Curating inclusive cities

We are witnessing a profound challenge to the global city – the rise of the pandemic era has altered many activities, in particular the movement and gathering of people and communities. I am fascinated by the role of curator, the carer of a collection, particularly in this historical moment, and how we can care for a community through the curation of their stories and creative expressions. In my earlier days as a curator and arts manager, I was the Exhibitions Co-ordinator for Customs House, the earliest historical entry and exit point into colonial Australia which is currently a public heritage building managed by the City of Sydney located on the Circular Quay foreshore. The Quay became significant to the first fleet of colonial settlers in 1788 as the interface between town and harbour, a gateway of transnational and immigration engagement. Simultaneously, it holds great significance to First Nations as Gadigal territory. The location has continued to be a contested historical site between First Nations and settler communities. With this history in mind, I endeavoured to capture the diversity and richness of our local community baked into the place through a range of artistic and social history-oriented curatorial projects. During this time, I developed a curatorial research focus on creative urban communities and how their activities influence and shape our meaningful connections to place. In particular, I wished to demonstrate how this artistic and creative re-imagining of place could impact the perceived social and cultural values of the local through a diverse range of curatorial programming.

Years later in 2021, I stumbled across a photograph of the Wong Family taken in 1916 in Cobar, New South Wales (NSW) on an Australian-Chinese history social media page, taken more than one hundred years ago. Those pictured were my ancestors, a transnational family: My great-grandfather Wong Singfu, my great-grandmother Ah Kue and their Australian-born children Fred, George (my Grandfather), Nellie, Jean and Willie. Wong Singfu had arrived in 1884 from Doumen, Zhuhai in Guangzhou Province, as many Chinese immigrants did, to work as a mining labourer and later a market gardener in rural NSW, Wongaiban country. Further investigation informed me that their immigration documents are now held by the National Archives of Australia and were processed through Customs House, Sydney. Always believing that our family history was marginal, I was surprised to realise our story was a part of a greater national narrative that had not been recognised as such. The family photograph had been included in their application to gain permission to go to China and then return after twenty-four years of residency in Australia under the notorious ‘Immigration Restriction Act’, also known colloquially as the White Australia Policy, which disproportionately affected Chinese-Australian families through its racialising restrictions. The documentation made it evident that the act of temporarily leaving Australia and then returning home to it was not straightforward. A local supporting Mayor, John Leah of Cobar, corresponded often with customs officials for permission for the family to leave the country and to be able to later return. I found my families’ ‘hungry ghosts’^[1] were calling me to find their stories and to engage more deeply with their experiences in the early days of Australia’s colonial settlement.

These professional and personal experiences later influenced my further research into viewing the city as a curated space and to consider an alternative model of exhibition practices of reading the city landscape as a site of exhibition. As I engaged more deeply in this research topic, it became clear that the various urban communities were not equally represented, and that the ‘right to the city’ as promoted by urbanist Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre et al., 1996) is not a privilege for all residents, in particular those with immigrant or racialised ethnic backgrounds. This realisation has therefore inspired my research focus to be on collaboration with certain urban communities to represent their voices more prominently in the public urban sphere and build their right to being represented as a part of a local community that has resulted from globalising conditions.