RE-ORIENT: RECLAIMING SPACES THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHIC SELF-PORTRAITURE

On a bend along the Yarra River a white tent was erected in 1837, 5 years after the founding of Melbourne. What stands there today, is a 150-year-old grandiose white building called the Customs House. It was built, like the tent, on the unceded Aboriginal lands of the Woi wurrung people. From controlling what was brought into the country, the Customs House gained power to also control immigration into Victoria. Famous for ‘The Dictation Test’, immigrants were required to a pass a language test in any European language other than their own. The customs officers were able to exclude all non-Europeans, and thus the early beginnings of the White Australia Policy. The physical building is one of the most continuous in the English colonial tradition, with its towering architecture and stark whiteness profoundly defining who belongs in the building. For the past 25 years, it has been home to the Immigration Museum, a place that celebrates and nurtures the stories and collective histories of First Peoples, migrants and their descendants within Victoria. Re-Orient is a site-specific self-portrait photographic project set within this building that explores post-colonial identity and migration. As a female Eurasian Australian artist, I perform my cultural gendered identity and ‘re-orient’ myself through the physical spaces of the museum. The project is shaped by my own family’s migrant journeys – and the knowledge that my ancestors would not be welcome – along with the museum’s archival migrant images and stories, to further recognise the transnational histories that shape Melbourne. This paper weaves together photography with empirical research, discussing how phenomenological and performance-based methodologies are instrumental in reclaiming and redefining colonial spaces. It presents how the Eurasian body can shift our understanding of territories and identities, and how the photograph can represent a re-imaging of cultural identities.