Spain, traces in the shape of abandoned properties and closed-down businesses and also the new long-lasting organisations, institutions and relationships that have emerged and taken on a form of permanence over time and daily practice of these migrants as agents. Drawing on practice theory to draw attention to outcomes of migration, this paper argues that even the most fluid of migrant communities and lifestyles leave sediments and traces that shape the future for prospective migrants and those who are settled.