Flying Below the Radar

Australian government administrators and private enterprise took full advantage of the opportunities made possible by civil aviation in Australia’s Northern Territory. Yet, there is a common perception among Territorians that there is more on display and known about the defence aviation heritage of the Territory. Considering the long-term impact civil aviation has had on Territorians and their way of life, this paper queries this representation of its aviation past. This is achieved through a heritage audit, alongside an exploration of primary and secondary historical resources, and other forms of presentation. This paper highlights existing gaps in the representation of civil aviation heritage in the Northern Territory and suggests a way forward so that this significant historical narrative is not forgotten.

Righting History

In recent years there has been ongoing controversy in the United States regarding monuments and place names commemorating the Confederate cause in the American Civil War. The following discussion focuses on Monument Avenue in the former Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. This was one of the most prominent locations of Confederate commemoration until statues along the avenue began to be removed during 2020. While also needing to be seen in the immediate context of events in mid-2020, these removals followed a process of investigation and consultation carried out by Richmond City Council. This produced a report which is now a useful resource for a case study investigating Monument Avenue and the broader issues its history helps to illustrate.

Assorted Bastards of Australian History

Cook looms as large in Australian statuary as he does in nomenclature and, perhaps especially, psyche. To those who still deify him as the explorer at the vanguard of white-hatted colonial Enlightenment he remains the Neil Armstrong of his day – he who sailed where dragons be to bring English light and civility to the oldest continuous civilisation on the planet. To others of this continent, he is a sinister bogey man and a monster, the doorman who ushered in later colonisation with all its extreme violence, dispossession and ills with his east coast arrival in 1770 – in which his first act was to personally shoot two Gweagal men at Kamai.

'Who controls the past... controls the future':

Ultimately, dialogical memorialisation is a way to promote critical thinking and engagement with these old statues, moving away from viewing them as nineteenth-century memory culture relics and transforming them into more dynamic parts of society which more accurately reflect the many different people now residing in it.

'Setting the Scene':

This article provides an outline of the current statue wars in Australia, England, America, New Zealand and Eastern Europe before reviewing the many of the acts of public history making these contestations have inspired among both protestors and protectors. Commencing with the unveiling of the contested statue of Captain James Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park in 1879, the authors trace the connections and contestations between past and present history making before reflecting upon the role of public historians as communities strive to develop frameworks that can foster careful conversation, consultation and collaboration processes that help to reckon with the past.

Off The Pedestal:

This paper considers the fall of the statue of Edward Colston in long historical perspective and reflects on the place of history, memory and ‘heritage’ within this. The statue has its own long history of protest and challenge, and this paper makes the case for telling the whole history around both its erection and rejection in Bristol.

Set in Stone?:

Memorials to white explorers and pioneers long stood (virtually) unchallenged in the heart of Australia’s towns and cities. By occupying civic space, they served to legitimise narratives of conquest and dispossession, colonising minds in the same ways ‘settlers’ seized vast tracts of territory. The focus of this article is a memorial raised to the memory of three white explorers, ‘murdered’ (it was claimed) by ‘treacherous natives’ on the north west frontier. It examines the ways that historians and the wider community took issue with this relic of the colonial past in one of the first encounters in Australia’s statue wars. The article explores the concept of ‘dialogical memorialisation’ examining the way that the meanings of racist memorials might be subverted and contested and argues that far from ‘erasing’ history attacks on such monuments constitute a reckoning with ‘difficult heritage’ and a painful and unresolved past. It addresses the question of whose voice in empowered in these debates, acknowledges the need for white, archival based history to respect and learn from Indigenous forms of knowledge and concludes that monuments expressing the racism of past generations can become platforms for truth telling and reconciliation.

'Remember Aesi':

In this article I draw upon a definition of ‘dialogical memorial’ offered by Brad West to offer an experimental artist's brief that outlines the various ways that a contemporary monument to the colonial artist, Adelaide Eliza Scott Ironside (1831-1867), could ‘talk back’ to the nineteenth-century statues of her contemporaries, and ‘converse’ with more recent acts of history making. In contrast to the familiar figure of the individual hero, which we associate with the statuary of her age, I suggest a group monument that acknowledges the intimate intergenerational female network which shaped Aesi's life and also ‘re-presents’ – a term coined by the historian Greg Dening – several native born and convict women from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras who influenced her life. Instead of elevating Aesi upon a plinth, I recommend grounding this group monument on Gadigal country and planting around it many of the Australian Wildflowers she painted in ways that draw attention to the millennia-old Indigenous uses of the same plants. And finally, by situating Aesi’s monument in the Outer Domain (behind the New South Wales Art Gallery in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens and to the east of the Yurong Pennisula, near Woolloomooloo Bay), in an area where she once boldly assumed centre stage before a large male audience in a flamboyant moment of her own theatrical history-making, I argue that this memorial will have the capcity to speak for itself in ways that challenge the underepresentation of colonial women in Sydney's statuary, abd, as West suggests, do much to ‘alter the stage on which Sydney's colonial history 'is narrated and performed’. [i] Greg Dening, Performances, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p37.

Toppling the Past?:

This article explores some of the recent debates over statues, memorials and cultures of commemoration in New Zealand. These 'statue wars' are particularly focused on explorers, military men, colonial governors, and even Queen Victoria herself, figures who are seen as being deeply implicated in the production of the persistent inequalities and pain that has resulted from colonialism and empire. My analysis particularly focuses on the city of Tūranga/Gisborne, James Cook's first landing place in New Zealand and a location where there has a sequence of heated debates over Cook's legacies and a series of attacks on statues of the navigator. It explores three ways in which the city's landscape of memory has been reshaped: the removal of a contentious 1969 statue, the creative redevelopment of a long-standing historic reserve, and the erection of a statue to a key Ngāti Oneone tupuna (ancestor). This discussion particularly highlights the work and arguments of the Ngāti Oneone historian and artist, Nick Tupara. The final section of the essay turns to the author's own location - Ōtepoti/Dunedin - and offers a reading of debates over statues in that city, underlining the pivotal importance of indigenous perspectives on history and public space.

Making Public History:

In June 2020 Black Lives Matter had become prominent in the USA and was taken further in various countries . This included opposition to certain statues and memorials , such as those previously supporting slavery. Such matters were raised in Britain, although both disputes in the past and changes to statues and memorials had previously taken place, for example in Lancaster. Within relatively political progressive places, like Bristol, some disputed memorials had remained. Some press coverage almost implied that there were new recognitions of unknown events even dating back to the early nineteenth century. However, such debates had not been unprecedented. Further, in local disputes or through many past anti racist action and in positive historical school curricula, political and historical positions have been forgotten. Attention should be drawn by public historians to former radical stances and actions. Simply observing and just seeing local stances as new events means being unaware of past activities or ignoring them.