Changing the Collective Narratives of Nation and Self? Explorer and Massacre Memorials in Twenty-First Century Australia

The practice of memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political, as 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 a type of collective forgetting that has been labelled “the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath” (Gandhi, 1998, 4). In Australia this has meant that colonial histories of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ have been commemorated through ubiquitous ‘explorer’ memorials that proliferate across the country. 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, refuted through the 1992 Mabo legal judgement that recognised continuing Native Title to land, is now being actively countered by social protests focused on memorials to ‘explorers’ and colonial administrators. In addition, a trend to memorialise and commemorate the massacres of Aboriginal 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, it is possible to question whether the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and in so doing serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt “the great Australian silence” (Stanner, 2009, 189) about colonial dispossession and violence.