Towards sanctuary: securing refugees and forced migrants in multicultural Australia

The notion of sanctuary has been an integral part of the history of Europeans' presence in Australia, since the earliest interactions between Aboriginal inhabitants and Dutch sailors lost near the western coast. Throughout the nineteenth century, new arrivals (whether convicts, free settlers or participants in organised migration schemes) continued to arrive with the hope that Australia would offer them economic opportunity and safety. Indeed, whilst Europeans forcibly displaced Australia's Indigenous population, the white colonies came to reimagine themselves as one part of a global network of settler societies that offered new opportunity to fashion a more just world. The chapters in this collection focus on the period following the development of Australia's vaunted multicultural model. Contributors interrogate how the experience of receiving sanctuary and refuge affects the formation and expression of refugees' and forced migrants' identities in Australia. In doing so, it focuses on the frequent disjuncture between receiving official sanctuary and feeling secure in one's self and community. The collection deliberately blurs the legal distinctions between migrants and refugees in order to engage more directly with subjectivities of new arrivals' lived experience and social networks in their new homes