Histories of constrained compassion: the idealised refugee family and the Australian nation, 1947–1975

By way of introduction to this special issue, I examine the idealised family as a technology of Australia’s white nation-building project in a period of growing internationalism. I place the articles in this context, highlighting their contributions to a history of compassion propelled by Australia’s emerging sense of itself as a global citizen and constrained by a nationalist agenda defined by economic and social aims and informed by a history of racial anxiety. Racialised and gendered productions of the family have been deployed by the Australian nation to embrace, regulate and reject refugees in the period since 1947. This special issue contributes to historicising these techniques and their effects, which remain with us in reconfigured forms in the present.