Memorials to murdered women: A study of the dynamics of claiming,marking and making place in publics of commemoration

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence and trajectory of a vernacular femicide memorial tree at Mount Gravatt (Meanjin/Brisbane) which is juxtaposed with established and regulated official commemorative placemaking practices in this social geography. The paper explores the implicit rules about marking gender in official publics of commemoration, arguing that they perform or conversely risk a doubling of women’s invisibility through assimilation into symbols and aesthetic conventions of seemingly settled history and settled subjects. They can become barely noticeable for the kinds of messages they may seek to publicly speak and breakthrough in encounter. Conventional commemoration of violence against women also risks positioning women as ‘victims’ by not unsettling that position through passive, familiar and assimilationist design forms and narrative tropes. Importantly, memorials that address violence against women and intimate femicide should contest ‘active forgetting’ by insisting that this is a public facing, collective issue of responsibility against resistant effacements, disavowal, and sequestration into the private sphere and personal life.

Keywords

contestation femicide gendered violence memorial culture place-making

Introduction

In this paper, we highlight and juxtapose established, regulated, and authoritative commemorative placemaking practices against the intentional place-making activities around a memorial tree located in Mount Gravatt Reserve in Meanjin or Brisbane. Every day, people drive, walk and cycle past memorials and plaques scattered amongst the tracks, routes and roads of this forest-leisure space and surrounds. These memorials are material evidences of placemaking (planned) and place-making (organic) activities, and provide a useful case study site to examine how place and memorialisation come to be a contested and gendered process. In this geography, most memorials adhere to typical aesthetic forms of plaques on stone, granite, metal, and inscribed bench seats. The collection of memorials around Mount Gravatt invites active engagement with dominant narratives around war, pioneer life, and civic and cultural achievement. These are consistent with dominant narratives around memorials throughout Queensland, such as sport, governance, pioneer life, war, work, and commerce, and include placemaking cultural memorials, such as murals and sculptures (Gibson and Besley, 2004). We refer to these memorials as ‘official’ to explain the way in which they are embedded in placemaking processes, which involves the top-down efforts of governments or businesses to create places that facilitate planned objectives. Official memorials provide a tangible access to the past, and memorial encounters are woven into the everyday movements of daily routines across cities, towns and rural areas (Rosenberg, 2012). While also inviting casual and intentional encounters, vernacular memorials differ in that they are spontaneous, produced outside official processes, and can initiate counter-narratives to official, sanctioned subjects (people, events and issues) of commemoration.

We use the term place-making to explain ‘how people recognize, define, and create the places they often call home, whether intentionally or not’ (Lew, 2017: 450). An important distinction here is between placemaking as an official process and the organic place-making activities which influence a place incrementally, largely through individual agency (Lew, 2017). We find that place-making activities have a role in reinforcing the longstanding resilience of a vernacular grassroots memorial against top-down pressures of contestation through government regulation. In a broader context, this paper opens up to question implicit rules that govern marking or not marking gender or indeed other marks of identification in official publics of commemoration. In the context of the murder of women, we argue that the neutralisation of gender-marking performs or conversely risks a doubling of women’s invisibility in their own stories. Furthermore, women’s stories also risk becoming assimilated into the symbols and aesthetic conventions of seemingly settled history and settled subjects that are overwhelmingly male-centric in commemorative culture. They become barely noticeable for the kinds of messages they may seek to publicly speak and breakthrough in encounter. Conventional commemoration of violence against women also risks positioning women as ‘victims’ by not unsettling that position through passive, familiar and assimilationist design forms and narrative tropes. Importantly, memorials that address violence against women and intimate femicide should contest ‘active forgetting’ by insisting that this is a public-facing, collective issue of responsibility that is actively present against resistant effacements, disavowal, and sequestration into the private sphere and personal life.

Through photographs, interview text and mapping, this paper explores the political, spatial-temporal and affective dynamics of the Bianca Faith Girven memorial tree located in Mount Gravatt Reserve in Meanjin/Brisbane. Interviews with those involved in place-making through memorialisation activities were conducted either at the memorial tree or at Mount Gravatt Lookout during April to July 2021. Clearance for this project was provided by Griffith University, and participants were consulted regarding their preferred naming in this paper. The Bianca Girven memorial tree located at Gertrude Petty Place in Mount Gravatt Reserve is reiteratively encountered in the everyday through the leisure practices of visitors (mostly people living locally) driving to the lookout, walking, running, cycling, picnicking, sitting, and doing social activities. To explore this vernacular memorial’s place on public land, we draw on Law’s (2004: 61) work on assemblages and the idea that ‘different realities overlap and interfere with one another. Their relations, partly coordinated, are complex and messy’. In focusing on Bianca’s physically located memorial, we explore its place within a larger commemorative assemblage in a specific geographical location (see Map 1). In so doing, we are able to scrutinise the social processes of commemorative practice to consider the interplay and contestation between official forms of commemoration and grassroots community activity.

Map 1

Memorial mapping of Mount Gravatt.

