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R OMULUS, MY F ATHER Context: Exploring Issues of Identity and Belonging Text: Romulus, My Father Prompt: Unknown SA C: One piece; Imaginative, Expository or Persuasive  Written in 2 Periods in Term 4

Romulus INtro ENG 10

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ROMULUS, MY FATHER 

Context: Exploring Issues of Identity and Belonging

Text: Romulus, My Father

Prompt: Unknown

SAC: One piece; Imaginative, Expository or Persuasive

 Written in 2 Periods in Term 4

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BELONGING

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Bound For Bonegilla 

The Age , January 31, 1998ROMULUS and Christina Gaita, and their small son Raimond,were three of the 320,000 migrants and refuges whose firstexperience of Australia was the former army barracks and POW camp at Bonegilla, on the Victorian side of Albury-Wodonga.

The Gaitas arrived at Bonegilla, Australia's biggest migrantreception centre, in 1950.

The camp was dusty, a bare desert covered with corrugated-ironbarracks. People slept in dormitories, sometimes with a blanket

hung up for privacy.

 At its busiest, 10,000 people lived there.

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Romulus Gaita was born in a Romanian-speaking part

of Yugoslavia, and Christina was from GermanyRomulus was typical of the first-wave of post-war European migrants, many of whom

were from Baltic countries."They were the first people to be brought here because

they were considered to be like us. They were fair-skinned´«

From there, Romulus was sent to Baringhup, where he helped dam the Loddon

River. Other migrant men were sent to Queensland to pick fruit or cut cane. Womenwere usually given domestic jobs.

Bonegilla is just one part of a vast story of displacement, migration and new lives

that was Australia in the post-war years. Between October 1945 and June 1959,

almost 1.5 million people came here as permanent or long-term residents. Half a

million had last lived in the UK and Ireland, 208,000 came from Italy, 193,000 from Germany (although many of these were prisoners or refuges, survivors of the

Holocaust who were from other European countries), and 58,000 from Greece.

From 1945 until the end of 1997, 5.6 million people have migrated to Australia.

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BONEGILLA 

The Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre,

established by the Department of Immigration in 1947

to process immigrants before they were permanently 

settled in Australia, was the first, the largest and thelongest operating centre of its kind in Australia.

By the time it closed in 1971, 320,000 migrants had

passed through, remaining for about six weeks on

average, until permanent employment could be foundfor them.

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The clip represents Bonegilla as a benign and

 welcoming environment by depicting it largely through

the activities of three siblings, who are shown skipping

along to the sound of jaunty music as they exploretheir surroundings. This is reinforced by the narrator¶s

motherly tone, the use of phrases such as µnew 

adventure¶ to describe the immigrant experience, and

the portrayal of centre officials as supportive and the

policeman as benevolent rather than authoritarian.

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The experience of many migrants at Bonegilla was

strikingly different from that portrayed in the clip.

They felt completely isolated in rural northern Vic and

the accommodation was basic. It consisted of galvanised-iron or fibro-cement huts, arranged

dormitory-style to sleep about 26 people, with no

heating, sparse furniture and communal bathrooms.

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The clip paints a rosy picture of Bonegilla life ±

however, in 1961, the year before the film was made,

migrants descended on the Centre¶s Commonwealth

employment office with placards reading µWe Want Work¶ to protest a lack of jobs.

 About 100 migrants had been at Bonegilla for more

than five months waiting for jobs and felt misled by the

Department of Immigration¶s promise of employment.

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The family shown in the clip were just a few of the

hundreds of thousands of migrants who were part of 

the Australian Government¶s large-scale post-Second

 World War immigration program.

The Government felt that Australia¶s population of 7

million people needed boosting to improve the

nation¶s economic growth and ensure it could be

defended if attacked. Between 1947 and 1968, 2.3million migrants arrived in Australia.

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 A World for Children may have aimed to promote greater 

acceptance of migrants among Australian children,

particularly as, on leaving centres such as Bonegilla, migrant

children went to school alongside their Australian peers. Therewas still some resistance to non-British migrants based on

 fears that they threatened Australia¶s homogeneity

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BELONGING

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IDENTITY 

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