Memorialisation, Reconciliation and Truth-Speaking: The Role of Explorer and Massacre Memorials in Settler-Colonial Australia

ABSTRACT Memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. It creates public symbols of people and events those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counter-narratives of various marginalised others are silenced through processes of collective forgetting. In Australia, this forgetting has meant that colonial histories of exploration and discovery have been commemorated through ubiquitous explorer memorials. But these memorials represent a very selective account of settler-colonial history firmly based in the colonial fiction of terra nullius or empty land used to justify the British claim to Australia. This fiction is now being actively countered by social protests focused on memorials to explorers and colonial administrators. Furthermore, a trend to memorialise and commemorate the massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of the colonisation process is overturning the myth that Australia was peacefully settled. In fact, truth-speaking is now recognised by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as an integral part of the reconciliation process. However, the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and may serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt what has historically been a resounding silence about colonial dispossession and violence.


Introduction
This article explores historical and contemporary practices of memorialisation in the Australian context by comparing memorials to white "explorers" 1 credited with discovering and exploring the Australian continent to more recent memorialisation of the massacres CONTACT Vanessa Whittington V.Whittington@westernsydney.edu.au 1 The term "explorer" is formatted in quotation marks to critically position the claim that these white men were the first people to traverse the Australian continent.Australia was fully occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples before the arrival of Europeans, and was thus not an unpeopled wilderness available for white exploration, as the term implies.Additionally, such journeys were not typically an individual but rather a collective effort, in which Aboriginal peoples often played an important role.See Tiffany Shellam et al., Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016), 1-2.
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including by these same explorers.In this way, it highlights contentious aspects of Australian history and the way this history is interpreted (or ignored) through such memorialisation.An additional focus is the significance of remembrance practices to national identity and a politics of reconciliation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous Australians.While explorer memorials perpetuate the myth of terra nullius, that Australia was an empty continent peacefully settled, the massacre memorial evokes more historically accurate accounts that the white settlement of Australia was achieved by the deliberate killing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 2 Despite this interruption of "the great Australian silence" 3 about colonial dispossession and massacre, this article also explores whether massacre memorials that are conceived as shared heritage, and arise as acts of reconciliation, perpetuate a settler agenda of atonement, forgiveness and peacemaking intended to lay the past to rest: another form of silencing.These arguments take account of the work of Penelope Edmonds on the history of conciliation and reconciliation movements in Australia, in which processes of "peace-making and accord [seek] to elicit Indigenous volition and cooperation in the face of unrest, violence and the expropriation of Indigenous lands and resources". 4Massacre memorials and processes of memorialisation that involve the participation of Aboriginal peoples may therefore represent a continuation of settler narratives rather than their cessation.

Contextualising the Explorer Memorial
Travel to almost any country town of a certain size in rural and regional Australia and you are likely to encounter the explorer memorial.Whether a plaque, a bronze bust on a plinth, or a full-sized human likeness, it will inevitably depict a white male explorer in heroic guise, often accompanied by flowery text lauding his exploits.These will almost certainly relate to the alleged discovery of that locale by the explorer on behalf of other settler colonials, and the significance of his being the first white person to traverse this area, as if this fact itself is an event to be celebrated.As I will discuss through a number of examples, most notably a case study of the monument celebrating the surveyor George Evans in the town centre of Bathurst, Australia's oldest European inland settlement, such events are considered founding moments of the settler-colonial nation, and they are typically framed in a narrative of white triumphalism.The claiming of this land by the explorer on behalf of the settlers (or invaders) that followed is expressed in purely positive terms, with no acknowledgement that what is also being celebrated is the often violent dispossession of the existing inhabitants of this country, Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
"Dispossession" is too mild a word to describe this process, which involved the deliberate massacre of Aboriginal peoples, frequently euphemised by settlers using terms such as "dispersal". 5Aboriginal people are typically either completely absent from the narratives promoted by explorer memorials, or they are represented in disparaging ways -if they dared to offer any resistance to settler-colonial incursion and violence. 6While it is tempting to assume that the explorer memorial is a thing of the past, analysing a selection of these on the Monument Australia website 7 provides data to the contrary.This analysis reveals a date range of 1870 to 2010 for the creation of explorer memorials in the most populous Australian state, New South Wales, with a median date of 1964. 8Many of the more modern among them-that is, those installed from 1970 onwardscorrespond to the centenaries and bicentenaries of "discovery" or visitation by explorers such as Captain James Cook and Matthew Flinders, or events such as the crossing of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney by Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth.
