On settler wars, the celebrated and the repressed ones: Penny Edmonds, ‘A breastplate reveals the story of an Australian frontier massacre’, The Conversation, 2014 | settler colonial studies blog

On settler wars, the celebrated and the repressed ones: Penny Edmonds, ‘A breastplate reveals the story of an Australian frontier massacre’, The Conversation, 2014

19Mar15

Extract: The flood of coverage of the centenary of Gallipoli and the first world war profoundly shapes the way we think of Australia’s history; but we suppress other violent events in our own country that also shaped us.

On Australian colonial frontiers, violence and conciliation went hand-in-hand. Acts of aggression, retribution, and pacification were linked in complex ways — ways that were not always recorded in archival accounts. We come to our history often through the written word, or television, and objects too often are left as mere footnotes to our history.

So can historical objects from our frontier past gives us fresh perspectives in rethinking and writing colonial history, and give us a window on such violence and troubled diplomacy?

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