Painting Labour: A Case Study of Visual Citizenship in the Postwar Mass Migration Scheme

This article focuses on Verners and Girts Linde’s contribution for the New Australians art exhibition, presented as part of the 1950 Australian Citizenship Convention, to consider how visual citizenship may contribute to histories of Australian postwar migration. In this large-scale painting, the visual tropes through which Anglo-European labourers were heroicised as cultivators of the nation are writ large. However, by considering the work of image-making alongside this image of work, this article demonstrates how visual citizenship may be understood in the context of postwar migration as a highly nuanced and negotiated relation between individual actors and official policies.