To give some background to the femicide memorial, Bianca Faith Girven,¹ a 22-year-old mother of a 21-month-old child, was strangled by her ex-boyfriend, Ryhs Austin, on 30 March 2010 at Gertrude Petty Place, and later died on 31 March 2020 in hospital without regaining consciousness. Before her death, Bianca advocated for vulnerable members of the community, especially the homeless, young mothers and abused women, and this investment plays a key role in the emergence and continuance of the public memorial tree. The tree was the site of a flower ceremony vigil in the days after her death with police supporting the safe movement of people who walked up the road to the tree, bringing flowers. Since her daughter’s death, Bianca’s mother, Sonia, has become a domestic violence advocate, especially in regard to Queensland’s lack of laws surrounding non-lethal strangulation, which is one of the most significant red flags to homicide in the context of violence against women. In May 2016, non-lethal strangulation was made a criminal offence in Queensland under section 315A of the Criminal Code 1899. The lobbying of Sonia contributed to these changes. Ongoing prevention measures through education and training were also put in place through the Bianca Faith Girven National Institute for Strangulation Prevention (now called the Australian Institute for Strangulation Prevention under the Red Rose Foundation) (AISP, n.d.). While we focus on the memorial tree, the story of Bianca’s death and memorials to her memory also exist in multiple places within media publics. Bianca’s name and image are often present at domestic violence gatherings around Brisbane, such as the unveiling of a memorial to domestic violence victims at Emma Miller Place in Brisbane city (March 2016), and the Red Rose Foundation community event in Broadwater Park, Mansfield, during Domestic and Family Violence Awareness Month (May 2021).

This paper begins with an overview of the scholarship on memorial culture generally and femicide memorials in particular to demonstrate contested public commemoration when a design or narrative disrupts the hidden or unspoken symbolic and political investments in maintaining the fiction of gender inclusion through gender-neutrality that covers up the reality that it is overwhelmingly women killed by male partners or ex-partners. We then position the case study site of Mount Gravatt as an already contested place of various histories and narratives, before mapping 10 official and other organic memorials in the area. We then explore the intentional place-making activities involved in creating and maintaining the Bianca Faith Girven memorial tree for 12 years, despite pressure to sanitise its existence. We argue that memorials to murdered women publicly protest ‘active forgetting’ that dissociates, represses or seeks to remove these deaths from the public sphere. One of the ways this happens is when the femicides are framed in public discourse (social media, news media, police reporting) and in commemorative culture as individuated and non-accumulative instances of violence decontextualised from broader, systemic issues of gender inequality.

Memorialisation and contested publics of remembrance

The political, social, symbolic functions and aesthetic forms of public memorials have an extensive multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary literature in which hegemonies of remembrance, and concomitantly, subjects of active forgetting, repression, and marginalisation are key areas of social and academic debate (Young, 1992; Bold et al., 2002; Batten, 2004; Syron, 2005; Ware, 2009; Oliver and Summers, 2014; Moll, 2016; Osborne, 2017; Barritt-Eyles, 2019; Alderman and Brasher, 2020). Memorials are situated within social processes of political-social-symbolic systems of meaning production, and in the built environment (roads, street names, bridges, landmarks, cenotaphs) they embody aesthetic codes and scales of significance for collectivising ritual and mundane encounters. However, the memorial landscape, as Morgan writes, is always ‘at one and the same time a landscape of power, a landscape of forgetting, and a landscape of silences’ (Morgan, 2008: 1).

Official commemorative culture, in contrast to vernacular forms, also serves to represent and materialise dominant historical narratives, subjects and rituals in overwhelming male-centric privileged axes of socio-class, race and cultural heritage. Furthermore, intersectional axes of privilege and marginalisation amongst women and non-binary genders must also be taken into account in the production of commemorative culture. As such, memorial culture is always open to contestation in the public sphere, particularly when counter-narratives engage with marginalised subjects, dissonant stories and voices. These counter-narratives may provoke conflicts between normalised and naturalised subjects, that is, people and events, and more subversive or shameful histories of injustice, violence and suffering. In this regard, memorials to murdered women sit uncomfortably in relation to nationalising hegemonies of war commemoration and civic achievement and its representations of an ideal type of heroic, courageous and protective masculinity. The altruism of self-sacrifice codified in war commemoration contrasts with the narcissistic egoism of intimate partner/ex-partner femicide (Beers, 1992; Dalferth, 2010). Memorials to murdered women produce a tension and contradiction between the masculine ideal type of war commemoration in counter-narratives of non-heroic or anti-heroic masculinity. Memorials to violence against women are almost always stories of men sacrificing women, and often children for self-serving motivations: revenge against women leaving a relationship, the rage of a wounded ego, the anger of women asserting their autonomy as individuated subjects with their own lives.

Memorials to murdered women are part of a general broadening of commemorative practice in both official and grassroots forms in Australia and internationally (Clark, 2007; Doss, 2008). Many grassroots memorials highlight issues of injustice in spaces of mobility and habitation in the ‘everydayness of people’s lives’ (Ashton and Hamilton, 2008: 4). Research on the growth of Australia’s vernacular memorial culture shows diversity in voices addressing Aboriginal massacres, deaths from racist policing, asylum seekers, crimes and violence against children, women, and LGBTQI+ peoples (Bulbeck, 1992; Ashton and Hamilton, 2008; Baguley et al., 2021). Grassroots memorials often emerge from events of traumatic violence – the context of our case study. As performative and commemorative assemblages (Santino, 2006; Margry and Sanchez-Carretero, 2011) in which people gather (e.g. vigils) to leave objects, memorials produce affective intensities that ‘pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 1).

In the context of women’s deaths in circumstances of violence perpetrated almost exclusively by men there has had little focused attention within memorial research relative to other events and subjects such as war, the Holocaust, genocide, natural disasters or terrorist events. This is an interesting question in and of itself and, as feminist scholarship has suggested, raises the issue of women’s status as subjects within memorial research (see Rosenberg, 1998; Bold et al., 2002; Burk, 2003). In the context of Australian research, Baguley, Kirby and Anderson’s (2021: 104) systematic literature review of Australia’s commemorative culture notes that ‘there is a gap in the commemorative landscape with no memorial or monument existing in Australia that specifically addresses violence against women perpetrated by men’. Although official (gender-neutral) memorials to domestic violence victims are emerging, typically, memorials to murdered women and gendered violence exist almost entirely in the category of vernacular grassroots memorials. The latter can be either ephemeral or more enduring in terms of their material presence in physical public space. These types of memorials to loss and grief also tend to be associated with protests against injustices in law, policing and gender inequality through vigils, graffiti, social media campaigns, and objects placed at meaningful sites of impact (Ashton and Hamilton, 2008).

