‘Welcome to Australia’ reading images of refugees

Benjamin Thomas White’s lucid examinations of historical and contemporary images of refugees clearly demonstrates the complexities of reading images and the importance of historical analysis. (You can read them here: part one, two, three, and refugee camps.) Given how readily images, particularly photographs, populate our physical and digital worlds, it is through a detailed historical analysis of images that we can better understand the place of the visual in making, and remaking, social and political meaning.

Professor James Grossman (Executive Director of the American Historical Association) said in the Los Angeles Times that ‘Everything has a history. To think historically is to recognize that all problems, all situations, and all institutions exist in contexts that must be understood before informed decisions can be made.’ Here he’s talking about how valuable people with history majors are in workplaces. This is entirely right. In addition, we also need these skills in daily life, and reading images is one place where understanding context is crucial.

When researching how the Australian government has photographed arrivals of displaced people, I found this photograph of five women in Hungarian national dress, on hand to welcome what was called the first ‘freedom flight’ that brought refugees to Australia after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The women surround the Minister for Immigration, Athol Townley, at Sydney airport, awaiting the the Qantas Super Constellation aircraft that carried 83 Hungarian refugees.

I first saw this photo about the same time I was also reading Robert Dixon’s excellent article ‘Citizens and asylum seekers, emotional literacy, rhetorical leadership and human rights’. In this article Dixon focuses on what has become known as the ‘children overboard’ affair – in which during the federal election campaign in 2001 the Australian government used Navy photographs (of asylum seekers being rescued by Navy personal while the boat they had been on was sinking) to make public claims that adults seeking asylum in Australia were throwing children overboard as a tactic to force them to be brought to Australian shores (see Senate Select Committee report).

Refugee and immigration policy and practice was a feature of the election campaign and the spectre of terrorism, after the attacks in the United States on 11 September contributed to concern in the political climate. The campaign included then Prime Minister John Howard’s now well quoted statement: ‘But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

In examining the children overboard case Dixon says it shows how ‘in the conduct and representation of public life, words and images matter…words and images used by politicians and the media…have the power to actively constitute people’s feelings and opinions, and hence their actions’ (p11). I don’t want to suggest any direct and simple comparisons between displaced Hungarians in 1956 and more recent cases of people seeking asylum in Australia – but where I do think this juxtaposition is useful is in demonstrating the ways in which government, through images and words, narrates and frames the experiences of displaced people seeking to immigrate to Australia. It is only by understanding historical contexts that the meaning and purpose of such narratives can be revealed.

Hungarian refugees who were publicly described as putting children at risk when escaping in 1956 were deemed people of ‘fine calibre’ and the Immigration Department worked hard to promote their ‘human stories’ and warmly welcomed them to Australia (see, for e.g. Press Statement Issued by the Minister for Immigration, 27 November 1956 in NAA: C3939, N1955/25/75167 PART 2) . But this was during the Cold War, and a time in which the government needed public support for its immigration program. The context today is vastly different, and ‘protect our boarders’ is the focus. This can be seen in a range of ways as Gwenda Tavan has written and is encapsulated in the name of the department that administers immigration today: the Department of Immigration and Border Security.

In thinking about the welcoming of Hungarian refugees, I do not wish to romanticise the history of Australia’s involvement with migration and displaced people (as Klaus Neumann astutely cautions against), but use it to think about how we should look at images.

This is particularly significant given how easily images can be circulated in the digital age, and that for historians, to try to interpret and understand visual materials we need to examine the variety of contexts in which they were created and appear. The photograph above showing a formally arranged ‘Welcome to Australia’, like others of the Hungarian refugees’ arrival in Sydney that are more casually composed, don’t tell us so much about the refugees themselves, but reveal to us how displaced people were, and continue to be, imaged by others.