Migration Memories

Migration Memories is a research project about creating museum exhibitions of Australian migration history from local and personal perspectives. As the idea was to try out some approaches in practice, exhibitions were developed in two regional locations with individuals interested in developing a personal migration story for display. The two regional locations were Lightning Ridge, an opal mining town in central north NSW, and Robinvale, a horticultural town on the Murray River in north western Victoria. The personal stories were chosen to show migration as an aspect of Australian history that reverberates in some way for all Australians. They covered migration histories from the colonial period to the present and included the impact of colonising migrations on Indigenous peoples’ movements within Australia. They were developed from the participants’ own experience, or their understanding of a forebear’s experience, or their sense of the experience of people of the past who had inhabited a place that is dear to them. Seven personal stories were developed for each local exhibition. Research material for analysis and discussion was provided by documentation of the process of exhibition development, the exhibitions themselves and conversations with visitors

Personal histories/collective biography: ideas for a biography of place suggested by two local exhibitions of personal migration histories

The Migration Memories exhibitions were a collection of migration biographies, rather than a collective biography, but the ways in which local people engaged with them and articulated their responses them reflected understandings of the collective. One strand of responses highlighted collective practices and understandings of cultural diversity, suggesting strong distinctions between the ways in which Lightning Ridge and Robinvale ‘do’ and express their cultural diversity. Another strand of responses concerned the exhibition as an experience of engagement with fellow residents and suggested an active inquiry about ‘you’ and ‘me’ and our relationship in this place. Nezaket Shulz in Lightning Ridge spoke most eloquently in these terms: ‘It’s like I think you have walked into a huge living room and there are all these people who have all known each other and who thought they knew each other. But... [the exhibition] actually connected some of them more to each other by reintroducing them to each other… Even though one has known them, but never actually known what their connection to something else - to the bigger picture - was.’2 In this paper I’m working with both sets of responses; those that highlighted practices of cultural diversity and those that reflect the story-making of collective biography – not just putting myself in the picture but drawing (and re-drawing) the picture of us

Translations: experiments in dialogic representation of cultural diversity in three museum sound installations

Using the example of three experimental museum sound installations, this paper discusses the translation into practice of the intention to make meaningful connections between diverse social positions and experiences. We use the term ‘dialogic’ to theorise these interactive intentions and show them at work in the content, development processes and form of the sound installations. Our discussion is framed by the collaboration between the authors across the disciplines of museum studies and creative practice

Gungahlin on a Plate - Stories of Land and Identity in a New Suburb

The author describes her role in the community project to represent Gungahlin, a new suburb of Canberra in the ACT, through writing and images

The development of a tool for slaughterhouses to measure how well pathogens are controlled in the pork production chain

A web based assessment tool has been developed for slaughterhouses to assess how well pathogens are controlled in their process. The scoring available in the assessment is linked to the quality and weight of scientific evidence supporting the use of certain practices and their measurable effect on pathogen levels and is awarded in response to objective evidence on their implementation. The scientific evidence supporting the scoring is accessible from the tool to encourage the development of improved practices. The UK results for an EU survey of salmonella levels on pork carcasses carried out in 2006/7 (EFSA 2008) is being used as baseline value against which the effect of using the tool and improving scores can be measured

Migration exhibitions and the question of identity: reflections on the history of the representation of migration in Australian museums, 1986-2011

Museums and Migration explores the ways in which museum spaces - local, regional, national - have engaged with the history of migration, including internal migration, emigration and immigration

New Evidence on the Palaeobiology of the Eureka Sound Formation, Arctic Canada

The Eureka Sound Formation, a thick sedimentary unit in the Canadian Arctic having a late Cretaceous and/or early Tertiary age, is known to contain plant fossils indicative of a continental origin of deposition and a relatively temperate climate. The Formation was selected for a palaeontological survey in order to determine whether it could, as suggested by distribution of fossil vertebrates in other areas and from evidence of plate tectonics, provide evidence on terrestrial migrations between North America and Europe in the Palaeogene. Fossils of plants, invertebrates and fish were found. They indicated that large parts of the Formation are marine in origin, although other parts are continental and thus could still be interpreted as representing part of a land connection between the northern landmasses

The L1Md long interspersed repeat family in the mouse: almost all examples are truncated at one end

Caractérisation d'un grand élément répétitif détecté en sept localisations différentes dans le locus globine β de la souris Balb/C. Cette répétition possède la même extrémité de l'élément conservé alors que l'autre extrémité se termine en un point différent chez chaque membre de cette famille de répétitions

Electrical characterization of gel collected from shark electrosensors

To investigate the physical mechanism of the electric sense, we present an initial electrical characterization of the glycoprotein gel that fills the electrosensitive organs of marine elasmobranchs ͑sharks, skates, and rays͒. We have collected samples of this gel, postmortem, from three shark species, and removed the majority of dissolved salts in one sample via dialysis. Here we present the results of dc conductivity measurements, low-frequency impedance spectroscopy, and electrophoresis. Electrophoresis shows a range of large proteinbased molecules fitting the expectations of glycoproteins, but the gels of different species exhibit little similarity. The electrophoresis signature is unaffected by thermal cycling and measurement currents. The dc data were collected at various temperatures, and at various electric and magnetic fields, showing consistency with the properties of seawater. The impedance data collected from a dialyzed sample, however, show large values of static permittivity and a loss peak corresponding to an unusually long relaxation time, about 1 ms. The exact role of the gel is still unknown, but our results suggest its bulk properties are well matched to the sensing mechanism, as the minimum response time of an entire electric organ is on the order of 5 ms