Black Wars and White Settlement: the Conflict over Space in the Australian Commemorative Landscape

Abstract

The Australian commemorative landscape has long been dominated by memorials to white settlement of the continent and their associated historical narratives of discovery, exploration, pioneering and the extra-territorial war memory of Anzac. This article considers how Indigenous narratives were marginalized or suppressed in the construction of that landscape and it examines, from geo-historiographical and political perspectives, the struggle over commemorative space and the contemporary movement to recover and reinscribe social memories of the Frontier or Black Wars in Australia’s geography of remembrance.

Keywords

• Australia
• commemorative landscape
• black wars
• white settlement
• monuments
• geohistory