Disrupting cultural amnesia about the Frontier Wars in Australian war remembrance. A review of (in)visible: the First Peoples and War at The Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, NSW

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring my research into the representation of Indigenous war experience at the Australian War Memorial (AWM), it became obvious that so much was invested in the foundational myth of a nation born in war on foreign shores and a national identity based on Anzac spirit, that the Frontier Wars of colonization could not be part of the narrative of ‘Our Story’ because of the ways in which they contradicted it. The Frontier Wars are silenced and hidden, often in plain sight, in Australian war remembrance. Cultural amnesia about the Frontier Wars is reinforced by the AWM’s representation of Indigenous national service, without the historical context, as part of the singular narrative of ‘Our Story’. The refusal to officially acknowledge the Frontier Wars poses questions about the possibilities of commemorating all Indigenous war experience, not only national service, and of how and where the elided stories about the wars fought in the making of the nation might be publicly represented. The Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery exhibition (in)visible: the First Peoples and War, in 2015, demonstrated the possibilities for disrupting ‘Our Story’s’ collective forgetting. This article discusses the ways in which contemporary Indigenous artists’ works performed a motivated remembrance of the Frontier Wars and subsequent wars, and their ongoing effects in Indigenous lives. Enacting ‘memory work’, (in)visible countered cultural amnesia, revealing what is hidden in ‘Our Story’.