‘I Am Responsible’: Histories of the Intersection of the Guardianship of Unaccompanied Child Refugees and the Australian Border

In Australia in 1946, the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act was passed. This Act was intended to support the postwar migration to Australia of British children, unaccompanied by their parents, and to provide them with a guardian in Australia—the Immigration Minister. Despite subsequent amendments, this key provision continues. Children who attempt to migrate to Australia unaccompanied by adult family members are subject to the minister’s guardianship. In 1948 Arthur Calwell, the then Minister for Immigration, described himself in parliament as the ‘father’ of these such children. This article focuses on the period from the 1970s to explore what this notion of fatherhood entails. What can it tell us about how children, families and the role of the minister in child refugee policies, have been imagined? I examine how the Act functions as a form of biopolitics, to discipline and regulate intimate relations for child refugees. The article asks how the Act produces a set of historically specific interdependent relationships and highlights the ways successive governments have subordinated concerns for the ‘best interests of the child’ to concerns of the policing of the Australian border

Intersectionality, Resistance, and History-Making: A Conversation Between Carolyn D'Cruz, Ruth DeSouza, Samia Khatun, and Crystal McKinnon, Facilitated by Jordana Silverstein

A good, solid, history-writing practice is one which, I think, shakes people's ideas of the world and their place in it, compelling them to imagine new social, cultural and political formations which can provide an account of life. Kimberle Crenshaw's development of the term 'intersectionality', and the ways it has been taken up by people of colour within the academy internationally, as well as by activists, provides one example of such imaginative work. Because when you spend some time in the Australian History academic scene, at conferences, in departments, talking to other academics, it's quickly noticeable that one of its key features is its hegemonic whiteness. Even in those spaces that aspire to avoid whiteness, it's inescapable, visible daily, as well as in the themes at conferences, the keynote speakers chosen, the food served, the knowledge shared. When it came time for the Australian Women's History Network conference in 2016, which carried the theme of 'Intersections in History', it felt like this could provide a way of modelling a different kind of Australian academic History space. What would a conversation look like that skipped over the presence of white Anglo Australians, I wondered? What if we just left them to the side? What if we gathered together some of the smartest, sharpest thinkers in Melbourne academia, and spoke amongst ourselves, coming up with new formations of knowledge? And so we did: Crystal, Samia, Ruth and Carolyn gathered together, I asked them some questions, and we had a conversation that, in numerous ways, challenged white hegemonies. We've recreated some of that conversation below, as a way of continuing to think together, and to find new ways of making this thinking public