ABSTRACT
In this concluding chapter, Australia’s multiculturalist framing of migrant heritage is described as one based on a narrative of migrant arrival and settlement that excludes the history of ongoing engagement by migrants in the life of their origin countries. This is compared with China’s interpretation of the many old buildings constructed by ‘overseas Chinese’ in their home villages and towns as representing their ongoing loyalty to China. It is argued that both approaches are fundamentally nationalist. This book’s framing of migration heritage in terms of cross-border flows is offered as an alternative. As an illustration of these flows, and of the heritage corridor approach, an account is given of the connectivity between a particular street in Sydney’s Chinatown and a street in downtown Zhongshan. Tim Ingold’s ‘meshwork’ concept is then discussed in relation to its usefulness in depicting, from a material heritage perspective, the mobility of migrant lives and the links between migrant-associated sites situated at either end of a migration corridor. The chapter concludes with a proposition for using the meshwork concept in the development of a museum of Chinese migration to be situated in a building in Sydney’s Chinatown that formerly housed a remittance agency.