While the more ostentatious of these monuments, such as the bronze statue of Captain Cook in central Sydney (corner of Park and Elizabeth Streets, Hyde Park), dedicated in 1879, were the result of public subscription and a grant from the NSW government, many more, ranging from humble brass plaques to life-size monuments in bronze, were the work of local governments or associations of white citizenry such as suburbbased progress associations and local chambers of commerce.For this reason, many represent a localised commitment to a key settler-colonial narrative by ordinary settler Australians, albeit those with a vested interest in promoting the appeal of their local area through its association with figures of regional, state or national significance.While I do not intend to conduct a comprehensive discourse analysis of the text inscribed on these monuments or the descriptions of them on the Monument Australia website, in all cases the discourse position presented is that of the settler coloniser.If Aboriginal peoples are represented at all, it is in terms of the impediment they represented to the so-called discovery of NSW by the explorer in question.
For example, the text on the Monument Australia website describing the memorial to Edward and Fred Ogilvie, squatters who occupied the land of the Bundjalung, Yaegl and Gumbaynggirr peoples near the Clarence River in northern NSW, claims "the Aboriginals were hostile but Edward became fluent in the local dialect and at a parley explained that he only wanted the grass and gave them complete hunting rights on his run".In this narrative, Edward Ogilvie is depicted as dealing generously with the Bundjalung, Yaegl and Gumbaynggirr peoples people by allowing them hunting rights on what was formerly their Country, because "he only wanted the grass"!These more amicable relations with the local Aboriginal people followed a massacre of between 200 and 300 Aboriginal people on the Orara river, 9 in which the Ogilvie brothers are reported to have participated, together with border police and other squatters. 10These deeds are not mentioned in this website entry or in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which in identical language depicts the Ogilvie brothers as acting in a kind and humane manner towards Aboriginal people. 11hile these monuments remain permanent features of Australian cities and country towns, often located in significant spaces within the settler-colonial polity, some of the explorers they commemorate, such as the Ogilvie brothers, were responsible for serious crimes against Aboriginal people.It is worth noting that Aboriginal peoples were technically under the protection of the British Crown in the colonial period.Yet these narratives are celebrated based on the assumption that these crimes and accompanying dispossession were a social good.Paul Daley describes how common memorials to massacre perpetrators and those responsible for other crimes against Aboriginal peoples are in the Australian context. 12It is problematic, then, as Daley and other commentators observe, that a multitude of geographical features and aspects of the built environment, such as streets, suburbs and towns, are named after them. 13Aboriginal academic Bronwyn Carlson reveals that objections to such memorials by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians predate the recent attention these issues have gained as part of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, explaining: "Indigenous people have been calling for the removal of colonial statues that celebrate and remember the genocide and massacres of Indigenous people for a long time.So it's not a new debate … just something that's hit the airwaves because of what's happened in the US." 14 While the BLM movement has seen the toppling of a statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston into the Bristol Harbour and the removal of confederate statues in United States cities including Richmond, Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky, 15 there have been no well-publicised cases of the removal of monuments like these in the Australian context.Public ire has to date extended only to the defacing of prominent monuments of this type, such as the 1879 monument to Captain James Cook in Hyde Park, Central Sydney, and statues of Queen Victoria and NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie, also in central Sydney.These were graffitied with slogans such as "no pride in genocide" and "change the date" on 26 August 2017. 16Despite the upswell of public sentiment that saw "tens of thousands of people" 17 participate in a BLM protest in Sydney in June 2020, even when threatened with arrest for protesting during a pandemic, the Australian Government continued to plan a program of events to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's 1770 voyage to Australia.This commemoration was to include the construction of a replica of Cook's ship, the Endeavour, and a planned voyage around Australia; however, the voyage was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 18In addition, a life-size bronze statue of the colonial governor Lachlan Macquarie was installed in central Sydney as recently as 2013, despite the fact that a military campaign initiated by Macquarie was directly responsible for the 1816 massacre of Aboriginal people near Appin, as I will discuss below.
As Daley has noted, the inscription on this monument presents an untarnished and romanticised image of Macquarie,19 despite this well-documented history, which, by today's standards, would have constituted a war crime.Similarly, prominent new monuments to the white explorers Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson were installed in 2013 in the Blue Mountains townships that bear their names, to honour the 1813 bicentenary of their crossing.While the trio may not have been directly responsible for atrocities against Aboriginal peoples, their finding a path through the Blue Mountains led to the expansion of the colony into western NSW and the establishment of the town of Bathurst; it was also implicated in the many deaths of Aboriginal people that followed.

