Cooking the Books: Contested Colonial Commemorations in Australia

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

Index Journal, 2022

The removal of the monument to slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol during the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020 did more than denounce the ongoing celebration of colonial legacies. It was a public execution to colonial mythmaking. This paper examines such colonial mythmaking in the context of the settler-colonial nation-state of Australia. By situating Thomas Woolner’s Captain Cook (1879) within the context of settler-colonial nation building to link its protection by police at the height of the 2020 BLMS protests, this paper emphasises the value of colonial monuments to the five-hundred-year history of modern colonisation. Colonial monuments in Australia serve a militarised function to narrate the lie of a just settlement on the grounds of terra nullius and deny First Nations sovereignty. Woolner’s sculpture, this paper argues, protects itself from the memory that the nation-state longs to forget.

By the end of the 1880s the development course of British colonies in Australia made some politicians and public figures bring up the issue of political unification of separate autonomies and their rise in imperial matters in the South Pacific. In 1888 there appeared a reason to express the loyalty to the British Empire as well as to form public opinion on the future of Australia as a unified state. Colonial governments initiated the large-scale celebration of the British colonization centennial of the continent. Despite the doubts expressed by some people in autonomies about the necessity to remember the convict labour past of the continent and certain apathy of Australian cultural periphery, the celebration was significant and caused a broad public discussion on the past and future of Australia and about the attitude of Australians to their country, the Empire, themselves and the world. These events became an important milestone in the formation of Australian nationalism.

History Australia, 2020

This article explores an unusual 'colonial' monument in Australia and the different uses to which it has been put since its erection in 1826. The Lap erouse monument in Botany Bay (Sydney) commemorates Count of Lap erouse, a French rather than a British explorer, who disappeared shortly after departing from Botany Bay in 1788. Examining the ambivalent and changing memories of empire that have been attached to this monument over two centuries allows us to question the notion of a 'colonial monument' and shows how changing contexts can alter perceptions of what specific monuments commemorate.

Postcolonial Studies, 2023

In recent years, many memorials have come under intensified scrutiny, as the values and ideologies they express about historical figures and events are critically interrogated. This especially applies to those that commemorate characters enmeshed with colonial exploitation and slave economies, 'explorers, colonial governors and administrators, British political figures and members of the British monarchy' i. This critical surge is manifest in the political demands and dissident demonstrations culminating in the 2020 toppling of 18 th century philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, UK, because of his active role in the slave trade, and successful campaigns to remove more than 160 Confederate statues in the USA. In Australia, numerous commemorative forms have veiled the dispossession of First Nations people and ignored the violence and injustice that enabled the establishment of Australia as a British settler colony; they are similarly subject to widespread contestation.

Andres Gunstone (ed), History, Politics & Knowledge: Essays in Australian Indigenous Studies, 2008

Journal of Australian Studies, 2011

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.

2015

Since the 1988 Bicentennial and the 2001 centenary of federation celebrations colonial images have flourished in Australia, highlighting the roles of convicts and free settlers during early colonization. Old sites, such as Port Arthur have been re-invigorated, and in 2004 Tasmanians celebrated the bicentenary of ‘white’ settlement. However, social scientists have given little attention to the role of colonial and post-colonial figures and myths as aspects of Australian national identity. We seek to address this issue by examining how convicts, free settlers, bushrangers and ANZACs are associated with contemporary identity in Australia.2 We examine evidence from the 2003Australian Survey of SocialAttitudes and find that historical figures such as the ANZACs and post-World War II immigrants comprise important aspects of national identity.A substantial majority of Austra-lians judged ANZACs to be important, countering recent claims of the ‘demise of the digger’. Sporting heroes are als...

The old adage, ‘silence speaks louder than words’ does not mean that silence is simply a passive absence. As renowned playwright Harold Pinter demonstrated, silence has a power to communicate and dominate. This article explores the endurance of the Great Australian Silence over the history of our colonial past, and the continuing colonization of Indigenous people. Despite the introduction of Indigenous Studies and Indigenous History into school and university programs, and despite the heart-felt statements that Australians need to understand their own history, that understanding remains partial. The desire to engage with this history appears problematic. This article argues that the failure of a more embracing history to penetrate, more than partially, into the education system and popular understanding is a product of a particular national imagination embodied in projections of the Australian landscape and the Australian individual. The case is put that a particular way of framing the embodiment of national identity and the land has created an imagining of ‘Australianness’ that impacts on our capacity to hear and accept the history of Indigenous colonization. It argues this embodiment, when accepted uncritically, perpetuates not simply a silence but an un-history, a not-telling, a non-acceptance of colonial history post-1788.