Organised Forgetting

How Australian community history organised to forget significant Aboriginal events, and the role of memory in successfully challenging official history.

Map of Victorian massacres of Aboriginal people,

Melbourne Invasion Day Rally, 26 January 2016.

Image NMJoyce 2016.

Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern Address can be viewed as a reading of a shopping list of wrongs committed against Indigenous Australians. However, to do so is to omit the full impact of his words on the audience present. Where the written text effectively erases the audience response, to listen to Keating deliver his words to a mostly silent and largely black audience is to gain a deeper understanding of the tensions present between community memory and accepted history.

For the first six minutes of the Prime Minister’s speech there is a distant voice yelling in the background “Give us sovereignty!” while the rest of the mostly black audience is (respectfully?) silent. Interest spikes as Keating utters the words “We committed the murders” and a few claps and murmurs can be heard in his pause for breath. When he moves on to “We took the children from their mothers” there is an outcry and widespread applause. Here is a white, male Prime Minister publicly acknowledging for the first time that the original inhabitants of this land had been seriously wronged. Yet as Keating’s speech continues, it is possible to still hear the yells from the man in the background repeatedly calling for sovereignty. What had previously been a deliberately denied collection of individual memories had unexpectedly been publicly spoken into history and an officially endorsed record of recognition was made, while a disrupted history continued to be yelled from the sidelines.  From this point in official history, Hamilton’s “organised structures of forgetting in relation to Aboriginal people” can be seen to be breaking down, while simultaneously exposing the existing tensions between state powers and forced forgetting.

Bulbeck points out the difference in the pre- and post- assimilation era attempts by officialdom to address Aboriginal history. That is, where previously Aboriginal names, places and stories were omitted from history entirely, post-1970s contributions by local councils and historical societies have been done so in a white context and without recognition of racial tensions. In examining the complex issues arising from the contradictory feelings of individuals and communities about the loss of their “dead places”, Read argues that consideration be given to tensions between public memorial and private remembering. Using examples of state—endorsed plaques and exhibitions that praise actions and events but not place, Read notes that communities and families hold personal objects of intimate significance—such as charred jewellery, found spoons and broken crockery—in great value. These same observations can be applied to the intense feelings of communal loss and grief that Indigenous communities have for their own “lost places”.  

A poignant example is that of the middens of Dring Hill and the “practical forgetfulness” of the local white community in the mid—1990s. Dismissive and racist attitudes from senior, white community members about significant, historical Aboriginal sites marked for development continued to be the cause of grief and racial tension. One scholar explained it in terms of a problem that the white community has with the seamless association Aboriginal people hold with their past. That is, a failure to accept that differences in perception of the past as a valid reason for not digging up and building over it. 

Read’s focus on the struggle of community memory against state power and forced forgetting highlights how little consideration is given by governments to the damage on the human psyche. It is reasonable to apply this focus to the events of post—settlement Aboriginal history and as such recognise that while the space between institutional recognition and community memory of Aboriginal history is beginning to be rewritten, it continues to be done so from a white perspective and the narrative of Australian history was, and continues to be largely separated. 

Repeated acts of remembrance in stories, songs and oral traditions kept the community memory of the Stolen Generation active and successfully challenged the official version that white society “had no idea” — for so many to have been stolen, there had to have been as many complicit in the stealing. Through memory, Indigenous communities forced compelling shifts in societal attitudes and contested official remembrances. 

Invasion Day Rally,

Melbourne 26 January 2016

Image NMJoyce 2016

While the example of the Stolen Generation is instructive in recognising community memory versus organised remembrance, it appears not to have been a lesson learned, and Australia is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. The ongoing injustices of the current Intervention in the Northern Territory and policies of offshore detention of Asylum Seekers indicate that once again, the collective memories of Australian communities will challenge organised forgetting.

Bibliography

Chilla, B, 'Aborigines, Memorials and the History of the Frontier' in Packaging The Past. J Rickard & P Spearitt (ed.), 1st ed., Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1991, pp. 168—178.

Darian—Smith, K, 'Up the country: Histories and communities'. In Australian Historical Studies, 33, 2002, pp. 90—99.

Hamilton, P, 'The Knife Edge: Debates about Memory and History' in Memory And History In Twentieth Century Australia. P Hamilton & K Darian—Smith (ed), 1st ed., South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 9—27.

Kavanagh, G, Dream spaces. London, Leicester University. Press, 2000.

McKenna, M, Looking for Blackfella's Point. Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2002.

Read, P, 'Remembering dead places' in The Public Historian, 1996, 25——40.

Read, P, Returning to nothing. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Sinclair, P, 'Ch.5 Practical Forgetfulness' in The Murray: A River And Its People. 1st ed., Carlton South, Melbourne University Press, 2001, pp. 45—57.

Watson D & Keating P, 'Redfern Speech'. In antar.org.au, 1992, <https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf> [accessed 28 October 2014].

Watson D & Keating P, Prime Minister Paul Keating — Launch of International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples, 1993.  National Archives Australia, 1992, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1S4F1euzTw> [accessed 28 October 2014].