School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Introduction
    Healy, Chris (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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    Meatworkers' memories: the mnemonics of the nose
    Healy, Chris (Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1994)
    It is entirely proper that I have travelled from Melbourne to Sydney to present a few thoughts on memory, history and smell. The first time I visited Sydney as an adult was at the end of a surfing safari along the coast from Melbourne. As we came into the metropolitan area four of us were in what might loosely be described as high spirits. I was driving, and the portable tape-recorder was probably playing one of those tuneful post-punk numbers that tended to be our favourites at the time. Elisa was the most excited of us all. She had spent some of her childhood in Sydney, and had not been back for many years. Going along one of the freeways that carve through the hills south of the city, I looked over to the passenger seat and was startled by a pair of legs. Elisa had not so much put her head out of the window as she was out the window, sitting on the door frame and hanging on to the roof-rack. She was laughing and sniffing and yelling, all at the same time. "Breathe . . . Breathe. Can't you smell it . . . can't you smell it!" Once we got her back in the car we agreed – yes, we could smell this place that for Elisa came with memories of smells and for us was a brand new sensation.
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    Moving around: an interview with Stephen Muecke
    Healy, Chris ( 1999)
    Moving around: an interview with Stephen Muecke. HEALY: Reading the country, the book you coauthored in 1984 with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe, is dedicated ‘to the nomads of Broome, always there and always on the move’. What do you make of that dedication now? MUEKE: When I worked in the Kimberley in the late seventies and through the eighties I was experiencing a frontier complex of cultures. Land rights were under negotiation. For nearly a hundred years whitefellas had been ‘settling’ and imposing pastoral and mining economies of exploitation; blackfellas were being displaced yet had obviously always belonged. Whitefellas and Asians were part of diasporic movements. People were moving around a lot, in modes quite unlike, say, suburban commuting.
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    'We know your mob now': histories and their cultures
    Healy, Chris ( 1990)
    Which of our traditions we want to carry on and which we do not is decided in the public process of transmitting a culture. The less we are able to rely on a triumphal national history, on the seamless normality of what has come to prevail, and the more clearly we are conscious of the ambivalence of every tradition, the more intense are the disputes about this process of cultural transmission. For a long time Aboriginal history was an impossibility. History was both the product and the self-contemplation of European civilization. Aborigines were allowed to have myths, for myth is one of the great markers of the primitive, but history they had not. True knowledge of the past was knowledge of white Australia and reserved for white Australians.
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    Histories and collecting: museums, objects and memories
    Healy, Chris (Oxford University Press, 1994)
    I want to explore the question of how we might understand the museum in relation to collection and memory. This is one approach to much more general issues around the rules, modes and rhythms of social memory. The capacity of institutions like the museum have, in general, been radically undervalued in thinking about memory.