The very presence of femicide memorials in public space can threaten established aesthetic conventions and narratives of established dominant memorials. This becomes evident in the contentious response they can elicit if they move too far into the already established conceptions of dominant masculinities in public culture/space. In her analysis of the memorial project in Vancouver called Marker of Change which sought to honour the lives of 14 women killed in the Montreal Massacre with an explicit message about gendered violence, Burk analyses the complex processes of its contested trajectory. At Quebec’s Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal university campus engineering school in 1989, a man entered the building and separated the men from the women in order to kill those ‘damned feminists’ with a semi-automatic rifle. The Montreal campus’s formal memorial to this violence erased all signs of its gendered nature as a hate crime. In response to both the public media and the explicit erasure in the university’s first iteration of the gendered context of violence, a group of women in Vancouver, as Burk (2003: 321) writes, proposed to develop a public memorial. The group didn’t want to conform to ‘Euro-centric cultural conventions of restrained grief’ and sought to make a statement about gendered violence. After receiving strong public and media support with council ceding land for the Marker of Change memorial, it became contentious and ‘stonewalled’ when the proposed memorial inscription became public. The inscription read:

To women, murdered by men

Women of all ages, all colours, all creeds, all races

We, their sisters and brothers, remember,

and work for a better world

Burk argues that ‘the phrase “murdered by men”' (2003: 321) committed the taboo, in Clifford Geertz’s memorable phrase, of ‘telling the truth in a public place [and] just as it was to pass into material public space, [the project] froze’. (The memorial, as Burk writes, ‘was not anti-male [as some commentors wanted to frame it] but challenged the very idea these acts of violence could be committed by anyone and emphasised that the public sphere addresses everyone – men, children and women’; Burk, 2003: 323.) Ahmed’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion is instructive as she argues that emotions are performative through words, producing regulatory systems of value. These regulatory systems shape or construct the flow and movement of different registers of feeling (e.g. love, hate, anger, etc.) directed to or away from certain subjects or objects. The marking of gender which told the truth about who commits violence against women generated a public backlash in mainstream media cultures and local government withdrew its support. A classic defensive mode of politics ensued that substituted and circumvented the memorial’s call for an ethics of responsibility into the politics of rights discourse, such as the right of men not to be made to feel guilty in public spaces. It therefore became a battle about the right to protect men’s feelings, producing an ‘affective economy’, as Ahmed (2014: 4) writes, ‘bound up with the securing of a social hierarchy’. The disruptive, transgressive memorial script generated a form of top-down placemaking politics that sought to reclaim men’s public positive value through neutralising the explicit marking of gender.

Official memorials remain highly constrained, and top-down support from governing bodies is reliant on the extent to which the processes of negotiation underpinning memorials can navigate prevailing narrative and aesthetic hegemonies and their unstated rules. And these rules become exposed, visible and audible through transgression. In her discussion of genocide, Fox argues that gender-neutral forms of memorialisation practices not only sanitise truth-telling but may erase gendered specific acts, experiences and histories of violence (Fox, 2019). An example can be explored in the first memorial to domestic violence victims in Queensland (sited in 2016; see Figure 1). Brisbane writer Jas Rawlinson initially started a crowdfunding campaign to honour domestic violence victims in 2015, motivated for justice for the public murders of Karina Lock, Tara Brown, and a child murdered by her father (Haxton, 2016). Once the project gained traction, Rawlinson decided to broaden the scope of the memorial to include all domestic violence victims (men, women, and children), thereby circumventing a public marking of gendered violence. Unlike the resistance to the Markers of Change memory project with its more disruptive narrative and aesthetic design, this memorial quickly gained the support of council and Brisbane Mayor Graham Quirk. The accepted site for the small granite-base plaque memorial and tree was Emma Millar Place near the Roma Street busway station. The park is named after Emma Miller (1839–1917), a suffragette, women’s rights activist, and pioneer trade union organiser. The memorial is a negotiation of gender rules by its generality. However, the memorial’s location is certainly associated with women’s lives and, as such, doesn’t quite perform or conform to gender neutrality. But, at the very same time, it is adhering to the rules of sanitised story-telling by eliminating any potential offence by excluding the naming of two women and any other specific messaging about the perpetration of men’s violence against women.

Figure 1.

Memorial to domestic violence victims at Emma Miller Place in Brisbane, photographed March 2022.

The traction of the domestic violence memorial at Emma Miller Place is unusual. Typically, it has taken a long time for memorials marking violence against women to emerge in publics of commemoration in Australia through dedicated official sites in public space. For example, it took 29 years after Anita Cobby’s horrific rape and murder in 1986 for an official public memorial to be placed in Western Sydney, and 10 years after Janine Balding’s rape and murder in 1988 for a public memorial in the Sutherland Shire of Sydney. Both memorials emerged after the persistent work of families advocating for their remembrance in a public space, but they are not explicitly testimonies to gendered violence. These are examples of memorials to gendered violence that was enacted by strangers; but memorials to women murdered by partners or ex-partners have taken much longer to gain a visible public presence and voice through official channels of commemoration. The latter are not about stranger violence but rather about acts that hit at the heart of romantic idealisations of heterosexual relationships and happy families.

