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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | RADARCOMPETITION 1 What are the possible formal and spatial qualities of a postcolonial memorial? Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs look at the Stolen Generations Memorial competition.
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The revelations of the National Inquiry into
the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Children from Their Families – as
published in the Bringing Them Home report
(1997) – shocked many non-indigenous
Australians. For those who are part of the
Stolen Generations, the inquiry delivered
their painfully familiar stories to the
collective consciousness of the nation.
These revelations gave the process of
reconciliation in Australia a certain urgency,
the pivot of which became the apology.
Many Australians have said their sorries,
some infamously have not. Many hope that
saying “sorry” will provide closure, others
think it is merely a beginning.
Melbourne Museum recently displayed
the results of a national design competition
which edges us towards a different kind of
vocabulary for this moral restructuring of the
nation – one that is formal, spatial,
relational. This competition, managed jointly
by Museums Victoria and the School of
Architecture and Design at RMIT University,
called for proposals for a memorial to the
Stolen Generations.
This competition was philosophically
underpinned by the idea of a “progressive
memorial”. The brief was very precise
about what this “anti-memorial” might be:
interactive rather than dogmatic; ephemeral
rather than permanent; modest rather than
heroic; offering multiple interpretations
rather than singular readings of history. In
short, this “anti-memorial” was meant to
challenge the traditional idea of the
monument which, in the logic of the
competition brief, is firmly aligned with
power, force, and the imperial. Other, more
pragmatic parameters flowed from this
philosophical commitment: schemes had to
be conceived as “temporary installations” for the museum building and/or precinct
and realisable within the rather modest
budget of $30,000.
Given these parameters, the competition
solicited a relatively consistent range of
responses. Entrants by and large kept to
budget and diligently worked with the ideas
of ephemerality, inter-activeness and anti-monumentality.
They also demonstrated a
genuine sensitivity to the tragic history of forced removals. Most avoided drawing on
stereotypes of Aboriginality in contemporary
visual vocabularies – dots, curvilinear forms,
and culture/nature folds – grappling instead
with forms that better acknowledge the fact
that the history of forced removals
implicates Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
Australians alike.
Four schemes were commended. Liz
Herbert produced an intriguing and solemn
scheme consisting of a large folding cabinet
for the museum’s forecourt. The cabinet
would be ritualistically attended to each day,
unfolded in the mornings to reveal, for all to
read, thousands of perspex memorial tags
engraved with information about individual
children removed from their families. At
close of day this cabinet would then be
folded away, leaving a sombre box mutely
inhabiting the forecourt. Annabel Stanton
and Damien Pericles proposed an interactive
installation consisting of hessian printed with
extracts from protectionist policies
overlaying a more permanent surface
covered with Stolen Generation stories.
Museum visitors would be invited to remove strands of the hessian overlay and in so
doing literally unravel an official history to
reveal hidden emotional truths. This scheme
quite literally would invite visitors to worry at
and about the nation’s past. Rosanne Barley
and Damien Wright proposed an installation
of a finely crafted set of wood memorial
boxes lined with bands of silver into which
are incised relevant words. The way visitors
could interact with these boxes was less
scripted: they might be touched, climbed
through or simply looked at. Renee Romyn,
wittily toying with suburban Australia’s
obsession with lawn, literalised the
experience of uprooting through her work.
She proposed a text-based installation
around Archie Roach’s song “Took the
Children Away”, to be located in the
museum forecourt. The scheme takes letters
cut from the turf of the surrounding
parklands and assembles them into
manicured stacks. Visitors would then be
invited to return these stolen lawn-letters to
their places of origin.
This competition has provided a welcome
opportunity for exploring the language of such awkward memorywork. A notable
feature of the entries generally – including
the four commended schemes – was an
inclusion of words, whether in the form of
an extract of the official policies of the
time, or a snippet of a heartbreaking
testimonial from a member of the Stolen
Generations. Indeed, within the various
strategies on show in this exhibition, the
text often carries the most substantial
memorialising responsibility. What might
account for this reliance on text? It is
certainly true that most (non-indigenous)
Australians have come to “feel” the
experience of the Stolen Generations
vicariously through texts such as Bringing
Them Home. These accounts appear to
have weighed heavily upon the design
language deployed in these schemes. A
text-based strategy also offers a convenient
way of addressing the anti-monumental
aims of the competition brief. It generates
intimate, interactive, personal and
contemplative effects.
But what is being gained and what is
being lost by the presumption that this memorywork needs to be anti-monumental?
Must a postcolonial memorial be denied
hard monumental expression? Does the
language of healing have to be formed
through the intimately ephemeral? Do these
assumptions enrich or impoverish our forms
of remembrance? Can such anti-memorials
produce the kind visceral effects that would
be needed to register the violence and the
pain? The politeness of these diminutive,
impermanent installations leads us to
wonder who exactly is meant to be the
beneficiary of these rememberings? If
coming to terms with the tragedy of the
Stolen Generations is so central to a
reconciled Australia, then why is it that we
lack the courage to imagine something
permanent and heroic? These qualities are
not the sole domain of the imperial, just as
emotional solace does not have to belong to
the small spaces of individual interaction.
Dr Jane M. Jacobs is associate professor of
cultural geography at the University of
Melbourne. Dr Stephen Cairns is a senior
lecturer in architecture at the University of
Melbourne.
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