The Mapping of Massacres

by Guest Sat Dec 09, 2017 3:23 pm

A multimedia project led by the the Indigenous Australian artist Judy Watson is among the initiatives seeking to map the numerous sites where colonists massacred Aboriginal people.

Source: the names of places. Artistic / research / technical team: Judy Watson, Greg Hooper, Freja Carmichael, Indy Medeiros, Jonathan Richards, Angus Hooper, Jarrard Lee.

From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire—Columbus, Rhodes, Cook—have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled. The fate of these statues—and those representing white men of a different era, in Charlottesville and elsewhere—has ignited debate about the political act of publicly memorializing historical figures responsible for atrocities. But when the statues come down, how might the atrocities themselves be publicly commemorated, rather than repressed?

In the course of her long career, the historian Lyndall Ryan has thought about little else. In the late nineties and early aughts, Ryan found herself on the front lines of what came to be known, in Australia, as the History Wars: skirmishes fought with words, source by disputed source, often in the national media. At stake was whether the evidence existed to prove—as Ryan and others had argued, and conservative historians and politicians refused to accept—that Indigenous Australians had been massacred in enormous numbers during colonization, from late in the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Even among those who grudgingly accepted that there had been widespread killings, there were still bitter, and, in some cases, ongoing, fights over the exact number of Indigenous people killed, the strength of their resistance to British settlement, and the reliability of oral versus written history. A truce has never been reached in what the Indigenous writer Alexis Wright calls Australia’s entrenched “storytelling war.” (In October, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the core recommendations of the government-appointed Referendum Council, which, after six months of deliberative dialogue across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, had called for establishing an Indigenous voice to Parliament, and a process of “truth-telling about our history.”)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-massacres

by 'Wolfie Sat Dec 09, 2017 4:47 pm

I'm not surprised to see the high number of massacre sites in Queensland on that map; but I reckon they will be able to add a few more in Tasmania and Western Australia...

On another point, I don't know why the author of that article keeps on referring to Captain James Cook, when it was Lt. Governor Arthur Phillips who established the British colony at Botany Bay. (Both her geography and her Australian history are a bit shaky there -- she could have spent a little more time on her background research, and in a little less on dramatising her narrative..).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myall_Creek_massacre

The Mapping of Massacres

The Mapping of Massacres

Re: The Mapping of Massacres