The 2020 horrific murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children in Brisbane, with its significant community and national impact, publicly broke open, even if momentarily, such idealisations. Photographs of Hannah and her estranged husband published across media channels brought about a confluence of identifying markers that disturbed mainstream Australian self-images. For example, they embodied a lifestyle of health, fitness and the great outdoors and lived in a middle-class suburb. Hannah’s estranged husband looked like an ordinary ‘good’ bloke and had no criminal history. These very markers undercut stereotypes of stigma production about who are perpetrators and victims. At the same time, the police officer who broke the story in the media stated that the police force is keeping an ‘open mind’, intimating that ex-husband Rowan Baxter may have been ‘driven too far’ and appealed to family to come forward in order to understand motive (McGowan and Smee, 2020). There was a backlash from domestic violence agencies and Hannah Clarke’s parents about this framing and its implicit blame shifting from perpetrators to victims crudely expressed in familiar phraseologies such as ‘she must have drove him to it’ or ‘she tipped him over the edge’. These types of narratives are regulatory systems shaping the direction of public feeling and responsibility either towards or away from victims and perpetrators. Hannah Clarke and her children’s murder generated significant spontaneous memorialising in the suburban street where they lived and organised community vigils spoke out about violence against women. In various media and public forums, the family also addressed the failure of laws and policing to keep women and children safe from men intent on killing them. Through the family’s advocacy work and foundation, Hannah’s memory has been officially commemorated in a public park in Camp Hill, named ‘Hannah’s Place’, and the signage explicitly states the context of domestic violence.

The abovementioned murders are not isolated but are part of a consistent pattern of violence against women in Australia in the context of domestic settings. On average one woman dies each week in Australia due to intimate partner violence (IPV), often from traumatic violent acts such as strangulation, stab wounds, blunt force trauma, immolation, and gunshot wounds (Bricknell, 2020: 12). These murders usually happen in contexts of intimate terror, surveillance, financial control, and intimidation before and after women and/or their children might leave a relationship. Our Watch, the national leader in primary prevention of violence against women and their children in Australia, assert prevention is possible by focusing on gender equality. Much of the research into IPV prevention places the onus on improving the status of women (gender equality) and reducing gender norms of violence (Jewkes, 2002; Powell and Webster, 2018; Willie and Kershaw, 2018). These findings are significant; however, less focus has been given to the importance of the disruptive manifestation of victim visibility and voice in public spaces, and the ways in which the presence of public signs of death, trauma and grief can elicit responses from actors in various spheres. Actors include the bereaved, people who use urban spaces where memorials exist, those invested in domestic violence advocacy for change, the media, and people working for governmental and environmental bodies responsible for public land management.

It is also important to note that discourse from violence prevention agencies is underpinned by the belief that prevention is possible, thus ongoing action is imperative. Australian prevention advocate agencies such as Our Watch and Red Rose Foundation adopt similar catchphrases that focus on the importance of changing the narrative around violence against women. For example, Our Watch uses the phrase ‘change the story’ as a framework to coordinate a national approach to prevent violence. This framework assumes ‘all forms of violence against women have a gendered dimension and occur in the context of gender inequality’ (Our Watch, 2021: 15). Similarly, the Red Rose Foundation uses ‘change the ending’ for their Red Bench Project as an ‘opportunity for this important issue to remain visible’ (Red Rose Foundation, n.d.). This advocacy for change is part of a contemporary movement towards ‘affirmative memorials’ (Buckley-Zistel, 2021). Such memorials acknowledge grief and trauma while also advocating against the social-political conditions that generate grief and trauma.

Grief can be productive and transformative through public memorial culture designed as advocacy statements and change objectives. A useful example of this shift can be explored through the Red Bench Project by the Red Rose Foundation. Although not officially called memorials, the vibrant red benches with a plaque inscription – ‘Change the ending, let’s stop domestic violence’ – serve to both acknowledge loss and grief in the continuing present and, at the same time, reconstitute the impacts of traumatic violence and grief for futures of change. They aim to be preventative not simply by raising awareness and calling out violence but calling for change. The first Red Rose bench was installed in May 2019 outside the Cleveland Library in Brisbane, and there are more than 300 benches currently installed across Australia. The benches have dedicated plaques to domestic violence prevention and are placed mostly in parks and reserves for ordinary encounters. Like any park bench, they literally offer a place to sit, and in this instance may invite affective experiences of remembrance, solidarity, reflection, resistance, or anger. By design, the benches mediate physical comfort whilst also mediating potential individual and public discomfort on the subject of femicide. As a place for sitting, the bench embodies a tangible, affective connection to its subject.

As we argue in this paper, women’s lives and deaths are often relegated to the private sphere, placed outside history and the recognition of women as public subjects (topics and people) worthy of large-scale forms of commemoration in public ritual, space and the built environment. Positive commemoration of diverse women’s lives in all the roles and the contributions they make to communities and the nation beyond a public-private binary divide is essential for gender equality as part of the puzzle of redressing violence against women. Women’s invisible and unpaid labour already contributes to the public sphere and economy but largely remains assimilated and hidden within the selected recommendations of achievements of men in public roles and in their names. Unless women become truly equal economically, politically and representationally there is the danger that the proliferation of memorials to murdered women in public spaces normalise this violence and position women as natural victims rather than function as a disruptive change agent.

Commemorative threading of women’s lives in both official and unofficial forms

In the forest-leisure landscape of Mount Gravatt Reserve, the striking Bianca Girven memorial tree is encountered within a larger social-political geography of complex juxtapositions and assemblages of public commemoration. Mount Gravatt Reserve is itself located within the larger geography of Toohey Forest in the city of Meanjin/Brisbane (Australia). Toohey Forest is named after the settler James Toohey, who selected these lands in 1872, and Mount Gravatt named after Lieutenant George Gravatt, commander of the Brisbane Penal Colony in 1839 (BCC, 2022). The forest is on the lands of the Turrbal and Yuggera Peoples and known as ‘caggara-mahbill’, or resting place of the echidna. The official names Toohey Forest and Mount Gravatt constitute a commemorative assemblage in which Indigenous cultural memory is institutionally overlaid within a history of colonising governance, and violence. This points to the theme of the complex entanglements between different histories and forms of violence in official commemorative history and naming practices that are central to the politics of active remembering and active forgetting.

