The place of the migrant : heritage and ethics in the transnational space of a Sydney park

This chapter focuses on migrant placemaking in Sydney, Australia, looking not at built space but at the natural environment of a national park and the ways recently arrived immigrants have made a place for themselves there by virtue of repetitive acts of embodied presence. The ethical question of how migrants acquire a place-based heritage in their destination locale is interesting in that it implicitly challenges the conventional notion of heritage as something inherited rather than something made. Transnationalism is a concept with significant implications for the way national parks are socially constituted in Australia: the parks draw migrants to them but park space is also drawn into transnational space. If picnics sites have this aspect of emphemerality, it may also be said that national parks are attractive to recent migrants partly because they constitute what Catharine Ward Thompson calls ‘loose space’ – spaces that are not ‘fixed’ or ‘constrained’ in the way that built urban space tends to be