Places of the Heart: Memorials, Public History and the State in Australia Since 1960

Abstract

Memorials as a form of public history allow us to chart the complex interactions and negotiations between officially endorsed historical narratives, public memorials, privately sponsored memorials in public spaces and new histories. As Ludmilla Jordanova reminds us, ‘the state… lies at the heart of public history’. And this is evident in the public process of memorialisation. At one level, the state endorses certain narratives within which communities and organisations need to operate if they are to be officially part of the national story and its regional and local variants. Ultimate endorsement for memorials includes listings on heritage registers. Controls over the erection of memorials vary from official policies to process for the issue of permits for their construction in public places or their removal. The state, however, is not monolithic. Permissible pasts evolve over time given shifts in power and social and cultural change. This involves both ‘retrospective commemoration’ and ‘participatory memorialisation’. The presence and power of the past in peoples’ lives, too, means in practice that memorial landscapes will reflect, in truly democratic societies, the values, experiences and dominant concerns of its citizens.

Remembering and forgetting 1974: the 2011 Brisbane floods and memories of an earlier disaster

“…This act of news media remembrance signifies another moment in which memories of 1974 were enacted within the 2011 event, in this case through the interplay between a fixed memorial site and the active memory‐making processes of local news media. Memorials are sites at which memory is imagined as fixed and solid, yet the meanings of such structures shift and adapt across time (Ashton & Hamilton, ). In the moments before a disaster, the 1974 flood memorials shifted from easily ignorable monument representing an event in the past to a source of information usefully deployed in the present.…”

Legacies of Occupation

“…Ashton and Hamilton 2008;Bulbeck 1988;Hamilton 2003;Norkunas 1993;Nugent 2005;and Siblon 2009). A vast amount has also been written about the interpretation and history of individual monuments and memorials and memorial practices within landscapes and cityscapes (e.g.…”

Memorialization and Heritagization: Investigating the Site of the Last Execution by Hanging in Finland

“…Memorials constitute a special category of material culture designed to aid memory and to fight against forgetting, but, when colored by a national agenda, they can also cement shared cultural meanings about the past (Connerton 1989;Ashton and Hamilton 2008). The common phrase "History is written by the victors" acknowledges the setting up of memorials and the process of memorialization, whereas places of shame are normally considered as something to be forgotten rather than remembered (Logan and Reeves 2009).…”