Double take: reappraising the colonial archive

Australian Historical Studies, 2018

›And there'll be NO dancing‹. Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007, 2017

In: ›And there'll be NO dancing‹. Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007, ed. by Elisabeth Bähr, Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing 2017.

Who owns Australia's past? Is it the victors of a genocidal race war? Can we disentangle myth from fact in the legacy of assumed sovereignty and violent displacive occupation? Should we be honouring our First People in the way we write history? With recognition comes identity and authenticity, the capacity for self-awareness, the hope of validation. The history of Australia since 1788 is caught up in the tension between invasion, resistance, and racially targeted extermination, us, and them. Why have we written out Aboriginal society from colonial history? Is it guilt? The guilt of Stanner's 'great Australian silence'? What we are is determined by what we were. Our emergent reality is circumscribed by the choices we make and have made. The question is: can we change? Can our mutating rulebased order accept the lessons of truth-telling and embrace inclusion, the rights of otherness, the rights of the biosphere?

Memory Connection Journal, 2011

Most of the many war memorials in the Australian public domain commemorate wars that were fought offshore. Conversely, memorials dealing with the fractious and sometimes violent interactions between Aboriginal and settler Australians since colonisation are rarely evident. This article examines selected examples of recent public art dealing with Aboriginal-settler issues. Beginning with a study of the Myall Creek Memorial (2000) on a remote site in the northern tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, the authors then briefly consider more recent public art projects by indigenous artists that expand the symbolic repertoire of massacre memorials. Examined in terms of their use of material culture and symbolism, the authors also question the degree to which specific art works function as contained memories or as catalysts for cultural change within the rural and urban fabrics.

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2018

Indigenous Australian Identity in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts, 2019

This chapter presents a survey of writings about Australian Indigenous identity formation, from the beginnings of European intrusion, through racialized identities in the colonial-settler era, and up to the era of self-determination and rights and recognition, wherein Indigenous peoples assert their own identities. The chapter includes brief discussion on identities within the nation-state, Aboriginality and ethnicity, and discourses and representations of identity.

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2024

We are two white settler artist-researchers based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) who have separately created artworks during our doctoral research that disclose silences and evasions in Australia’s settler narratives. In this article, we identify that we are part of an increasing cohort of non-Indigenous artists in settler colonial Australia who are heeding First Peoples’ calls to truth-tell the past, and are striving to formulate critical, decolonial approaches to practising art that confronts the tensions of being settlers on First Nations’ unceded Country. We continue by describing George’s ongoing creative research Shifting mentality: a case study in going home (2017—present) where they critically engage with their personal family history on Yamaji Country, and instigate creative activities that expose their ancestors role in frontier violence and the impact of colonisation on Yamaji people. We also describe Amy’s continuing creative project #MirandaMustGo (2017—present) that seeks to interrogate why a pervasive myth of a vanishing white schoolgirls at Hanging Rock obscures and over-writes First Peoples’ actual losses and traumas in the region due to colonisation. We conclude this article by examining the benefits and complexities of non-Indigenous artists addressing sensitive colonial histories and relations between First Peoples and settlers through their art. We propose that critical settler creative efforts to point out silences about Australia's foundations in violence might be conceptualised as a form of solidarity that works to stimulate in settler communities receptivity for truth-telling. We argue this can perform a potentially important ancillary role to the essential project of First Peoples-led truth-telling.

2007

In the final two decades of the twentieth century Australian society was preoccupied with its own history. So ubiquitous was this interest, that bookshops were crammed with popular histories and historical fictions, TV networks aired historical re-enactments and devoted whole series to its exploration and recreation. In part, this increased awareness of history was stimulated by the 200-year anniversary of white settlement simultaneously celebrated by many non-Indigenous Australians and condemned by Indigenous protestors. Throughout the 1990s the debate over historical fact and its place within society-or the 'history wars'-took centre stage moving beyond academic circles and into political and public discourse. At the heart of this debate was what Bain Attwood called the 'new history', which incorporated the hitherto absent perspectives oflndigenous Australians. This new version of history examined discrepancies between dominant settler accounts of historical events and those provided by Indigenous people, often in the form of oral testimony. A more vocal Indigenous population also forced these new perspectives on Australian history into being, as increased calls for land rights recognition and social justice became prominent. The debate was so prominent that it permeated many areas of Australian society, the visual arts provides one such example. This thesis is concerned with how the popularisation of history was contended in the visual arts. I argue that Australian artists have used appropriation as an effective means of engaging in a discourse on colonialism; of communicating with the past, and of ensuring that that past remained a highly visible concern of the present Through its reliance on existing images, appropriation enables artists to condense the space between the quoted image and their new work. It therefore demands that the quoted image be se~'ll as a concern of the present. This strategy was implemented by a significant numher of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian practitioners during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, it provides an important point of intersection between the artistic practice of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. Rather than seeking to document the history of appropriation in Australia, this thesis is concerned with highlighting how appropriation has become the basis of a critical commentary on historical narratives of colonialism. .. lV w Table if Contents

Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, 2019

The paper examines the presence of Aboriginal art, its contact with colonial and federation Australian art to prove that silencing of this art from the offi cial identity narrative and art histories also served elimination of Aboriginal people from national and identity discourse. It posits then that the recently observed acceptance and popularity as well as incorporation of Aboriginal art into the national Australian art and art histories of Australian art may be interpreted as a sign of indigenizing state nationalism and multicultural national identity of Australia in compliance with the defi nition of identity according to Anthony B. Smith.

The colonial Northwest of Western Australia was a harsh frontier, where demands for Aboriginal land, labour and knowledge led to dispossession, loss of rights, massacre and generations encumbered with the colonial legacy. In the Pilbara, there are some rare attempts to engage with this difficult colonial history, mainly in the form of heritage site interpretation and heritage trails. Overall, the difficult colonial history of the Northwest is poorly represented. Colonialism and its legacy are not effectively commemorated, nor are distinct local cultural and civic attributes highlighted as ‘lessons from the past’. In this paper, we explore the memorialization and commemoration of the Northwest’s traumatic colonial history and consider a history of how heritage has been represented across the landscape. We suggest that the affective heritage of the Northwest especially cross-cultural or multi-cultural sites and histories can provide a basis for commemorating difficult colonial history or violent events that are underrepresented in dominant heritage regimes. Keywords: colonialism; ‘frontier’ violence; catastrophe; heritage; Pilbara; memoriali- zation; commemoration; historical archaeology

In 1927, an inquiry into what has come to be known as the Forrest River massacre sent shockwaves across Australia and overseas, playing an important part in the shift toward better treatment of Aboriginal people. The evidence tendered to the inquiry was narrowly forensic, focused upon dates, places and human remains, alongside three photographs of the outback crime scenes: how were these grainy, scratched, inscrutable images seen at the time? How should we look at them now? The horrified public preferred to look at more eloquent, familiar images of Indigenous suffering. In this paper I review these parallel, sometimes intersecting, ways of seeing Aboriginal people, and consider the role photography has played in arguing for Indigenous rights.

Much of Australian history is in the form of ‘myth’. The absence of case law makes the investigation of massacres more difficult. Many university history faculties discourage such conflict studies as unnecessarily negative, preferring to focus on ‘race relations’. The debate gave rise to the ‘history wars’ and a repudiation of the ‘black armband view’ of history. This paper contends that a culture of denialism has perpetuated some of the dysfunctional behaviours that drove violent Aboriginal depopulation.There is evidence that Australia is in a late stage Lemkinian genocidal process.