Colonial Imaginaries: Monument to George Evans, Bathurst
Bathurst, established in 1814, is a regional city in the Central Tablelands of NSW, almost three hours' drive northwest of Sydney.At the time of the 2016 Australian census, it had a population of 36,000, six per cent of which identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, compared to approximately three per cent for NSW as a whole.The Traditional Custodians of the Bathurst region are the Wiradjuri Nation, although other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples also now live in this area, as a result of settler-colonialism's impact on traditional Aboriginal lifeways.This impact was particularly severe in the Bathurst region due to its proximity to the colonial epicentre of Sydney, and the fixation of the early colony on crossing the Great Dividing Range to find land suitable for grazing stock west of the Blue Mountains.This land was soon to become known as the Bathurst Plains.
Westward expansion progressed rapidly under the leadership of NSW Governor Thomas Brisbane (1821-1825).However, the Wiradjuri people undertook a "co-ordinated, sustained and intense campaign"20 to resist the incursions of white settlers and their animals onto their lands, prompting Brisbane to declare martial law west of Mount York (in the Blue Mountains) in August 1824 for a period of approximately six months. 21As a result, a detachment of the British army's 40th Regiment was sent to Bathurst, and local magistrates authorised settlers to use force against the Wiradjuri during the period of martial law.Three documented massacres of Wiradjuri people occurred in the Bathurst region in 1824, just before and during the period of martial law, including that of unarmed women and children.These massacres represented the calculated murder of nearly 70 Aboriginal people. 22However, no reference to these atrocities exists in recent interpretation of the monument to George Evans, the British surveyor credited with the 1813 discovery of the place where the town of Bathurst was later established.I chose this monument (see Figure 1), erected in the town centre to commemorate the centenary of Evans's discovery of the western plains, as a case study because it powerfully articulates the myth of terra nullius or empty land.Terra nullius was the British legal fiction used to justify the colonisation of Australia, which, unlike other instances of colonisation, occurred without a treaty or any form of compensation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 23The role of the surveyor was integral to the colonisation process because it resulted in the transformation of Indigenous land into settler property, itself a form of violence sometimes carried out through threat of force. 24he monument to George Evans is a life-size bronze statue of Evans in a dynamic pose, standing on a granite plinth, with a Wiradjuri man kneeling at his feet.The brass plate under these figures reads: "Commemorating the discovery by Evans of the Bathurst Plains and the opening of the west."Recently installed interpretative signage opposite the monument reveals that the Aboriginal figure is not intended to represent an Aboriginal guide, "but a Wiradjuri inhabitant of these lands gazing westward with Evans sharing the view of the land beyond". 25As the interpretative signage recognises, the Wiradjuri man's gaze mirrors that of Evans, establishing a commonality between the two as they focus on the landscape before them.However, as I discuss below, the monument depicts this landscape in terms of white rather than Indigenous futurities, consigning the Wiradjuri man's relationship with this landscape to the past-almost as though, as he gazes at this landscape, it is being taken away from him.The relationship of the Wiradjuri to these lands is thereby symbolically diminished.
These meanings are reinforced by the semiotics of the sculpture, as the different poses, relationship and relative height of Evans and the unnamed Wiradjuri man kneeling at his feet, in what is clearly a subordinate position, conveys their differential status and power in a "postcolonising" Australia. 26The disempowered role accorded to the Wiradjuri man contrasts sharply with the fierce resistance the Wiradjuri offered to the invasion of their lands, suggesting that this depiction reflects a settler fantasy rather than historical reality. 27The staging of this monument is remarkably similar to the monument to the French explorer Samuel de Champlain in Orillia, Canada, unveiled in 1925, which includes seated Indigenous people on two sides.The monument to Champlain, who is credited with founding the city of Quebec, depicts Champlain standing on a central stone plinth, with Indigenous people below him on two sides, sitting at the feet of a Jesuit priest and a fur trader. 28Parks Canada took the monument down in 2017 for restoration but have delayed reconstructing it "after hearing complaints about the representation of Indigenous people and considering the findings of the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission". 29The arrangement of Indigenous and settler figures in monuments of this type reflects a settler self-identity as dominant and a racialisation of Indigenous peoples as both lesser and disempowered, expressing state-sponsored views of this era.
