Memory Studies

This essay examines natural and artificial signifiers in a tract of colonised land in south-east Australia. The essay asks how do country and human consciousness mingle to fashion each other in long processes of remembrance? How does the present loom out of the past across generations, ecologies and geographies, within communities formed by actively remembering individual psyches? Language is one of these ways. Therefore, the essay pays attention to the form of its writing.

This article explores the idea of memory effects, that is, memory and materiality as intertwined producers of something we can call memory effects. This article argues that memory is an ‘effect’ produced through and with materiality, rather than something only produced by a human-centred consciousness. Through an exploration of the scale of memory in the shapes of a tiny Captain Cook painted on a matchbox and a giant Captain Cook, which stands as ‘Big Cook’ in Cairns in northern Queensland (Australia), new paths of perception and connection that may better account for the circulations and translations of memory are established. To think of memory as having a scale is to see memory as always simultaneously physical and temporal. These are memory effects. To think memory as memory effects is to give memory a key place not just in orders of concatenating events that we may over-determine as ‘national’ but as an order of perception given to us by the things themselves.

Remembering in ‘modern’ Australia arises first and foremost through the transcultural processes of settler colonialism. This article explores some questions of memory’s cultures through a discussion of ‘travel television’. It argues that this kind of television is an example of a hybrid or non-human form of remembering that I call companion memory. I consider two examples: the 1950s television series, Australian Walkabout, and a recent television series on Australian indigenous art, Art + Soul. I conclude by considering how memory and travel might help us think about the kinds of intimacy and proximity implied by the notion of ‘memory up close’.

What kind of memory-work is generated in settler nations when historians, archivists and television producers shed light on the family tree? What happens to the faithfulness, or reliability, of memory when we imagine the past through compelling figures and scenes that resonate with childhood memories? Why do we need our ancestors, our close relations, to be good, to be better than the history we inherit from them? At stake here, for memory studies, is not the familiar set of tensions between historical truth, empathetic unsettlement and unreliable memory, but the relation between memory, recognition and imagination, or what Terdiman calls the bipolar vocation of memory: ‘to remain focused on the facts and simultaneously to spin off into fantasy’. To probe memory’s bipolar vocation in the decentring of settler subjectivity in Australia, this article begins with the interplay of memory and recollection provoked by ‘Emily’s story’, recounted in McKenna’s award-winning book, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. It then turns to chastened recognition and the otherness of the past in the Australian version of the UK television format, Who do you think you are? It concludes with Ricoeur and the positing of incognito forgiveness as an alternative to the exoneration of our close relations from the barely hidden crimes of the past – foundational crimes that trouble the politics of reconciliation in settler-colonial nations.

For the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, living takes place at the intersection of inner and outer worlds, in a space riven by destructiveness and enlivened by love, play and repair. Working with Winnicott’s understandings of empathy and play, this essay explores creative writing’s prompting of a recognition of the not-yet-past, as it suffuses the place where we live. This essay focuses on the rancorous debates among historians and critics that followed the publication of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, a novel about Australia’s settler-colonial past. After pointing to the centrality of empathy within these debates, the essay examines Winnicott’s exploration of destructiveness as the precursor to empathy and reparation. The essay continues by examining the different modes of acknowledged and disavowed empathy associated with historiography and fiction, exploring, in particular, The Secret River’s engagement of empathy. The essay concludes by suggesting that Grenville’s work of ‘historical’ fiction ‘contributes’ (in Winnicott’s terms) by provoking an awareness that the violence that was part of Australia’s settler-colonialist history cannot be simply consigned to the past but lives on – and requires recognition – in the place that is Australia today.

This article considers the interplay between Aboriginal people’s remembrances about race relations in rural mid-twentieth-century Australia and the frames of remembrance provided by the American Civil rights movement. It takes as its focus two key Australian sites of racial segregation – country town cinemas and public swimming pools – to explore the ways in which since, and in no small part due to, the desegregationist politics of the 1960s they have become prominent sites of public memory. Drawing on three examples from a range of media – art, film and published memoirs – the article traces the ways in which different ways of narrating and remembering these ‘twisted spaces’ contributes to and makes possible alternative and at times unsettling interpretations of experiences and histories of relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people during what is commonly referred to as the ‘assimilation era’.

