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Abstract

Memoricide, it seems, is memory made rubble and ash. Its emblematic imagery is of scenes many would find familiar: burning ash-snow from Sarajevo’s Vijecnica; satellite images of Palmyra’s missing structures; the exploding Bamiyan Buddhas. Physically altering space is understandably a highly visible tactic. However, when explicitly built into definitions, the emphasis on physical destruction has been on specific forms targeted: archival institutions, monuments, memorials and heritage sites. This article revisits memoricide as a range of converging physical, social and discursive strategies. It introduces ‘everyday’ memoricide – the normalisation of memory erasure as mundane practices – which ordinarily masks its intelligibility as memoricide through ‘common sense’ or ‘greater good’ discursive frames. The sacred Djab Wurrung trees, threatened by the Victorian State Government’s Western Highway project, and a felled Directions Tree in particular, provide a still unfolding case study within the broader history of Australian memoricide.

Keywords

Australia collective memory colonialism everyday forgetting memoricide

Black snow fell over Sarajevo,

darkening the midday sky with ashes

from the million and a half books burning

in what was once the National library.

‘Memoricide’, Phil Cousineau (2004: 33)

On Monday afternoon, the removal of a towering fiddleback tree – felled in preparation for the highway’s expansion – made headlines.

Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation (EMAC, 2020)

Memoricide (the ‘killing of memory’) first emerged as a concept in 1992. Mirko Dražen Grmek (2019: 157) intended it to label the systematic purge of Croatian heritage during the War of Independence (1991–1995), of which the deliberate shelling of Old Dubrovnik, an inscribed UNESCO World Heritage site, was salient amidst widespread destruction across the countryside. Other campaigns within the wider Yugoslav Wars, particularly the Bosnian War (1992–1995), would also exemplify the killing of memory. Cousineau’s (2004) poem above conveys the purposeful destruction of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (also known as the Vijecnica) during the Siege of Sarajevo. Its devastation, alongside that of the nearby Oriental Institute, has come to epitomise the campaign ‘to erase the Bosnian Muslim imprint from the land’ (Porteous and Smith, 2001: 198). Hariz Halilovich (2016) declares that the ash-snow ‘has become Sarajevo’s intimate collective memory, a shared emotion, of the burning Vijecnica’ (p. 83). It has also formed an emblematic atrocity for our understanding of memoricide, guiding our sense of what it is and what it looks like.

Memoricide, it seems, is memory made rubble and ash. It comprises dramatic scenes many would find familiar: the ruined Vijecnica; empty cliff cavities that once housed the Bamiyan Buddhas; before-and-after shots of Palmyra’s missing structures. Yet memoricide is more than the destruction of world-famous archives, monuments and World Heritage sites during times of war and violent conflict. Memoricide has social and discursive dimensions which produce and sustain its normalisation as quotidian practices in everyday contexts – ‘everyday memoricide’. The second epigraph is illustrative of this. Its banal rhetoric frames an act of epistemic violence in labelling a Directions Tree – an integral part of a women’s site sacred to the Djab Wurrung people – a ‘fiddleback tree’. The underlying material violence, the destruction of the tree itself, is further diluted through the euphemistic language of ‘removal’ and ‘felled’. Here, memoricide’s social and discursive means converge to enable material mnemonic destruction not quite captured in existing definitions. The point of this analysis is to highlight the ‘felled’ Directions Tree and the burning Vijecnica as part of the same memoricidal phenomenon.

Existing literature on memoricide has predominantly focused on two ethno-nationalist wars: the broader Yugoslav Wars, specifically the Bosnian and Croatian theatres, and the First Arab-Israeli War (1947–1948).¹ These case studies establish a template for memoricide that is fixated on certain material targets destroyed during scenarios of armed conflict. However, in Ilan Pappé (2006) and Nur Masalha’s (2012, 2015) work, memoricide analysis has begun to account for processes beyond these extreme periods characterised by widespread devastation. Their work explicitly identifies memoricide that largely (and gradually) takes place within everyday contexts – the planting and signposting of artificial forests over Palestinian village ruins; the renaming of Palestinian toponyms into Biblical and Talmudic ones as well as their transliteration from Arabic into Hebrew. These analyses, though, remain relatively tied to the immediate aftermath of the First Arab–Israeli War and its foundational violence in systematic destruction (over 530 Palestinian villages) and expulsion (700,000 Palestinians) (Davis, 2011: 7; Pappé, 2006: xii; UNRWA, n.d.).