These power dynamics are emphasised by the other key elements of the Evans monument, which include, on one side, a male figure with the rolled-up sleeves of a labourer binding a sheaf of wheat (see Figure 2) and a "female figure on a terrestrial globe, representing respectively agriculture and geographical science" (see Figure 3). 30The name "Wentworth" appears on the plinth behind the male figure, "Blaxland" behind the female figure, and "Lawson" on the eastern face of the monument.These names directly link it to the three explorers who established the path through the mountains followed by Evans.The woman's figure, who according to nearby interpretative signage is intended to represent "Learning", is shown partly clothed poised beside a globe, holding a scroll.
The symbolism of these images constructs a narrative of what followed Evans's discovery and therefore justified it, a vision of what settler-colonisers considered the proper utilisation of land as a natural resource by means of Western-style agriculture using  the imported plant, wheat.They also depict the growth of Western knowledge of lands such as Australia through white exploration, further assuring colonial domination of the globe through such knowledge.As I discuss below, there is much here that mirrors and reinforces the myth of terra nullius.Captain James Cook was of course aware that Australia was already occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples when he took possession of the East Coast on behalf of the British Crown in 1770.However, he believed the continent to be "sparsely occupied". 31Not only this, Cook and colleagues such as the botanist Joseph Banks claimed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were less technologically advanced than other Indigenous peoples the British had encountered.He based these claims on only the most cursory observations of Aboriginal people, including that those he had encountered wore no or little clothing and built only "rudimentary" kinds of shelters, "small hovels not much bigger than an oven, made of pieces of Sticks, Bark, Grass &c., and even these are seldom used but in the wet seasons".Most importantly of all, Cook claimed that "the Natives [sic] know nothing of Cultivation". 32s Banner explains, the British were "heirs to a long tradition of [Western] thought associating the development of property rights with a society's passage through specific stages of civilisation", with the invention of agriculture a milestone "that was believed to give rise to property rights in land". 33Concomitantly, those who were assumed to be without agriculture-because they were believed to be at an earlier nomadic stage of human development-not only lacked property rights in land but they did not deserve it because they did not put this land to good use.In simple terms, it was believed that "the land that was being colonised was occupied but not by humans", 34 or by humans who were so far removed from the way the British perceived themselves that they could not be accommodated under the same term.From a contemporary perspective, thanks to the work of scholars such as Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe, the various forms of traditional land-and water-management practices and other technologies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples associated with food production, such as cultural burning, are now recognised. 35However, Cook and Banks failed to make note of these conventions because they did not resemble European farming methods.Nor did the early colonists understand the relationship of Aboriginal Nations and family groups to specific areas of land and sea.
That the Evans monument had strong resonance with the white elements of the Bathurst community at the time it was created is apparent in a contemporaneous report that "many thousands of people" attended its 1920 unveiling by the NSW Governor Sir Walter Davidson. 36Davidson concluded the speech that followed the unveiling by stating, "I hope that every Australian who passes over this beautiful square will look up to this monument as that of a stalwart member of a stalwart race, and thank God that the planning and building of Australia fell to the Anglo Saxon race."According to a local news article, this statement was met with "loud cheers" by the surrounding crowd. 37or the NSW governor and the attendees at the unveiling, the monument to George Evans was not just a celebration of his "discovery" of the Bathurst Plains, but also part of a racialised discourse lauding the achievements of fellow members of "the Anglo Saxon race" for "the planning and building of Australia".
The monument is located in Kings Parade, described in nearby interpretative signage as "the last remaining public open space of the original Bathurst town square". 38These squares also typically feature other civic monuments such as war memorials to local Australian soldiers killed in various offshore wars, with religious, legal and government institutions such as prominent churches, the local court and local government offices often located nearby. 39The result is a configuration of settler-colonial literal and symbolic power at the heart of the country town.The nearby interpretive signage links this configuration of power with collective remembrance, declaring that "through the dedication, commitment and effort of the people of Bathurst, Kings Parade is where we celebrate, commemorate, remember and be remembered". 40his signage also acknowledges the government and voluntary organisations responsible for it: the Bathurst District Historical Society, the Bathurst Regional Council and Heritage Near Me, a project of the NSW Department of Environment and Heritage.The park and its monuments are accorded the status of local heritage items, a standing reflected in their listing within Bathurst Regional Council's Local Environmental Plan.However, the "we" that celebrates and is remembered is inevitably a white "we", as the explorer memorial is more likely to be rejected than celebrated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.Although Aboriginal people did participate in the offshore wars also memorialised in Kings Parade, they and their descendants continue to struggle to have their service recognised, for example by inclusion of the fallens' names on memorials such as those I discuss below. 41What Aboriginal Australians are more likely to remember are the massacre sites of their people, and these have no official public memorialisation within the city of Bathurst or surrounding areas. 42n addition to the Evans memorial, Kings Parade is home to a memorial to Australian soldiers from the Bathurst region who died in the South African (Boer) War-also designed by Gilbert Doyle-and completed in 1909, and a Carillion, completed in 1933 (see Figure 4).The latter serves as a memorial to local soldiers killed in the First World War and all subsequent wars.The Carillion, at which Bathurst's annual Anzac Day commemorations occur on 25 April, is positioned directly opposite the Evans memorial, at the eastern end of Kings Parade, with the South African (Boer) War Memorial positioned halfway down, on the right.The positioning of the Carillion in this way creates a spatial relationship and dialogue with the Evans monument as an object of 37 "Explorer Evans," 3. 38  remembrance and commemoration for the community, adding to its meaning through a process of "symbolic accretion". 43The added symbolism that the Evans monument acquires through its relationship with the Carillion serves to emphasise the familiar narrative of the heroic sacrifice and hardship endured by Evans and the other white male explorers whose names are included in the memorial, in the "opening of the west" to settler-colonial influx and "improvement".
