Commemorating Melbourne’s Past: Constructing and Contesting Space, Time, and Public Memory in Contemporary Parkscapes

Melbourne’s urban parkscapes contain a range of memorials, monuments, and features, all of which have a role in the creation, performance, and reiteration of public memory and contemporary identity. These include a collection of sites and objects that originated in Australia’s pre-colonial and colonial past, but which were recontextualized and memorialized in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Despite the earlier origins of the material and remains incorporated at these sites, their subsequent recontextualization can tell us a great deal about the changing values and identities of the city’s communities over time. Thus, in this chapter we will argue that Melbourne’s urban parks have been used as places for reflection on the foundation stories of the city, and that through this engagement contemporary identities are reinforced, contested, and negotiated. Considerable attention has been paid previously to sites such as the Shrine of Remembrance, which commemorate Australia’s involvement in the World Wars, but in this chapter we will examine the practice and process of memorializing older material (see also Graff, Chapter 4, for examples of long-term memorial practices in Chicago). We are interested in what each site tells us about contemporary Melbourne’s changing relationship with its colonial and pre-colonial past, and the current nature of its post-colonial discourse. The terms ‘memorial’, ‘memorialization’, and ‘monument’ will appear throughout this chapter. We use ‘memorial’ to refer to an object erected or modified to commemorate an individual, organization, or event. This adheres to the literal definition (‘memorial’ 1, OED Online), but is also the way in which the term is used by local park and heritage authorities (City of Melbourne 2003: 1). By extension, ‘memorialization’ refers to the process by which something or someone is memorialized, or, as is more relevant to this chapter, the process through which an object or site becomes a memorial. We use the term ‘monument’ to refer more specifically to architectural or archaeological sites, which are commonly defined by their large or physically imposing presence (see Carver 1996). These may also have amemorial function, but they are not inherently defined by their commemorative value (Cooper et al. 2005: 240; Carman 2002: 46–7).