This article concerns itself with exploring some of the ways in which we can move beyond the ‘cognitive bias’ within social memory studies. A key obstacle to engaging with the kinds of manifestations of remembering that cannot be reduced to intentional and conscious articulations or representations of the mediated past is a deeply entrenched opposition between representational and non-representational (or declarative and non-declarative) mnemonic practices. It strikes me that this opposition is, at least partially, a product of early thinking on memory and trauma, in which affect and representation were opposed to each other, and the notion of non-representational memory was subsumed in the idea of the traumatic. In this article, I intend to try out the idea of ‘more-than-representational’ coined in the field of human geography to reach out to mnemonic processes and practices that operate on various levels not fully reducible to cognition, with the products of these processes exceeding representational form (rather than being completely outside or beyond it).

This article reflects on the place of prisoners of war of the Japanese in Australian memory of World War II. It examines the return to prominence of prisoners of war memory in the 1980s and places this phenomenon in the context of the memory boom and the attention accorded to difficult or traumatic memories. By exploring the relationship between Australian war memories and debates about Indigenous suffering, it suggests that cosmopolitan memory cultures form an important conceptual link between them. Recognising prisoners of war memory as an example of traumatic memory allows us to move beyond an analysis bounded by the nation state, and to argue that instead of seeing it as emerging in competition with other contemporary memories focused on the suffering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it shares some elements in common with them.

In memory studies, concepts of cosmopolitan, transnational and transcultural memory have been identified as a means of studying mnemonic symbols, cultural forms and cultural practices that cross national, ethnic and territorial borders. However, what do these concepts deliver for memory work that originates in an ‘off-centre’ location such as Australia, where outsiders often lack an understanding of the history and cultural codes? A recent Indigenous Australian film, The Sapphires, set in 1968, provides an opportunity to consider some of the claims that are made for the transnational travels of memory. The film tells the story of an Aboriginal girl group that travels to Vietnam to perform for the American troops. I discuss the mnemonic tropes and transcultural carriers of memory, particularly soul music, that enable this popular memory to circulate nationally and internationally. While global tropes and icons of the 1960s can be imported into Australia, and used to construct Australian cultural memory and identity, how effectively does cultural memory travel transnationally from Australia?

This essay deploys the concept of cosmopolitan haunting to explore entangled relationships with the past, the role of minoritarian and ethnicized subjects of history and the emergence of horizontal post-national solidarities. I focus on two commemorative sites or practices that challenge the limits of transnational memory and its relationship with citizenship. The first is the story of William Cooper, an Aboriginal activist whose critique of the Nazi pogrom has been recognized by a number of commemorative events in Israel, and the second is a performative ritual enacted by migrant artists to honour Australia’s early Japanese history. The case studies demonstrate the affective contaminations that provoke not just feeling but also actions that both surpass but then get caught up again within the pressures of the nation state.

Across much of the Asia-Pacific today, the smart phone, the tablet and the laptop or home personal computer are vying with the humble TV set not only to promote new models of lifestyle and to distribute communal and national stories but also to circulate other people’s stories and ways of life, complicating notions of heritage and cultural affinity. The proliferation of media technologies and their rapid spread across populations hitherto remote from or hostile to each other has transformed the conditions for the practice as well as the study of memory in this region as elsewhere. Yet, there are precedents for these developments; ‘new waves’ of media culture responded to technological change, colonial conflict, war, revolution and the growing influence of Hollywood across the Asia-Pacific region after the Pacific War. In Australia, one such ‘wave’ was a boom in travel writing from the 1930s to the 1950s, and another was the ‘new Australian cinema’ of the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on work in progress about Ernestine Hill, a mid-twentieth-century writer preoccupied with technology, this article suggests that asking how ‘old’ media have circulated ‘new’ memories of community in the past also opens up a way of situating old Australian national stories in a regional frame today.

This essay surveys the fields of oral history and memory studies in Australia since the publication of the landmark volume Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia in 1994. It argues that the practice of oral history has been central to memory studies in Australia, and explores key texts relating to the memory and commemoration of war, colonialism, Indigenous histories, trauma and witnessing in Australian society.