Immigrant Industry - by Anoma Pieris & Mirjana Lozanovska & Alexandra Dellios & Andrew Saniga (Paperback)

About the Book

"After the end of the Second World War, migrants were critical to the spatial making of modern Australia. Major federally funded industries driving postwar nation-building programs depended on the employment of large numbers of people who had been displaced by the war. Directed to remote, rural and urban industrial sites, migrant labor and resettlement altered the nation's physical landscape, providing Australia with its contemporary economic base. While the immigrant contribution to nation-building in cultural terms is well-known, its everyday spatial, architectural and landscape transformations remain unexamined. This book aims to bring to the foreground postwar industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shaping of the built environment"--

Book Synopsis

After the end of the Second World War, migrants were critical to the spatial making of modern Australia. Major federally funded industries driving postwar nation-building programs depended on the employment of large numbers of people who had been displaced by the war. Directed to remote, rural and urban industrial sites, migrant labor and resettlement altered the nation's physical landscape, providing Australia with its contemporary economic base. While the immigrant contribution to nation-building in cultural terms is well-known, its everyday spatial, architectural and landscape transformations remain unexamined. This book aims to bring to the foreground postwar industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shaping of the built environment.

Review Quotes

"This is an excellent book that makes a crucial scholarly contribution in an understudied subject area. It makes a strong and nuanced argument for reinserting a focus on the built environment to critical heritage studies." - Andrew Johnston, University of Virginia

"This is an excellent collection that opens many avenues for further research. The chapters draw on a range of disciplinary writings as well as more theoretical conceptual critics... (and) the authors are truly knowledgeable concerning the work on migration studies." - Snjea Gunew, University of British Columbia

About the Author

Dr Alexandra Dellios is a historian and senior lecturer in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Her latest book is Heritage Making and Migrant Subjects in the Deindustrialising Region of the Latrobe Valley (Cambridge University Press, 2022).