This article extends these insights to the ‘colonial present’ of contemporary Australia. There are certainly shared memoricidal practices between Israel and Australia. However, unlike Israel, Australia presents a settler–colonial context that is further removed from its formative acts of violence, invasion and settlement. Importantly, describing this context as Australia’s ‘colonial present’ acknowledges that settler–colonial dynamics and asymmetrical power relations remain in a normalised state; colonialism is ‘a structure and not an event’ (Wolfe, 2006: 388). This colonial structure is embedded within the memoricide analysed in this article. Edward Said (1992: 18–19) has argued that Palestinians and their material cultural presence were discursively negated through Zionist ideology in ways reminiscent of other European colonial projects. Despite this, key contrasts remain between the legibility of Palestinian material cultural landscapes within Eurocentric lenses (brick-and-mortar homes, places of worship, cemeteries) and the landscapes bearing diverse nature–culture entanglements for First Nations peoples in Australia. Therefore, novel insights about memoricide can be drawn from an Australian context.²

Memoricide can be ordinary. In making this argument, I appropriate the theoretical framework that J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra Smith (2001) use to divide the deliberate destruction of home into two categories: ‘extreme’ and ‘everyday domicide’. The ‘extreme’ side of this binary refers to domicide tied to exceptional circumstances of open warfare, such as genocide and scorched earth tactics. The ‘everyday’ counterpart ‘comes about because of the normal, mundane operations of the world’s political economy’ (Porteous and Smith, 2001: 106). It entails home destruction that occurs in everyday settings, beyond extreme contexts of armed conflict and war crimes, such as homes destroyed (almost always in legally sanctioned ways) to make way for infrastructure or redevelopment projects. These acts are discursively framed as ‘common-sense’ or for the ‘greater good’. Similarly, everyday memoricide is normalised as taken-for-granted processes or is otherwise explicitly legitimated through narratives of human progress.

There is a connection between domicide and memoricide. In many respects, these unjust actions can be co-constitutive. Porteous and Smith (2001: 4) recognise this when noting that the destroyed human home can be a form of memoricide. The mass domicide in Bosnia and Palestine re-emerge as examples of this as part of their respective campaigns to erase traces of socio-cultural presence on the land. But, as Porteous and Smith (2001: 4) note, a single instance of home destruction can also be memoricide for its residents with home’s meaningfulness often tied to its function as a ‘memory machine’ (Douglas, 1991: 294). The affective dimensions of domicide – the suffering caused for its victims – can be due to having this mnemonic function permanently ruptured. This observation is significant for memoricide too as, although both phenomena can be disguised as mundane operations within ordinary social life, they are not disguised for those directly impacted. In other words, these destructive acts must be meaningful to someone.

For Porteous and Smith (2001: 22–23), recognising affective responses to domicide provides a starting point for de-naturalising its everyday practice. I argue that this is the case for everyday memoricide as well. Therefore, recognition of a visibly suffering victim – such as the anguish and protest witnessed following the Directions Tree felling – cannot be a defining feature of ‘extreme memoricide’ alone. It is necessary for identifying the practice of everyday memoricide. Material destruction is also not exclusive to extreme circumstances. It is true that memoricide can occur without a material ‘thing’ being destroyed.³ However, what distinguishes ‘extreme’ and ‘everyday’ is not ruined materiality; it is the context in which the act takes place and the discourse that frames its perpetration. The felled Directions Tree is an example of everyday memoricide precisely because it did not occur as part of a violent and armed breakdown of social order; rather, it occurred as part of social order operating ‘as normal’. How that status quo is socially and discursively constituted, sustained and legitimated when under challenge encompasses what I call ‘everyday memoricide’.

This article begins by distinguishing memoricide from seemingly similar terms like iconoclasm and cultural genocide. I argue that the killing of memory is not yet satisfactorily accounted for by any of these concepts. However, to better emphasise its social and discursive aspects, memoricide itself also requires conceptual reworking. This is achieved through aligning it with Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992, 2011) work on collective memory. Memoricide operates – productively as well as destructively – within collective memory’s frameworks. That is, rather than exclusively being an act of mnemonic destruction, memoricide reconstructs collective memory. This article then turns to the Directions Tree, felled as part of the Victorian State Government’s Western Highway expansion, and the uncertain fate of the remaining Djab Wurrung trees. I argue that the discursive construction of the Directions Tree as a felled fiddleback, the reasonable and unremarkable outcome of a much-needed infrastructure upgrade, exemplifies everyday memoricide and heralds potentially more to come.