At the base of the north-east roadway, when driving, cycling, running, or walking up into the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples’ lands of Mount Gravatt Reserve, one comes upon a small parkland area commemorated as Gertrude Petty Place. Gertrude and Joshua Petty were settlers and built a home in this area in the early 1900s. It was a special place for Gertrude, as shown on council signage (Figure 2). In 1993, Gertrude’s daughter successfully petitioned for this section to be renamed from ‘Mount Gravatt Reserve’ to ‘Gertrude Petty Place’ (BCC, 1993). In the council meeting document that approved daughter Anne’s petition, it is notable that Anne is assimilated into her father’s name/authority as ‘Mr Petty’s daughter’. At Gertrude Petty Place two women’s lives are marked on the landscape – Gertrude Petty through official commemoration and Bianca Girven through a grassroots memorial. They existed in different times and commemorated for different reasons but come together in the making and marking of place.

Figure 2.

Signage and narrative commemoration of Gertrude Petty, photographed December 2020.

Along the walking tracks leading up from Gertrude Petty Place and the Bianca Girven memorial tree (Figure 3) towards the café and outlook, other forms of commemoration are positioned along the lookout’s circular drive and parking facilities where people move and congregate (see Map 1 and Table 1). These are all council approved or enacted, taking the standard form of plaques on stone-slabs and rocks to include: a plaque dedicated to Robbie Williams (Figure 4), an Indigenous community leader; a plaque on stones honouring the Lord Mayor Paul Quirk planting the two millionth tree in Brisbane; and a dedication to the relief workers who completed the lookout in the 1930s depression years (Figure 5). There is also a council commissioned place-based mural by artist Frida Forsberg, who transformed concrete pipes into an emblematic reflection of the fauna and wildlife found in the area. It features red necked wallabies, Xanthorrhoea, Pacific baza, koala, meadow argus butterflies, spotted pardalote, scarlet honeyeater, wattle, eastern spine bill, and eucalyptus blossoms. Although there are no war memorials on the top of the mountain, an Anzac Centenary Memorial and flagpole sits at the base at Mount Gravatt Showgrounds. While we are not seeking to diminish or subtract the public value of these memorials, it is important to recognise that these constitute forms of positive, affirmative public commemoration in the formal governance and decision-making of placemaking processes. They are recognising mostly men’s contributions in adding or bringing value through their public service roles and community work. In contrast, there are only two official commemorations inclusive of women’s lives in the Red Rose Foundation bench (sited in 2021; Figure 6) and, as mentioned, Gertrude Petty Place. The Red Rose bench is grounded in death and loss and must be placed in the context of women’s significant absence in commemorative publics that fail to acknowledge their contributions to public service and community life in official roles, community work, and their enabling invisible labour within and across a public-private divide. It begs the question: do women have to die in order to meet some threshold of public commemoration in which they are already largely absent? Doesn’t this suggest the perpetuation of a public-private dichotomy such that women are thereby brought into the public sphere of commemoration (as if they primarily exist in the private sphere) rather than treated as always already equal constituents?

Figure 3.

Bianca Girven memorial tree located in the parkland of Gertrude Petty Place, photographed April 2020.

Table 1.

Memorials around Mount Gravatt.

	Sited	Physicality	Orientation	Function
Michelle Eagle Memorial	Probable 2000	Metal cross bolted to tree	Loss	Bereavement
Gertrude Petty Place	1993	Blue metal sign	Pioneer life	Civic achievement
Robbie Williams Memorial	2007	Stone with plaque	Indigenous	Civic achievement Commemoration
Bianca Girven Memorial Tree	2010	Objects at base of tree	Loss	Bereavement
1930s Relief Workers Memorial	2012	Stone with plaque and images	Government	Civic achievement
BCC Our Urban Project Memorial	2012	Stone with plaque	Government	Civic achievement Environment
Anzac Centenary Memorial	2015	Granite with plaque and metal flagpole	War	National identity History
Bianca Girven Memorial Bench	2019	Purple bench (no plaque)	Commemoration	Bereavement advocacy
Frida Forsberg Mural	2020	Mural on concrete pipes	Culture	Art Environment
Red Rose Bench	2021	Red bench with plaque	Commemoration	Domestic violence advocacy

Figure 4.

Memorial to Robbie Williams: Brisbane City Councillor for Holland Park Ward 2007, Founder of the First Contact Aboriginal Corporation for Youth, Founder of the First Contact Development Corporation, Commissioner of ATSIC 2005, Councillor for ATSIC 1996–2005, situated outside the Lovewell Café, photographed December 2021.

Figure 5.

Memorial to depression workers who built the lookout at the circular driveway of the lookout in the 1930s depression years, photographed December 2021.

Figure 6.

Red Rose Foundation bench at Mount Gravatt Reserve lookout. The plaque displays a commemorative partnership between Brisbane City Council, the Red Rose Foundation, Lovewell, and the Brisbane Women’s Club, photographed December 2021.

