Counter-Monuments and Nation Building in Australia

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.

Historical Encounters: A journal of historical consciousness, historical cultures, and history education, 2021

Australian war memorials have changed over time to reflect community sentiments and altered expectations for how a memorial should look and what it should commemorate. The monolith or cenotaph popular after the Great War has given way to other forms of contemporary memorialisation including civic, counter or anti-memorials or monuments. Contemporary memorials and monuments now also attempt to capture the voices of marginalised groups affected by trauma or conflict. In contrast, Great War memorials were often exclusionary, sexist and driven by a nation building agenda. Both the visibility and contestability of how a country such as Australia pursues public commemoration offers rich insights into the increasingly widespread efforts to construct an inclusive identity which moves beyond the cult of the warrior and the positioning of war as central to the life of the nation.

The Centre aims to promote and develop critical heritage and museum studies as an interdisciplinary area of academic analysis. We aims to stimulate new ways of thinking about and understanding the cultural and political phenomenon of 'heritage', and the way this interacts with cultural and public policy, management practices, cultural institutions and community and other grassroots expressions of identity, citizenship, nation and sense of place.

Adler Museum bulletin, 2008

Hillel Friedland Lecture, Adler Museum of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 16 October 2008.

Journal of Historical Geography, 1997

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

Visual Studies, 2005

When compared with other reconciliation processes, Australian reconciliation and its acts of official remembrance have received relatively little academic attention, and yet the case raises many important questions for settler societies struggling to come to terms with past misdeeds and the burden of the past in the present. This article places Australian reconciliation in the political context of the campaign for a treaty between Indigenous peoples and the settler state that emerged in the 1980s, the institutionalization of common law Indigenous land rights during the 1990s, and the current 'intervention' in the Northern Territory. The nature and trajectory of these political events are at odds with two highly lauded official acts of remembrance made under the rubric of reconciliation, Paul Keating's Redfern Park speech in 1992, and Kevin Rudd's formal state apology in 2008. The article argues that such settler state acts of official remembrance and acknowledgement of past injustices, while far from devoid of value, are considerably diminished by the positively colonial, and inherently unjust, contemporary political context in which they were made.

Artlink, 2021

In March 2021, Genevieve Grieves and Amy Spiers co-convened the online symposium "Counter-monuments: Indigenous settler relations in Australian contemporary art and memorial practices" with hosting partner Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. The symposium offered reflections on the broader public’s understanding of Australian colonial history, its violence and legacies, can be challenged and transformed through creative memorialisation and critical, counter- monument artistic practice. It featured contributions by Paola Balla, Lilly Brown, Fiona Foley, Kate Golding, Julie Gough, Dianne Jones, Djon Mundine, Odette Kelada, Clare Land, Carol Que, Joel Sherwood Spring, and the Unbound Collective. Part of an ongoing project, the symposium will inform an anthology of essays to be published by Springer in 2022. In the following conversation, Grieves and Spiers consider key works and ideas raised during the symposium, as well as debates stimulated by counter-monument art practices, and how they become critical scenes to appraise past and present relations between First Peoples and settlers in Australia.