School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemIntroduction(Cambridge University Press, 1997)As a collection of British colonies and then a nation, Australia came into existence as a product of both colonialism and modernity; proud of its fancied youth and eager for the fruits of civilisation, enamoured with progress yet yearning for tradition. Historical accounts of Australia have equally been products of colonialism and modernity. More often than not, the mission of history has been to remember the triumph of colonising a continent and forming a modern nation state with destiny on its side. While the historical legacies of colonialism and modernity remain palpable, many of the dreams of colonialism and modernity lie in ruins. This is a book from these 'ruins' in the sense that it discusses both the colonial past of former colonies and the colonising of indigenous people in Australia. But ruins are never simply gone or in the past; ruins are enduring traces; spaces of romantic fancies and forgetfulness where social memories imagine the persistence of time in records of destruction. Thus this book is about the past in the present, it is written from within contemporary cultures of history. It moves from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal accounts of Captain Cook, jumps to the installation of history in museums and school curricula, glides through the historiography of archetypal historical events. This is a book with strong hopes for history and social memory. My interest is not in hammering home the constructedness of history, nor in the important task of diversifying and proliferating accounts of neglected historical actors but in thinking historically about existing social memory. It is a gesture towards learning to inhabit landscapes of memory which are, in part, landscapes littered with ruins; some archaic and others nightmarish, some quaint simulations and others desperate echoes. I imagine such a landscape of memories not as homeless place for lost souls but a ground from which new flights of historical imagination might depart and to which they might return, differently.
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Item'Death is forgotten in victory': colonial landscapes and narratives of emptiness(Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005)In late 1998 I toured several sites of colonial ruination in the western district of Victoria. After writing about persistent attacks on Indigenous people and history in this region I was curious to see how colonial society provided legitimacy for its temporal occupation of Indigenous country. While (not unexpectedly) I visited places that attempted to deny the presence of Indigenous culture and evidence of ownership of land on my travels, I also discovered sites weird, wonderful and bizarre. Through these visits I came to realise that colonial commemoration of its past and contemporary identity is often contradictory and confusing, relying on heavy-handed mythologies and poorly-constructed fictions in an effort to authenticate its story. I visited places where whole towns and streets were signposted in the middle of the bush in order to locate a colonial site of occupation that never existed beyond an entrepreneur’s utopian imaginings. I spoke with farmers who relayed colonial fables disguised as historical truth - such as that it was ‘a widely known fact’ that Indigenous rock-art, carbon-dated at thousands of years in age, had actually been painted by a French artist in the late nineteenth century. While driving the roads of the western district I was confronted by giant Koalas, miniature Great Pyramids and Eiffel Towers, and even a rather puny Big Apple. I also consumed an oversupply of commemoration plaques, funereal cairns and ‘I was here’ anxieties that attempted to obliterate Indigenous life from both the landscape and historical consciousness.