Settling on a settler history: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell, ‘History by committee: Representing the ‘facts’ of settler colonialism in a local historical society museum’, in Cameo Dally, Ashley Barnwell (eds), Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration, ANU Press, 2023, pp. 219-246 | settler colonial studies blog

Settling on a settler history: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell, ‘History by committee: Representing the ‘facts’ of settler colonialism in a local historical society museum’, in Cameo Dally, Ashley Barnwell (eds), Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration, ANU Press, 2023, pp. 219-246

27Feb24

Excerpt: In his critical review of the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2018 exhibition Colony, Bain Attwood (2019) suggests that the curators’ aim of representing colonisation from both settler and Indigenous perspectives reflects the recent boom in exhibitions that seek to address what is termed ‘difficult history’ (see also Macdonald, 2008). Internationally, museums are displaying confronting histories and challenging nationalist erasures; for example, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre in Vancouver. In Australia, Indigenous artists such as Fiona Foley (2018) have pointed out that practices of historiographic critique and memorialisation have taken place in moveable Indigenous art, outside of national and academic institutions, in creative and community spaces (see also Foley & Howell, 2017; Grieves & Spiers, 2020; Konishi, 2019). Magdalena H Gross and Luke Terra (2018, p. 52) define ‘difficult history’ as ‘periods that reverberate in the present and surface fundamental disagreements over who we are and what values we hold’.

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