Mass Exposure: Memory Laundering, Racial Literacy and the Art of Truth-Telling

In this chapter, Odette Kelada and Dianne Jones argue that attempts to obscure the connections between colonial celebrated names and places from their origins in acts of slavery, eugenics and genocide, can be understood as a form of what they describe as 'memory laundering'. There is a correlation between the laundering of dirty money and the morphing of historic figures through a sequence of distortions and erasures to enable them to emerge white-washed, as elevated and revered fixtures foundational to a sacralised national landscape and imaginary. They explore this idea in relation to the factual transmission of nation building wealth having roots both in the profits of slavery money from the British Empire through the transatlantic slave trade, and the slavery of First Nations Peoples; as prisoners, as domestic labour, and enslaved in industries including pearling and sugar. The role of omission and denial in education and the visual colonising through statues, street names and commemorative practices in place making, are pivotal to this process. Kelada and Jones explore how this strategic use of forgetting may be countered through increasing racial literacy, drawing on art by Jones and other First Peoples artists as examples of creative interventions and decolonising practices that refuse this constructed ignorance and expose historical crimes through truth-telling.