Settled and Unsettled: The Spirit of Enterprise Project as (Post)Settler-Colonial Memory Activism

Abstract

From 1970 to 1992, the Springvale Enterprise Hostel in Melbourne’s southeast offered settlement services and temporary accommodation for refugees and migrants to Australia. This chapter looks at the development of the Spirit of Enterprise memory project, from its origins as temporary exhibition at the Immigration Museum, to an online history website containing oral histories, and now a public memorial and heritage trail. It explores the ways narratives of settlement have been consciously mobilized to project a golden age of multicultural welcome, highlighting the contrast with Australia’s brutal asylum seeker policy in the present.