School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    'Death is forgotten in victory': colonial landscapes and narratives of emptiness
    Birch, Tony (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.
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    'The first white man born': contesting the 'stolen generations' narrative in Australia
    Birch, Tony (Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004)
    The Australian political landscape from the mid-1980s into the 1990s was periodically dominated by issues relating to contested versions of its colonial past in conjunction with a discussion on the legal and human rights of indigenous communities within the nation-state. Key moments within this discourse included the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (established in 1987), the Bicentennial “celebrations” of 1988, the High Court’s Mabo land rights decision of 1992 (and subsequent Native Title amendments), and the reception of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (HREOC) Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which was the published outcome of a HREOC inquiry into the history of removing indigenous children from their families and communities during the twentieth century.
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    Returning to country
    Birch, Tony (Scribe Publications, 2001)
    As this history began - with journeys - so it will end. In February 2001 Tony Birch, writer, historian and former senior curator with Museum Victoria, rode into Melbourne from the north west. His tram wound along a route once familiar to Wurundjeri people travelling to Mt William - traversing the plain just to the east of the Moonee Ponds Creek and Coonan’s Hill, before veering away towards the central city. Along the way, in Royal Park, still stand a few eucalypts old enough to bear witness to all these comings and goings.
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