This thesis is a genealogical exploration into a second-generation immigrant writer’s identity through critical and creative writing. It (re)traces the author’s own familial immigrant experience via select contemporary literature and multicultural works, analysing key theoretical ideas and critical scholarly texts by intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Marianne Hirsch, Madelaine Hron and Gaston Bachelard. The thesis also explores and produces creative works on the themes of death and memory, place and trauma, journey and home. Chapter One, discusses death photography as the site of trauma and the “wound” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 26), and the resulting narratives produced as a response to the “punctum” (27) through the analysis of specific photographic works and texts by Chinese-Australian artist William Yang, French theorist Roland Barthes, and Australian photography curator, historian and writer, Helen Ennis. The chapter also introduces the writer’s own idea of “the personal punctum” building on the Barthesian notion of the power existing within death photographs and the “triggering” of memories through “photo elicitation” (Harper 2002) for their potential in the creation of fictional narrative. Chapter Two, through textual analysis of two contemporary Asian-Australian writers, Alice Pung’s memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) and Nam Le’s fictional short story “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (2009), trauma and second-generation immigrant writing about place, explicitly the landscape and familial homeland as “traumascape” (Tumarkin 12), are examined . The section focusses on the inter-generational effects of trauma and “postmemories of place” (own term), and the conflict arising with the appropriation of survivors’ testimonies. Chapter Three, investigates the trauma and pain as a result of the “journey” (Hron 15) in the immigrant narrative genre. It explores the ideas of “topography” and “topoanalysis” with the mapping of the first-generation immigrant’s journey back to the homeland. The emigrant’s/immigrant’s journey and the realities of the old homeland and the new imagined home are discussed through Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival (2006), and Péter Forgács’ documentary Hunky Blues (2009), about the Hungarian mass migration to America. Framing the dissertation are selected creative works. The non-fiction interleaves are bridging devices, linking critical theory with creative practice, enabling meditation on the aforementioned critical themes provoked by my father’s death. The fiction includes chapters from Our Fathers, a contemporary-historical novel of a boy escaping post revolution Hungary, and his death in Brisbane fifty years on. The fiction ties both past and present through themes of family history, trauma, inter-generational transfer of memories and postmemories, place, and the idea of home.

Terrorism and atrocities have scarred the public memory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Three atrocities, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania, Australia, and the 2002 Bali bombings, had a significant impact on the communities they most affected. How did the differing governments and communities at these sites respond to the sudden loss of life? How were the competing agendas of these groups managed ? Are there shared and distinctive characteristics in the memorialisation of atrocitites across these countries at the turn of the millenium? In responding to these questions, this study analyses cultural differences in memorialisation at contemporary atrocity sites. It examines the differing responses at the case study sites to the planning and the timing of memorials, the engagement of those affected, the memorial designs and the management of the memorials, including tributes. It is an original comparative study of contemporary memorialisation by a heritage professional directly involved in the management of memorials at contemporary atrocity sites. The original research includes the identification of the role the internet in contemporary memorialisation, an in-depth analysis of the memorialisation of the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur Historic Site, and the memorialisation in Bali and across Australia of the 2002 Bali bombings. It extends the current scholarship on the memorialisation of the Oklahoma City bombing through identifying the impact of the internet in the memorialisation and in the timeframe of the analysis through to the 15th anniversary in 2010. The comparative analysis of the management of tributes at all the sites identified issues not previously considered in Australian scholarship: that tributes and the response to them is part of the memorialisation and management of contemporary atrocity sites. A combined research method based on an interpretive social science approach was adopted. A range of methodogies were used, including literature reviews, analysis of electronic material, site visits, unstructured in-depth interviews, and participant-observation at memorial services. Studies on history, memory and memorialisation provided the framework for my analysis and led to an original proposal, that all three sites have shared histories of the memorialisation of war and ‘missing’ memorialisation. These shared histories, I argue, strengthened the justification for this comparative study. This comparative study identified differences across the case study countries in the designs of the built memorials, in legislation enacted after the atrocities, the responses to the perpetrators, the marking of anniversaries, and in the management of tributes left at the sites. These…