Settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada are undergoing “profound renegotiations of their histories” and are increasingly acknowledging the violence, trauma and dispossession of colonisation. As part of this process, a new generation of state-sponsored public memorials marks genocidal actions such as the systemic removal of Aboriginal children from their families in 20th Century Australia (a group now known as the Stolen Generations). These contemporary settler colonial memorials reflect the global post-war rise of public memorials that acknowledge instances of trauma, genocide and state violence. They invert traditional nation-building monumental forms, aiming to be interactive rather than pedagogical, fragmented rather than unified and evolving rather than completed. Their abstract aesthetic reflects absence and seeks to make space for multiple perspectives. This chapter explores the political complexities of Australian settler colonial memorials and their relationship to these broader global processes of memorialisation and post-conflict transformation. In particular, it examines the official central state memorial complex in the national capital Canberra, named ‘Reconciliation Place’, which is intended to both mark and bring about a newly integrated post-colonial society.

Settler colonial memorialisation efforts are often understood in the framework of transitional justice or reconciliation, that is, as part of the political and social rebuilding which must come after divisive internal conflicts. Public, communal acknowledgement of the full ‘truth’ of traumatic events through memorialisation is now widely accepted as central to the establishment of a new peaceful and just order. Settler colonial memorials share many characteristics with these international post-conflict memorials: they seek to acknowledge the violence and injustice of the past in order to facilitate a new political beginning; they accept the culpability of state institutions in much of the violence; they seek to create a single space where both victims and perpetrators can come together to build a shared and unifying historical narrative. This involves an attempt to break down rigid conflict-based group identities (in the settler case, coloniser and colonised) and to build diverse but integrated new communities. In recent decades, Australia has taken up many of the tools of transitional justice – official apologies, truth commissions and memorialisation – and in doing so has consciously connected itself to the political narrative of post-conflict transformation.