Migration Parks and Monuments to Multiculturalism Finding the Challenge to Australian Heritage Discourses through Community Public History Practice Alexandra Dellios ABSTRACT: In this article, I “read against the grain” of a monument to post-WWII immigration and migrant communities. I am concerned with how such monuments, locally situated, might be used in more progressive and transformative histories, ones that harbor the potential to challenge existing public and collective memories of postwar migration and multiculturalism that occur on a national stage and within the ambit of Australia’s heritage industry. This is a study in how discursively marginalized migrant groups, with subaltern narratives about mobility and settlement, claim space for alternative histories in the context of a restrictive official heritage. KEY WORDS: multiculturalism, heritage, migration, monument, ethnic In this article, I intentionally read against the grain of a monument to migration: the Gippsland Immigration Park, which was erected by a community group in south- eastern Australia in the coal-rich region of the Latrobe Valley. I am concerned with how community-initiated monuments might contribute to progressive and trans- formative histories, ones that harbor the potential to challenge existing public and collective memories of postwar migration and multiculturalism that occur on a national stage and within the ambit of Australia’s heritage industry. “Industry” refers to various national and state heritage bodies, the lists and registers they police, and the national and international (ICOMOS) charters and definitions to which they adhere. This realm of heritage legislation and the discourse it produces is one manifestation of “heritage” in which we can see how versions of the past are intimately connected to cultural power, as David C. Harvey has argued. 1 My con- cern over migration history’s encounter with the heritage industry, and the indus- try’s complicity with the state policy of multiculturalism, rests with the limitations and obfuscations it may produce: that is, the loss of marginalized, and especially THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 7–32 (May 2020). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576.  2020 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.2.7. 1 David C. Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 319–38. 7