Leaving: A memoir

BACKGROUND The essay, Leaving: A memoir (part of a much larger family memoir-in-progress) was published in the highly respected quarterly literary journal, Kill Your Darlings. The work provides an assault to media fixations on the migrant that emerge as monolithic symbols of violence and victimhood. It is an attempt to speak back to gendered and racialised stereotypes of 'the other'. Authors such as Raimond Gaita, Kristina Olssen and Mammad Aidani have adopted a similar 'memoirist' approach to narrating social history. Like theirs, this work acts as a cultural artefact, a first-person narrative that will be formative in describing new generations of migrants in Australia. CONTRIBUTION This work about a family's story of migration to Australia forms part of the social history fabric of Victoria in the 1970s. During this period, the dominant narrative was of refugees fleeing the Indochina War and Khmer Rouge regime from countries such as Vietnam and Kampuchea. While these histories are significant to our understanding of migration, Leaving presents an alternative story of migrant resettlement from a region of south-east Asia often overlooked in popular and scholarly engagements on migration - Borneo. The recounting of this family's journey reworks archival material to present the hidden dimensions of history in a more familiar narrative form for diverse audiences. This work represents an innovative alternative to foreground migrant diversity and the diasporic nature of displacement for this region. The work acts as a 'cross over text' that merges academic scholarship with popular forms. SIGNIFICANCE Recognised through a manuscript sponsorship award from the University of Melbourne Writing Centre for Scholars and Researchers, and an Australian Society of Authors' mentorship award, as one of '15 writers of great promise' selected from 209 eligible entries in 2010. The award winning essay forms part of the permanent collection of Melbourne's Immigration Museum.