Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia

This edited volume reflects on the profound effort undertaken by artists to contest settler denial and amnesia to disclose Australia's foundations in racialised violence and land theft. The book examines how First Nations creative and cultural practitioners have turned to the unique spaces of art and culture to remember and mourn the profound loss of life caused by British invasion and colonisation in the absence of official commemoration and public acknowledgement of the damage caused. It significantly focuses on a number of creative practitioners driving this powerful memory-work, containing contributions from some of the leading thinkers on truth-telling through creative practice, including Fiona Foley, Dianne Jones, Vicki Couzens, Julie Gough, r e a, Tony Birch, Paola Balla, Neika Lehman, Arlie Alizzi, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Kate Golding, Odette Kelada and Clare Land. An important contribution to scholarship on the public memorialisation of difficult histories, this significant edited collection foregrounds First Nations, female, queer, trans and gender diverse artists and scholars from the continent that is known as 'Australia'.

Taken together these deeply researched, considered texts, poems and conversations lend vital, critical perspectives on the ways artists are confronting settler colonial Australia’s toxic colonial memorial culture of denial. This book recognises that through a range of creative means and mediums, artists and cultural practitioners are making essential contributions to truth-telling, devising evocative, sensitive ways to make the injustices committed against First Peoples not only visible and tangible, but also strongly felt and grieved.

Genevieve Grieves is a Worimi woman from Southeast Australia currently based in Garramilla (Darwin). She is an award-winning artist, curator and content creator committed to sharing First Peoples histories and cultures and interrogating colonising frameworks and practices. Her recent projects include The Violence of Denial exhibition (2017) as part of the Yirramboi Festival; Barangaroo Ngangamay (2016), a place-based Augmented Reality app that shares and celebrates the living cultures of Sydney Aboriginal women; and, she was the Lead Curator of the internationally celebrated permanent exhibition, First Peoples (2013), at the Melbourne Museum. She is a passionate advocator of decolonising and community-engaged practice and teaches these methodologies in university, institutional and community contexts. Her current role is co-founder and creative director of GARUWA, a First Nations storytelling agency.

Amy Spiers is an artist and researcher of settler descent, and currently a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT School of Art based in Naarm (Melbourne). She has presented art projects across Australia and internationally, including at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne) and the 2015 Vienna Biennale. Amy has also published widely, including co-editing Let's Go Outside: Art in Public with Charlotte Day and Callum Morton for Monash University Museum of Art (Monash University Publishing 2022) and co-authoring the book, Art/Work: Social Enterprise, Young Creatives & the Forces of Marginalisation, with Grace McQuilten, Kim Humphery and Peter Kelly (Palgrave Pivot, 2022). Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to investigate non-Indigenous artists’ that engage in truth-telling about Australia’s colonial past through creative practice.