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Monument
Bonnie Cassidy
Giramondo, $32.95
Bonny Cassidy’s Monument is a hybrid work of archival research that blends poetry with narrative nonfiction and explores what it means for a family – her family – to establish itself on unceded lands. Looking back at this complicated history, it is a book forged from forgetting and denial with the project of remembering firmly in mind.
But in the history of colonial erasure, memory is always complicated. There are national histories and family trees, colonial records and counter-narratives of violent dispossession. As Cassidy looks for her family she also asks, how can a non-Indigenous person write this history?
The monument to the executed Indigenous men Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner by Brook Andrew and Trent WalterCredit: City of Melbourne
Monument begins outside Old Melbourne Gaol, with Cassidy standing in front of the solid bluestone swing that memorialises the lives of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, two Palawa men who were executed in 1842 after they were convicted of murdering whalers during a period of intense conflict between settler communities and Koorie peoples in Victoria.
Bonnie Cassidy explores whether new monuments encourage deeper truths.Credit: Laura Du Ve
“Their story isn’t mine, but I’m standing by it,” Cassidy writes, positioning herself alongside First Nations accounts while telling the story of her family who arrived in 1856. This is a position Cassidy returns to in the epilogue, writing that the book is “adjacent” to “the growing wealth of First Nations truth-telling″.
Cassidy writes: “Behind me / on the other side of this wall, is the monument / built to remind us of denial / the big and the little kinds / that tear us apart / as well as what we remember together / collect and corroborate / what we don’t want to know.“
The monument itself, Standing by Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, is one of the few in Australia that acknowledge the violent displacement of First Nations people instead of memorialising “founding” colonial figures. Are we replacing old whitewashed national identities with new monuments that encourage deeper truths? This is one of the central questions Cassidy explores, mentioning in passing various monuments, from Tom Nicholson’s public artwork in Melbourne, Chimney in Store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty), to the Standing Stones at Glen Innes in New South Wales.
Later in the book, she lingers more penetratingly on the Bowen Memorial erected at Risdon Cove on the Derwent River. Does it commemorate a successful British colony? Or does it represent genocide? “Unlike Country, a monument is ephemeral. It belongs to anybody. From the minute it stands up, a monument is already a ruin. Culture is acting upon it,” she writes.