But to what extent does the original significance that the creators of the Evans memorial sought to evoke have ongoing resonance with communities?To what extent do communities continue to value and esteem monuments such as these, one measure of their social significance as heritage items, 44 or are they of contemporary interest only to the passing tourist?And how do attitudes to these monuments vary on the basis of factors such as age, ethnicity and Aboriginality?On the one hand, explorer memorials such as that to George Evans may be in danger of slipping into irrelevance; on the other, they can become objects of contention, depending on one's interpretation of Australian history. 45While they may experience renewed interest in the context of such controversy, they become symbols of disunity-and for some, sites of protest and objects of derision, quite the opposite of their original intended function.
The BLM movement and scholarship on community attitudes to memorials makes it clear that memorials to explorers and other historical colonial figures are not esteemed by all sections of the community, suggesting that the regard and relevance of older memorials such as that to George Evans has declined as community values have changed. 46owever, it is clear from analysing the Monument Australia website that there are still segments of the community who wish to continue to engage in practices of memorialisation that celebrate the achievements of colonial figures, from conservative politicians to local governments and chambers of commerce. 47At the same time, we can observe a growing trend in the Australian context to memorialise places of "difficult" heritage, such as places where the massacres of Aboriginal people took place, part of a global movement to remember places of trauma through "practices of remembrance related to conflict, violence, loss and death". 48However, this form of memorialisation also carries with it a number of risks, such as the potential retraumatisation of survivor communities, the phenomenon of secondary witnessing, involving the appropriation of survivor memories (and identities), and the enactment of a premature closure for those who continue to experience the ongoing effects of traumatic pasts. 49The danger of seeking premature closure is also part of the critique of the Australian reconciliation movement, which I explore further below, in the context of the memorialisation of the site of the Appin massacre, as an act of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

The Aboriginal Massacre Memorial
Rather than being emblematic of civic power and institutionalised remembrance based on mythologising settler-colonial conquest and nation-building, massacre memorials insist on the assertion of a marginalised discourse about the fate of the colonised, and that this is not something to celebrate but to mourn.Massacre memorials powerfully communicate the historical reality that the white possession of Australia occurred as a result of acts of mass murder of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by settler colonisers.These memorials therefore stand witness to a very different version of Australian history from that promoted by the explorer memorial, which typically perpetuates the myth of peaceful exploration of an empty or near empty land.
As theorised by historian Patrick Wolfe, the colonisation and settlement of Australia was based on the principle of "the practical elimination of the natives" in order for the settler-colonial state "to establish itself on their territory". 50The narrative promoted by the massacre memorial is one tied to developments in Australian history from the 1980s onwards, when historians began to provide accounts of the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including their violent dispossession by mass killing. 51It is also linked to the rise of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism in Australia in the second half of the 20th century, particularly demands for truth-speaking as a basis for national healing and reconciliation. 52n contrast with the ubiquitous explorer memorial, massacre memorials are relatively uncommon in the Australian context. 53They also tend not to have the implied status and power associated with memorials such as that to George Evans, which are monumental in execution, highly tangible and located at the heart of town centres, and in close proximity to other loci of institutional power.The massacre memorial remains at the margins of practices of national remembrance: these are enacted only by local reconciliation action groups and Aboriginal organisations such as land councils, rather than via nationally recognised days of remembrance, commemorated by public holidays, and ceremonies attended by heads of state and national governments, such as Anzac Day.Many massacres of Aboriginal people occurred away from town centres, in outlying natural areas or more remote locations because those not carried out by soldiers in the name of the British crown were also crimes by the standard of the day, although very infrequently prosecuted.It follows that most memorials to these massacres are also located in relatively isolated areas, such as the memorial to the Coniston massacre in a remote part of the Northern Territory, the Myall Creek massacre in northwestern NSW, and the Appin massacre in rugged country southwest of Sydney.
