Memorialisation, Reconciliation and Truth-Speaking: The Role of Explorer and Massacre Memorials in Settler-Colonial Australia

Abstract

Memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. It creates public symbols of people and events those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counter-narratives of various marginalised others are silenced through processes of collective forgetting. In Australia, this forgetting has meant that colonial histories of exploration and discovery have been commemorated through ubiquitous explorer memorials. But these memorials represent a very selective account of settler-colonial history firmly based in the colonial fiction of terra nullius or empty land used to justify the British claim to Australia. This fiction is now being actively countered by social protests focused on memorials to explorers and colonial administrators. Furthermore, a trend to memorialise and commemorate the massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of the colonisation process is overturning the myth that Australia was peacefully settled. In fact, truth-speaking is now recognised by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as an integral part of the reconciliation process. However, the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and may serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt what has historically been a resounding silence about colonial dispossession and violence.