Great Southern Accord

The premise

A nation is an agreement between the people already here and the people still arriving.

Australia's story is not one migration but hundreds of overlapping ones — beginning with the oldest living cultures on earth and continuing through every ship, every assisted passage, every airport arrivals hall. We collect the documents and the memories side by side, because the paperwork rarely records what it cost to leave.

Chapters

Five movements of arrival

Australia's story is not one migration but hundreds of overlapping ones. These are the movements the archive follows.

  1. 01

    Country Before Ships

    60,000 years

    The oldest continuous cultures on earth — songlines, seasons and custodianship that long predate any map of this coast.

  2. 02

    Sail, Sentence & Settlement

    1788 — 1868

    Convict transports, free settlers and the frontier: the first uneasy century of a colony built on other people's country.

  3. 03

    Gold and the World Arriving

    1851 — 1900

    Ballarat and Bendigo drew Cornish, Chinese, Irish and German diggers. Australia became plural long before it admitted it.

  4. 04

    The New Australians

    1947 — 1975

    Two million people from displaced-persons camps and Mediterranean villages. Bonegilla, the Snowy, the milk bar, the ten-pound passage.

  5. 05

    Boats, Planes & Belonging

    1975 — today

    Vietnamese, Lebanese, Sudanese, Indian, Afghan. The argument about who counts as Australian is itself part of the history.

From the collection

Photographs, manifests and the evidence of ordinary courage

Migrant families disembarking an ocean liner at an Australian wharf in 1951
Port Melbourne, 1951New Australians walk down the gangway with everything they own in two cases.
Workers of many nationalities at a Snowy Mountains Scheme tunnel entrance
Snowy Mountains, 1957Thirty nationalities underground together — the country's first real multicultural workplace.
A worn suitcase beside a handwritten passenger manifest and a landing permit
Papers, undatedA name, an age, a trade. Often the only surviving record of a whole life's turning point.
7.6M
People who migrated to Australia since 1945
320,000
Migrants passed through Bonegilla reception centre
100,000
Workers of 30+ nationalities on the Snowy Scheme
300+
Ancestries recorded in the census today
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