ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the idea that we come to know ourselves through knowing others. This provides an ethical basis for a discussion of museum engagements with the contemporary refugee crisis and its attendant discourse of fear of the ‘other’. It is focused on practice in Australia, which has seen a marked increase in the arrival of asylum seekers by boat, in perilous journeys that – just as in the Mediterranean – have seen many deaths. As in Europe, successive Australian governments have sought to ‘stop the boats’. By doing so they have responded to, and helped shape, a discourse of fear of the stranger, and particularly the Muslim. Instead of positively valuing encounters across difference, this promotes the primal importance of the homeland as a place of stasis, its citizens bounded by commonality and, ideally, untouched by the worlds of others. This chapter then explores some of the ways museum exhibition practices are engaging with the contemporary global movements of refugees and, in so doing, are encouraging people to consider difference in an informed and positive manner.
In particular, it looks at two aspects of these practices: one is concerned with questions of representation of the empirical reality of the global movement of refugees; the other with how particular dispositions towards ‘others’ are being shaped. These practices are explored using two exhibitions at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne.
