The place of settler memory: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell, ‘Memory in Place: Memory at scale: Interdisciplinary engagements with Australian histories’, in Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell (eds), Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration, ANU Press, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

The place of settler memory: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell, ‘Memory in Place: Memory at scale: Interdisciplinary engagements with Australian histories’, in Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell (eds), Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration, ANU Press, 2023

09Jul24

Excerpt: The nation-state is often the container for conversations about how to remember and commemorate aspects of Australia’s history. In Australian memory studies, much of the research on settler colonialism, Indigenous–settler relations and colonial forgetting focuses on the national level. Cutting through this tendency, chapters in this collection focus on the local level, on places and landscapes where the potency of history and memory come together in lived relations that resonate across generations. While official national and state influences are still a critical concern, many of the essays turn to specific landscapes, biographical accounts or family histories to look at how memory plays out on a more intimate scale. The authors locate us in particular places: a museum, a beach, a tree, a sign, a memorial stone, a digital photograph, the ruin of a children’s home. In many of these cases, people grapple with the same challenge that faces the nation: how to remember what has been forgotten, especially violent and traumatic histories. Yet, the specificities of place and personal histories make it difficult to fall back on the generalising and mythologising strategies that underpin settler-national memories. In some places, national memory still looms large, particularly in state-funded institutions, where the work of curators consists of navigating channels for particular pieces of memory to speak beyond the well-worn mythos of white settlement that has so often served as the default in cultural institutions. This can mean taking leave of the usual houses of history – archives, books, universities – and rethinking where it is that histories are told and commemorative practices performed, and by whom.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed