Late last century a turn to ‘new museology’ and ‘history from below’ inspired new migration museums and exhibition spaces open to personal testimony and artefacts that locate lives in the museum more intimately and experientially. On display here, artefacts become evocative objects open to multiple stories of migration, past and present. This paper begins with an evocative object, that incubates memories of my own experience as a British child migrant, and connects to an account of the voyage in 'Working Class Boy' a recent memoir by one of my fellow passengers: Jimmy Barnes. This object was curated in theexhibition ‘On their Own –Britain’s Child Migrants’, now hosted by a network of migration and maritime museums in Britain and Australia, and in this paper I will speculate on the object lessons attached to this artefact.

Gillian Whitlock is a professor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. Her most recent book is ‘Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions’ (OUP 2015) and she is currently working on ‘The Testimony of Things’, a book that focusses on the asylum seeker archives held at the Fryer Library.