Abstract
Memorials to white explorers and pioneers long stood (virtually) unchallenged in the heart of Australia’s towns and cities. By occupying civic space, they served to legitimise narratives of conquest and dispossession, colonising minds in the same ways ‘settlers’ seized vast tracts of territory. The focus of this article is a memorial raised to the memory of three white explorers, ‘murdered’ (it was claimed) by ‘treacherous natives’ on the north west frontier. It examines the ways that historians and the wider community took issue with this relic of the colonial past in one of the first encounters in Australia’s statue wars. The article explores the concept of ‘dialogical memorialisation’ examining the way that the meanings of racist memorials might be subverted and contested and argues that far from ‘erasing’ history attacks on such monuments constitute a reckoning with ‘difficult heritage’ and a painful and unresolved past. It addresses the question of whose voice in empowered in these debates, acknowledges the need for white, archival based history to respect and learn from Indigenous forms of knowledge and concludes that monuments expressing the racism of past generations can become platforms for truth telling and reconciliation.
Highlights
Monuments proclaiming the white colonisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands are scattered across the Australian landscape
At the turn of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, White Australians hungered for founding myths of nationhood
Public history is an historical practice embedded in place and much of the focus of our work has been on the shaping and reshaping of civic landscapes.[4]
Summary
Monuments proclaiming the white colonisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands are scattered across the Australian landscape. Raised in 1913 it honours three white men killed in the far North West over fifty years earlier. Their deaths occurred after several months of white violence and provocation. – through stone and bronze – they crafted a coloniser narrative. It was a ‘pioneer mythology’ of white valour and Aboriginal ‘blood lust’ that would long pass unchallenged into Western Australia’s history books.[3] It rationalised the dispossession of First Nations Peoples as progress and exonerated the theft and occupation of Aboriginal lands
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