It is also noteworthy that while colonial monuments in town centres are not threatened by urban development despite the value of the real estate on which they are located, massacre sites such as the location of the Appin massacre and the surrounding cultural landscape have recently been threatened by plans for a major housing development.A successful listing on the State Heritage Register in 2022, as a result of efforts by Dharawal woman Glenda Chalker, now protects part but not all of this landscape. 54he Appin Massacre Memorial, Remembrance and Reconciliation The massacre of at least 14 Aboriginal men, women and children in the environs of Appin was carried out by soldiers of the 46th Regiment on 17 April 1816, acting under the orders of Governor Macquarie.It occurred as part of a military campaign against the Aboriginal peoples of this region planned and initiated by Macquarie in response to conflict between settlers and Aboriginal peoples as the frontier of the colony expanded.Because the conflict included the killing of several settlers by Aboriginal people Macquarie considered it "absolutely necessary to inflict exemplary and severe punishments on the mountain tribes … It is my intention … to drive them to a distance from the settlements of the white men … so as to strike them with terror against committing similar acts of violence in the future" and to "drive the hostile natives across the mountains [and] clear the country of them entirely". 55allis, the officer in charge of the 46th Regiment of 30 well-armed soldiers, attacked a camp of Aboriginal people before dawn without provocation, locating the camp after hearing a child crying. 56There was no call to surrender before the soldiers opened fire, and the terrified Aboriginal people, whom several sources refer to as Gundungurra,57 but the Appin massacre memorial describes as Dharawal, fled over the edge of the escarpment.Wallis claims he tried to spare women and children, but "some had been shot and others met their fate by rushing in despair over the precipice". 58Two women and three children were taken prisoner; Wallis counted fourteen dead and likely left the wounded among the rocks.
The memorial to the 1816 Appin massacre is an unprepossessing brass plaque attached to a rock rising to just below knee height in a small, enclosed garden above Cataract Dam on the outskirts of Appin, southwest of Sydney.Figure 5 shows the memorial surrounded by wreaths and bunches of flowers, laid by attendees at the 2021 commemoration of the massacre.The words "Lest we forget" on one of the wreaths echoes words that form part of official Anzac Day ceremonies each year, suggesting that the deaths of Aboriginal people during the colonisation of Australia should be treated with equal seriousness and with the dignity of casualties of war.The memorial was erected in 2007 by the Winga Mayamly Reconciliation Group, described on the organisation's website as "a group that brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people from the Macarthur Region". 59The group is auspiced by the Catholic Church, and one of the key contact people is a non-Indigenous member of the Catholic clergy.If Aboriginal people are also core members of the group, this is not apparent from its website.Although the annual commemoration of the Appin massacre at Cataract Dam has significant involvement from Aboriginal people and organisations,60 the text of the memorial could be interpreted as expressing a non-Aboriginal standpoint.It reads: The massacre of men, women and children of the Dharawal Nation occurred near here on 17 April 1816.
Fourteen were counted this day, but the real number will never be known.
We acknowledge the impact this had and continues to have on the Aboriginal people of this land.We are deeply sorry.We will remember them.

Winga Mayamly Reconciliation Group Sponsored by Wollondilly Shire Council 61
The statement "we acknowledge the impact this had and continues to have on the Aboriginal people of this land" is one in which the author speaks about Aboriginal people, rather than being expressed in a first-person Aboriginal voice to indicate that this statement is authored (and authorised) by Aboriginal people.This wording suggests that the author of this discourse is non-Aboriginal, as does the expression of remorse that follows.The fact that this memorial was established by a group sponsored by the Catholic Church, and that the annual commemoration continues to be carried out by them, albeit with the support and involvement of Aboriginal communities, can also be understood in the context that ritualised expressions of contrition are part of Catholic religious practice.These religious associations were further reinforced by holding the annual commemoration on a Sunday and including a blessing by the Catholic Bishop of Wollongong and songs by an Aboriginal choir led by an Aboriginal Baptist minister as part of the 2021 commemoration.