At the top of Mount Gravatt reserve is the lookout and a café in partnership with the non-for-profit organisation Lovewell that supports women who have left violent relationships, providing a safe place to work. A sign outside the café tells its purpose. In a visit to the lookout in January 2022, standing between the lookout and the forest, we found another vernacular grassroots memorial tree dedicated to Michelle Eagle, 16/10/49–03/11/00. We have not been able to discover the circumstances of her death; it may be a memorial to a woman who had a special attachment to the reserve and lived in the area. It has a plaque, a silver cross and silver canister for flowers placed high up on the tree’s trunk, making it difficult to vandalise. Its very existence changes our mapping of the reserve from one memorial tree to two that are dedicated to women’s lives. One of the possible interpretations of this spatial geography is that from the bottom of the hill at Gertrude Petty Place and Bianca’s memorial tree to the top of the lookout there is a commemorative threading of women’s lives in both official and unofficial grassroots forms.

Figure 7.

The plaque before vandalism, photographed October 2021.

Figure 8.

The plaque after vandalism, photographed January 2022.

In a recent visit only months after the red bench was ceremonially opened on 21 October 2021, we noticed in January 2022 that it had already been defaced by deep scratching over the plaque (Figures 7 and 8). This scratching is specifically over the words ‘domestic violence’ and begs the question what did these words performatively do in the dynamics of encounter? The scratching itself is a mark of violence against the marking of violence against women and immediately shifts the memorial into an object of visible contestation and resistance. Positive, supportive encounters would not necessarily leave a visible mark in place, which positions such encounters in the realm of the invisible or unknown. It is worth remarking that other memorials in this reserve, that have existed for a much longer time (see Table 1), have not been vandalised.

Case study: The Bianca Girven memorial tree

The Bianca Girven memorial tree started when a small group of friends, shocked and distressed, travelled by car to the place where she was violently attacked. In an interview with one of Bianca’s school friends, we were told how it began. We did this interview by the tree, sitting in fold-out camping chairs in order to situate the conversation inside the practice of performative commemoration.

Not long after ‘it’ happened my friends and I were driving around and I guess we were curious, and we decided to find out what had happened, and where and how…she was our friend…we wanted to get some answers or some closure or something. And yeah, we kinda just found this tree and cleared away all the weeds around it and just went and picked some flowers out and about, and that was very much how it started. (Bianca’s friend, 17 August 2021)

At the time of our conversational interview, we experienced an extraordinary, visceral soundscape of birds. It is part of the complex atmosphere of this memorial place in a forest-landscape. The birds are part of the aesthetic experience of the memorial as a performative atmosphere of place-making.

In the interview with Bianca’s mother Sonia we learnt about the memorial’s trajectory in the grassroots community action of a vigil:

I think the police were the ones that contacted me and said something about the flower ceremony, and I didn’t know anything about it. So, I originally hadn’t started it. But they said, ‘People are doing this for Bianca, you know, for you, for Bianca.’ It was just surrounded by flowers.

Within days, a couple of people built a rockery around it, which we’ve tried to keep those same rocks there, because I don’t want to take over. I like the fact that people have done what they do, because that’s what to me it was: it was people doing things. So, they did the rockery…and it kept changing when somebody would bring lots of candles and they’d have a container with matches and things. People would put in solar lights [and] it just kept morphing and changing all the time, and so it became the place that we would come to. So, when we would have an anniversary – Bianca’s birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, her son’s birthday – we would always come to her tree, and we would do something there in the park. (Sonia, 16 April 2021)

The actions of people making community by ‘doing things’ expresses the importance of affective labour in transitioning and transforming a trauma space into something that offers solace and peace. The tree is a vital object and place of interaction and exchange where signs of remembrance and care through objects re-cover this place from a raw, visceral imprint of violence and trauma. Doing things with symbolic objects also serves to transform the meanings of place by enacting an affective, symbolic labour of recovery. The placing of objects as signs/tokens of community care is something Sonia (Bianca’s mother) said enabled the tree to become ‘a place that we would come to’ to remember Bianca. This affective labour doesn’t cover up or erase the trauma but rather ameliorates suffering through symbolic acts of repair.

Bianca’s aunt Deb (and Sonia’s sister) explained the distinction between the place where the traumatic event occurred and what the space has become through intentional place-making activities:

The tree became the symbol of…I think a ‘where’, not a ‘where it happened’, as such, but a ‘where to go to’. A place to go to is important, and because it’s a tree, and a beautiful living item, a living being, and it’s such a pretty place, and it can be a place of solace and it can be place of calm and reflection. (Deb, 27 April 21)

The memorial tree is a living memorial in multiple ways. It is grafted onto a living tree situated in a richly layered landscape of habitation in which there are vistas of the Brisbane cityscape, koalas visible in trees, noisy bird life, and animal habitats in tree hollows, shrubs and grasses. It is also a living memorial in the sense that it holds tokens/signs of continuous encounter and affective engagement. The objects under the tree reveal various temporal-spatial activity with some showing signs of having been there a long time, almost submerged in earth. The objects are closely nestled together, mediated and touched by fallen leaves, soil and grasses that hold them in place and give them place. The memorial does not have a contained atmosphere but is mediated by a range of atmospheres that includes the elements of wind, rain, sunshine, birds and animal life and the movements and activities of people in and around the memorial as they cycle up and down the steep mountain, walk their dogs, or sit on benches or grass at Gertrude Petty Place. In the routines of people who regularly visit this forest-leisure park, the memorial tree would form a personal geography of memory. However, for first-time visitors the memorial has a commanding presence and aesthetic quality of a vector that draws attention to itself. It is not just any tree in a forest landscape but a tree of sizeable visible scale even at a distance. It is also set apart from other trees with visible markers of human interaction underneath the tree and extending up the tree’s trunk. It has a monumental form while aesthetically outside familiar monumental materials of stone, marble and bronze. It is a kind of monumental anti-memorial that uses the form of nature without converting it into another form through nature’s raw materials to perform/signify gravitas. Zhang and Gray consider the way in which commemorative sites can become atmospheres through accumulative effects of engagement:

