Blackheath History Forum History Week Lecture - Ruth Balint: ‘People Smugglers: A History’

Author Talk - Ruth Balint

@ Blackheath History Forum

Nowadays, the words ‘people smuggler’ conjure images of mafia networks, organised crime, and mass deaths at sea. But people smuggling has a history that stretches well beyond the recent past and Australia’s maritime borders, and a longer lineage than refugee movements of the twenty first century.

In this talk, Ruth Balint will trace the fascinating story of people smuggling in Australia’s migrant history, from the Second World War through to the present. With Julie Kalman, she challenged the ahistorical presentism of representations of refugee movements, and put ‘people smuggling’ into its complicated historical context, reminding us that ‘illegalised travellers’ are part of our immigration history, and that our perspective towards them is shaped by where we sit in time and place.

Ruth Balint is Associate Professor in History at the University of New South Wales. She writes and teaches about histories of migration, refugees and the family in the post-World War Two era. Her new book, Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and their Quest to Leave Europe after 1945, is published with Cornell University Press (2021). She also recently published, with Julie Kalman, Smuggled: An Illegal History of Journeys to Australia (NewSouth Publishing, 2021). It traces the smuggling trade from the Holocaust to the present, and offers a new perspective on the history of people forced to cross dangerous borders in order to survive. Dr Balint is also the author of Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea (Allen and Unwin, 2005).

ENTRY FEE:  $6 [plus tea and coffee, $3, cake $3]

Organiser:  Blackheath History Forum

Event website:  https://blackheathhistoryforum.org.au

Event contact:  blackheathhistoryforum@gmail.com