The involvement of reconciliation groups in memorialising the massacres of Aboriginal peoples, in which non-Aboriginal people play a prominent role, raises question about whether these remembrance practices serve the interests of Aboriginal people themselves -particularly survivor communities-or are more orientated to the priorities of non-Aboriginal people, such as seeking atonement and forgiveness for the crimes of their forebears.However, it is difficult to answer these questions without having insider knowledge of the composition of reconciliation action groups and the decision-making processes in which they engage.These include whether remembrance practices have been endorsed by Aboriginal people, particularly the descendants of massacre survivors and their representative bodies.In many cases, we are left with the limited publicly available information about these processes and the text of the memorial itself on which to base such assessments.
However, a significant amount has been written on the politics and processes of reconciliation itself, of which these memorials are often an expression.This literature is generally critical of the Australian reconciliation movement for seeking closure to a shameful history, rather than a commitment to justice in the present, including through more challenging approaches such as restitution and reparation. 62econciliation events such as massacre commemorations and national apologies, it has been argued, engage white shame and guilt as part of a dynamic in which settlers feel bad in order to feel good about themselves, their community and nation once more. 63In so doing, Aboriginal people are typically portrayed simply as passive historical victims, ignoring the complex reality of events in which Aboriginal people could themselves be powerful and at times violent actors, although typically in response to settlercolonial violence against them. 64As Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata argue, citing Whyte, the "actions of settler states toward reconciliation often remain symbolic in intent, more concerned with a desire for national unity than with 'actually transforming the conditions that perpetuate violence, domination, and denial of rights'". 65Settlers, they conclude, "desire redemption more than transformation". 66Similarly, Adrian Little and Mark McMillan argue that reconciliation seeks to gloss over and avoid conflict in favour of "harmonious social and racial relations". 67It is therefore at odds with the urgency of the BLM movement to address the continuing violence faced by Black and Indigenous peoples at the hands of the carceral settler-colonial state.As Little and McMillan note, this is because reconciliation is typically associated with historical injustice rather than "conflict in contemporary Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations rooted in structural injustice" that has never been addressed or resolved. 68onsequently, a danger associated with memorialisation, particularly through a shared approach, is the potential for commemorative events and massacre memorials to signal a type of closure of traumatic pasts that still have strong meaning and ongoing impact for survivor communities.There is a particular risk for non-Aboriginal Australians involved in creating such memorials to think that they represent finished business and that one can therefore "divest … oneself" of a difficult history. 69As a proponent of the German counter-monument movement has argued, memorialisation may actually "encourage forgetting rather than memory". 70This outcome is also related to the reconciliation movement's tendency to focus on historical crimes and other forms of injustice, rather than recognising that these injustices continue, for example in the form of ongoing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody.
The continued annual commemoration of these events, and the creation of heritage places that have potential to become places of pilgrimage, 71 while keeping the memory of these events alive, fails to remind non-Aboriginal Australians that structural injustice against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remains unaddressed.Like claiming the identity of ally, such practices can recentre whiteness, when what is really needed is to decolonise solidarity. 72As Kluttz et al. argue, "decolonising solidarity … requires taking active steps towards building 'right' relations, with a commitment to both naming and righting the material, epistemic, cultural and political injustices of present and past". 73In terms of practices of massacre memorialisation and commemoration, decolonising solidarity also entails ensuring that these enact genuine partnerships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities, which prioritise the wishes of survivor communities.
Although the symbolic nature of acts of reconciliation has been critiqued as inadequate, it must also be acknowledged that such acts can have a self-identified healing value for some Aboriginal people and are in this sense restorative.In a 2013 interview, Gamilaraay Elder Sue Blacklock, one of the founders of the Myall Creek massacre memorial site and annual memorial service, explained what the reconciliation process meant to her: "It has lifted a burden off my heart and off of my shoulders to know that we can come together in unity, come together and talk in reconciliation to one another and show that it can work, that we can live together and that we can forgive.And it really just makes me feel light.I have found I have no more heaviness on my soul." 74The intention that places of remembrance of traumatic pasts also be places of healing this trauma motivates the remembrance practices of some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.Interpretation involving natural elements is a form of memorialisation favoured by Aboriginal peoples when dealing with traumatic events because it facilitates quiet reflection and healing. 75It is expressed in the way the design of memorials such as those at Appin and Myall Creek incorporate rocks and other natural features into the memorial landscape, emphasising the Aboriginal connection to Country. 76he Myall Creek memorial can be accessed only via an interpretive walkway through woodlands and grasses, and the memorial itself is on a hill looking out over Country, framed by five large gum trees.The location of massacre memorials in natural areas and the incorporation of natural elements into the design serves to orientate the remembrance of these events towards the ontologies of Aboriginal peoples, for whom Country holds specific and powerful meanings.Country, for example, continues to be a place inhabited not only by creator beings but by ancestor spirits, who are remembered, invoked and placated through ceremony, such as traditional dance and smoking ceremonies that feature in the Appin massacre commemoration.