…atmospheres are affective economies that originate in particular spaces and places, over time and through the accumulation and regulation of affect; these affective economies exceed the people and the ‘originary’ sites that purportedly inaugurated the feelings, becoming atmosphere in their manifestation. We call this phenomenon atmospheres of commemoration: commemorative practices that create potential affective flows – atmospheres – that can and will be activated and actualized through certain triggers. (Zhang and Gray, 2019: 67)

As mentioned above, we do not propose that the Bianca memorial tree has a unitary or contained atmosphere. It certainly has complexity in terms of its affective potential that includes, among other things, the dimension of time. The tree is likely many hundreds of human years old while being brought into the service of commemorating the life of a woman who lived for only 22 years. In formal interviews and ad hoc conversations with people walking by the memorial tree it is unanimously referred to as a ‘peaceful’ place. The atmosphere has clearly shifted over time through care work that aesthetically folds human life in nature. The objects of the tree represent different world religions, objects of light (candles and solar lights), soft toy animals, butterflies and other animal objects, pot plants, plastic flowers, the planting of a yucca tree growing beside the memorial tree, a note with the name Aunty, drawings done by children, photographs of Bianca and of her family, and a laminated piece of paper, itself a memorial that reads: ‘Bianca Faith Girven. Our love to Bianca on what should be a day of celebration for her 32nd birthday…’. The photographs shown in Figures 9 and 10 capture different periods of the memorial’s existence with perceivable differences in the number of objects and how they sit in the grass and earth of the tree.

Figure 9.

Objects under the memorial tree, photographed in April 2011 and March 2013 by Bianca’s school friend.

Figure 10.

Objects under the memorial tree, photographed November 2020 and November 2021.

There is a Russian doll that symbolises the maternal feminine and a feminine genealogy. The yarn bomb explicitly marks the tree with a feminine symbol of crafting grafted onto the tree like a protective layer of skin – Bianca’s school friend called it ‘a shield for the tree’ (18 July 2021). Mann, in his paper on yarn bombing trees in city spaces, says these ‘unexpected and joyful forces of whimsy can act to disrupt these policing distributions, thus offering a significant ground for micro-political change’ (Mann, 2014: 65). The memorial tree symbolises growth and healing while also bearing the marks of its own history of fallen and cut branches, and renewed branches. The tree is central to place-making, as ‘trees are makers of place and…places are makers of trees (Jones and Cloke, 2002:73). Metonymically it stands in for the lost body of Bianca and has a touching quality. It is quite common for ‘natural symbols’ (Douglas, 2003) to be used in acts of memorialisation to symbolise life, regeneration and recovery (Tidball, 2013; Watson-Krasts, 2020). Heath-Kelly notes the paradox of using trees in commemorative practice, stating that ‘it is “normally” nature that enacts the forgetting and deindividuation of human bodies’ (2018: 64). Trees and their atmospheric elements provide a unique space for healing (Marcus and Sachs, 2013), and this is captured in the interview with Bianca’s aunty Deb:

We are so grateful for this beautiful space. It allows your mind to succinctly go to where you want to go to here in your heart without too much of a struggle. It’s not between two concrete buildings or something, you know? It’s not something nasty like that where – put some graffiti up or something to make it somewhere special. It’s a beautiful space of nature for which we are very grateful…it’s peaceful, and it allows for that moment inside you to occur and to come to be ‘with’. (Deb, 27 April 2021)

Figure 11.

Bianca Faith Girven memorial tree, view from the yarn bomb, photographed December 2021.

But the affective atmosphere of this forest landscape for Sonia has also required careful management in order to transition a trauma space/place into an emotionally safe place of engagement. In an interview, she said that she needed to make peace with the mountain by walking it: ‘I didn’t want to hate it. Because if I hated it, I feel as if I was hating on nature and the beauty that I should be feeling or seeing. So, it was a really big mental thing to do it’ (Sonia, 16 April 2021).

It took over a year following Bianca’s death for Sonia to be able to walk the steep topography of the mountain. She started at Bianca’s tree, sometimes walking the mountain two or three times, touching base with Bianca at the tree each time (Sonia, 16 April 2021). In the interview, the first author asked her: ‘Can you remember, or can you describe that first walk up [Mount Gravatt reserve]?’

Sonia:

Oh, interestingly, it’s when you first walk that I start remembering the first time Bianca walked it. I remember her telling me that she walked it. And I don’t think I remembered that until I’d done it. (16 April 2021)

This first walk reactivates a forgotten memory that comes back to consciousness through bodily movement. As Rosenberg writes: ‘walking shifts the burden of memory onto the individual on the ground, stressing the ethical dimension of remembering as an active participatory practice [which gives] presence to loss and form to absence’ (2012: 134). In her work on affective geographies, exploring how public spaces harbour invisible, hidden worlds of personal mourning and memory, the geographer Avril Maddrell writes about wayfinding through reiterative journeys into places charged with affective memory (2013: 501). Wayfinding is part of the process of adjusting to loss and its disorientations by finding one’s bearings in trauma spaces and/or places deceased loved ones inhabited.

Contested commemoration

The Bianca Girven memorial tree has a history of contestation with the local council. Conflict over the memorial’s continuance and legitimacy has been publicly documented in Australian newspapers (Crockform, 2018; Darvall 2018; Dawson, 2018; Wolfe, 2018). In February 2018, up to 30 people with connections to Bianca came together one morning to ‘yarn bomb’ the tree. In a community event, pieces of fabric gathered from homes and second-hand stores were woven together and grafted onto the tree. It was during this time that tensions escalated, with the local council suggesting the memorial had existed in its current form long enough. They wanted the trinkets removed in favour of a more conventional memorial design that would be suited to the park setting. The councillor in a newspaper report stated: ‘Whenever we look at these memorials, we look at them on a case-by-case basis and we sit down with the family and talk to them about what designs may be better suited for a permanent memorial in a public park’ (councillor, quoted in Hardy, 2018).

