Why stories?

I’ve been asked now a couple of times – where did the idea for the exhibition come from? Why the stories and pictures? Well, here it is, in a nutshell: I went through the interdependent visa thing myself – in France, early 2008. We downloaded the paperwork, and saw that one of the elements to be provided is a ‘statutory declaration’ where both partners have to tell about their relationships and its history. Trying not to copy each other as much as possible.
As an ex-linguist and still writer, I found that intriguing: how interesting that story-telling should be the basis for the right to migrate. It felt very… antique – memories of when I studied ancient Greek rhetorics, and had to talk about narration as part of the judicial discourse. Anyway, that’s where the idea came from.
And then reinforcements: when we arrived in Melbourne, Philip found a job at the Immigration Museum, and started talking about the ‘share your story’ database; visitors are invited to tell their migration stories (to the computers in the discovery centre) for publication on the Museum Victoria website, or something. Again, migration stories. There must be something about Australians and migration, mmmm, what is it, I wonder?