Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 ‘No Time for a History Lesson’ : The Contest Over Memorials to Angus McMillan on Gunaikurnai Country
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In Australia, calls for the removal of memorials to white colonists escalated during 2020, as the international Black Lives Matter movement influenced growing demands for a more open reckoning with Australian’s past to be reflected in public history. In June 2020, the Wellington Shire Council in Gippsland, Victoria, rejected a motion supported by Traditional Owners, the Gunaikurnai, to remove monuments built to commemorate the ‘explorer’ and instigator of massacres, Angus McMillan. Those who voted against the removals claimed that the cairns are educative and historically accurate. In this article, we argue that the value and intent of the cairns to McMillan have been contested since their inception, and therefore subject to revision and re-storying. We analyse the campaign behind the erection of the cairns in the 1920s and demonstrate that this public history project was informed by the white supremacist politics of the time, and that the political project of colonial erasure continues to be enacted in more recent public debates over McMillan’s memorialisation. We draw connections between the settler colonial politics of the 1920s and the 2020 contest over the cairns at a community level, highlighting the strength of colonial narratives of possession. This article demonstrates how First Nations– led public pedagogies provide a way forward that allows for collaborative, community-based rescripting of McMillan’s position in public history.' 

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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Aboriginal History Journal no. 46 Crystal McKinnon (editor), Ben Silverstein (editor), 2022 26598823 2022 periodical issue

    'The articles in Volume 46 each take provocative and generative approaches to the challenge of historical truth-telling. Examining the public memory of massacres in Gippsland, Victoria, Aunty Doris Paton, Beth Marsden and Jessica Horton trace a history of contestation between, on the one hand, forms of frontier memorialisation articulated to secure colonial possession and, on the other, the sovereign counter-narratives of Gunai Kurnai communities. Heidi Norman and Anne Maree Payne describe Aboriginal campaigns to repatriate Ancestors’ stolen remains over the past fifty years, showing how these campaigns have proceeded along with and as part of nation-building movements towards land rights and self-determination. Their call for Aboriginal relationships with Ancestors to be represented in a National Resting Place aligns their research with these movements. We return to Gunai Kurnai Country in a piece authored by Rob Hudson and Shannon Woodcock, who show how the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place has formed an important site and tool of community work towards cultural resurgence; the article itself demonstrates the value and importance of collaborative and co-designed research methods. The volume then includes a conversation between Laura McBride and Mariko Smith about their curation of the Australian Museum’s Unsettled exhibition, through which they responded to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s Endeavour voyage along Australia’s east coast by telling true stories that put Cook in his place.' (Publication summary)

    2022
Last amended 31 Jul 2023 16:24:19
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