For Aboriginal communities, remembrance of these events rests not simply in the creation of a physical monument but in the act of remembrance, performed bodily at massacre sites, and this embodiment is how these places come into being as heritage locales.This practice reflects the significance of intangible heritage to Aboriginal peoples as opposed to the tendency of the Western heritage tradition to value the built form.However, critical heritage scholarship now recognises that heritage is best understood as a verb, not a noun, 77 and does not meaningfully reside so much in objects such as explorer memorials, but instead in the intangible value arising from the ways that people do or do not value such monuments.Annual commemorations of the Appin, Myall Creek and Coniston massacres can thus be regarded as active heritage-making through performance and have the potential to create more positive collective memories for Aboriginal peoples that may counter the effects of intergenerational trauma. 78

Conclusion
This article has considered some of the ways that dominant national remembrance practices in the Australian context such as the memorialisation of white explorers and other prominent colonial figures tell a certain story of the nation, historically beloved of settlers but highly partial and exclusionary.This dominant narrative hinges around the fiction that Australia was peacefully settled by non-Aboriginal people, who, in supposed contrast to its original inhabitants, developed the country through diligent utilisation of its natural resources.
There are, however, many holes in this narrative, not the least of which is the historical reality that contemporary Australia was founded on deep and unresolved structural injustice, namely the violent dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through land theft and murder.While it engages in a form of truth-speaking by focusing on this hidden history, the massacre memorial at the same time runs the risk of seeking a form of closure to this shameful but contested history in the act of speaking about it.The focus on historical injustice at the expense of its ongoing forms and a desire to resolve conflict, rather than highlight and address its root causes, are some of the valid criticisms levelled at the Australian reconciliation movement, of which the massacre memorial can be an expression.
In this way, like monuments to explorers and other colonial figures, massacre memorials have the potential to serve a settler-colonial agenda rather than an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander one.While the text inscribed on the Appin memorial may reflect a non-Indigenous perspective, remembrance practices annually re-enacted at these places of trauma nevertheless have a self-identified healing dimension for some Aboriginal people.I therefore agree with Edmonds's statement that "public reconciliation discourse is multivalent, highly fragmented, and may be both reparative and coercive", 79 and that consequently the value of such practices of memorialisation must be assessed on a caseby-case basis, primarily from the perspective of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Male figure binding sheaf of wheat, southwest side George Evans monument.Photo courtesy of David Ambery.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Female figure, northeast side of George Evans monument.Photo courtesy of David Ambery.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Appin Massacre Memorial with wreaths and flower offerings, April 2021.Photo courtesy of David Ambery.
truths.See also Cole Harris, "How Did Colonialism Dispossess?Comments from an Edge of Empire," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (2014): 165-82.6MichaelAsten,"TheRisdonCoveSite: Birth of a State or Site of a Massacre; Bone of Contention or Future Site of Reconciliation?,"TasmanianHistoricalStudies 18 (2013): 103-21.7MonumentAustralia is a non-government organisation that maintains an online register of Australian monuments.See https://www.monumentaustralia.org.au/.andchoseevery tenth entry to examine in more detail for information such as date of installation or dedication and location.Of the eighteen entries identified, no date was available for four.9TheOrara River is within the Clarence River catchment, in the NSW Northern Rivers area: https://www.myclarencevalley.com/operators/orara-river/ (accessed 25 November 2021).
8Approximately 170 explorer monuments/memorials appeared on the Monument Australia website on 29 April 2021 for the state of NSW; however, I note this is likely to be an underestimation because these entries are based on information contributed by the public.I searched all entries under the category of explorer memorial for NSW Bathurst Historical Society et al., interpretative signage.
39Bathurst Regional Council, Bathurst Courthouse and Bathurst District Historical Society are located on Russell Street, which bounds Kings Parade on one side.All Saints Anglican Cathedral is located on Church Street, which bounds Kings Parade on the other side.40BathurstHistoricalSocietyetal., interpretative signage.41PhilippaScarlett,"AboriginalService in the First World War: Identity, Recognition and the Problem of Mateship," Aboriginal History 39 (2015): 163-81.42Daley,"Bathurst".