In Sonia’s conversations with the council a policy discourse of safety was stated in regard to the memorial tree’s future existence with the difficulty of mowing under the tree the publicly stated issue. However, in one private conversation with the council, Sonia was asked to remove the memorial and told that a complaint had been made against it by a mother who found it upsetting when her child asked, ‘What happened mummy?’ Sonia doesn’t believe this story, seeing it as a ploy to remove the visibility that something terrible and sad happened here. In wanting removal, the council is seeking to regulate the affective economy of this forest-leisure space by neutralising particular signs of gender, loss and grief invested in place. The memorial’s removal would regulate a young woman’s death and remembrance (herstory) from a visible public. Removal would also be an act of symbolic violence, instantiating another trauma against the memorial’s work of recovery.

Even if this story of a complaint is true, violence against women and family violence already exists in children’s lives such that any implicit discourse of protecting the innocence of children only serves to further efface the lived experience of women and children beyond the private sphere. It also displaces the social stigma of violence against women onto memorials themselves, and the victims they commemorate, by stigmatising them as ‘other’ and ‘out of place’ from public spaces of visibility and encounter. This places a limit on the agency of memorials for affective encounters with the very subject of violence against women and its impacts. Public memorials to violence against women should be framed as valuable resources for education programmes available for children and young adults, which is something Sonia supports in relation to the tree.

In this conflict, Sonia told the council that the memorial doesn’t belong to her and doesn’t in fact belong to anyone – it has a life of its own. In our interview Sonia spoke about how the memorial is a conduit of exchange as women, in particular, leave letters and notes at the tree about their own experiences of grief, survival from partner/ex-partner violence or the loss of loved ones from intimate femicide:

When I’m there, if I see a letter, I’ll open it and read it. And often – sometimes they are addressed to Bianca, and I’ll leave it.…But if they’re addressed to me, I take it home. But I get it from mums, and they’ll leave a note there for me. (Sonia, 16 April 2021)

The tree is its own entity in a shifting compilation of people and objects interacting with it for 12 years. The council appeared to negotiate with Sonia to remove the temporary marks of the memorial in favour of a permanent bench near the tree. Sonia agreed to the bench, requesting it be under the memorial tree and in Bianca’s favourite colour – purple – but she refused to dismantle the tree memorial. The purple bench was installed at a distance from the tree (Figure 12), which went against Sonia’s and the family’s expectations and creates a spatial separation. It is also unclear whether the purple memorial bench was implicitly regarded by council as a transaction that would substitute for the memorial tree in the expectation that it would be dismantled.

Figure 12.

Council-installed bench as a memorial, photographed December 2021.

The bench doesn’t as yet have a plaque and therefore no public signifier of its role as a memorial. Until the bench has a plaque only those who know of the bench’s origins would understand that it has been granted by council as a commemorative object/symbol. In the case of visitors or passers-by, the bench is just an ordinary object for sitting on, with no identifiable connection to the nearby memorial tree or indeed the Red Rose bench as a commemorative assemblage to violence against women in this forest geography.

What is apparent is that Bianca’s memorial tree has its own agency, evident in the objects, emotions and symbolic markings it has engendered in the incremental and organic place-making process. It is, foremost, a symbol of Bianca’s life and a testament to her investment in family, friends, and vulnerable members of the community. The tree has become not only a symbol of this significant loss but of change and advocacy through the affective labours of women. This entire commemorative assemblage speaks to the labours of women around caring for women’s lives, their remembrance and advocacy. The past 12 years of place-making at this spot is linked to wider intricate connections with local and state domestic violence prevention initiatives. As such, the memorial tree has rooted its own authority as a fixture of the landscape, and one not easily dismantled by resistant political processes.

Final thoughts

Official commemoration is always about value hierarchies which mediate and produce lives and events that matter for the cultivation and regulation of publics of feeling and remembrance. In this context, grassroots vernacular memorials can unsettle economies of value and boundaries of ‘imagined communities’ as other stories and subjects (in always imagined publics) are constructed in everyday spaces of encounter. Grassroots memorials often expose those dissonant national stories and subjects of violence that speak back to the commitments, investments, and values subtending public cultures of commemoration and particularly the production and regulation of a nation’s preferred self-images, which overwhelming venerate men’s lives within privileged axes of class, race and cultural heritage.

When memorials replicate conventional materials such as stone and plaques, benches and plaques, they perform conformity and serve to standardise the aesthetics of public expressions of remembrance. By enacting recognisable aesthetic codes of visibility, they create, paradoxically, invisibility in a taken-for-granted familiarity. Memorials at their best produce dynamic and disruptive possibilities of encounter where the onus of responsibility is placed on the consciousness/conscience of interlocuters. As Bonder (2009: 62) writes: ‘As our psycho-political and ethical companions, memorials should help us consider trauma and rethink and reactualize the past. They should encourage critical consciousness, committed memory-work, and the possibility of engaging with the world through transformative practices’. The Bianca Girven memorial tree is a not a form of public commemoration that emerged through planned design, such as the Red Rose Foundation bench. It exists precisely at the place where violence and trauma took place in a trajectory that uses that space, calling upon a natural symbol for commemorative practice, encounter and symbolic repair through the place-making activities of individuals and people in community. It is also a memorial public that has faced contestation around its permanence and legitimacy on council-governed land. Through a natural symbol in a nature-based environment of changing form and atmosphere, it has a living performative presence literally rooted in place.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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