The memoriae in memoricide

Memoricide and iconoclasm

To discuss memoricide today might prompt recollections of destroyed heritage in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq since the millennial turn. The Taliban’s detonations of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 are often held as a ‘precedent’ for the more recent destruction perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (Behzad and Qarizadah, 2015; Delman, 2015; Kandasamy, 2015).⁴ Both the Taliban and ISIS are militant Islamist movements that couched their vandalism within religiously charged discourse (i.e. the sin of idolatry) (Isakhan and Zarandona, 2017; Klein, 2018: 266). Moreover, the Taliban’s alternative justification for destroying the Buddhas – in protest of international proposals to fund their preservation while Afghans suffered under famine and economic sanctions – entailed exploitation of the site’s ‘world-facing’ value (Crossette, 2001). Amr Al-Azm (cited in Greenberg, 2015), conversely, argues that ISIS used its high-profile vandalism for its own geopolitical ‘points-scoring’ and to promote its intimidating brand of political violence. Memoricide, in both instances, functioned as highly visible propaganda in the short-term while simultaneously causing mnemonic damage that will have long-term impacts.

We must, however, remain cautious with this ‘precedent’ narrative. While similarities certainly exist, as do theological traditions of iconoclasm and aniconism, such framing risks locking us into perceiving memoricide as religiously, culturally and (geo)politically specific. The Taliban comparison, especially, is a limited reference point that also encourages assumptions that such phenomena are exclusively the domain of extremist religious – or, worse, specifically Islamist – movements. It also maintains a focus on the artistic, architectural and literary toll of such iconoclastic purges. These can be exhaustive in scope, and highly visible, but nonetheless ignore other important dimensions of memoricide. By this, however, I do not intend ‘memoricide’ to override ‘iconoclasm’ as a term of choice. The latter refers to a distinct phenomenon, and has an extensive history, which continues to be useful to spotlight.

Iconoclasm itself has recently undergone a reconceptualisation that challenges it as a uniquely religious phenomenon (Stapleton and Viselli, 2019: 8). Anne McClanan and Jeffrey Johnson (2017) outline iconoclasm as ‘a principled attack on specific objects aimed at the objects’ referents or at their connection to the power they represent’ (p. 3). They target ‘the icon’ in loaded acts, beyond straightforward censorship, designed to obliterate the sanctity and potency of what is being represented. Martin Kemp (2012) observes that ‘an iconic image is one that has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognizability and has come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large numbers of people across time and cultures’ (p. 3). Hence, as Rachel Stapleton and Antonio Viselli (2019) conclude, an ‘unseen icon would therefore be an oxymoron’ (p. 8). This sets a specificity that, while certainly relevant to memoricidal practices throughout the ages, is too narrow to encompass the killing of memory.

The point here is not to set up a competitive framework between the iconic and the everyday. Michael Rothberg (2009) warns about assumptions that collective memory is ‘a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources’ (p. 3). Old Dubrovnik and the Vijecnica, the Bamiyan Buddhas, Palmyra – these all remain important and devastating losses. Moreover, the iconic image circulates within collective memory’s frameworks insofar as repetitions produce refined images that might achieve the scope of recognisability Kemp identifies (especially if subsumed into artistic traditions). Iconoclasm is one of many possible modes of memoricide. However, memoricide does not just target the widely renowned. The bulk of memoricide during the First Arab–Israeli and Bosnian Wars impacted residential geographies and everyday spaces that at the time were hardly noteworthy beyond their immediate social worlds (Pappé, 2006: xii; Porteous and Smith, 2001: 97, 188). In fact, the wider significance these spaces have now is a product of the memoricidal assault they endured (see the prevalence of Palestinian house-key symbolism invoking refugees’ Right of Return). Therefore, iconoclasm and memoricide should not be considered straightforward synonyms or rival concepts.

Memoricide and cultural genocide

The pillage of heritage sites is now escalating in a strategy of total war, and commentators speak of it in terms of a ‘cultural genocide’. It seems more useful to name this new concept using a new term: In this respect, I suggest that memoricide is a concept more appropriate to describe this reality, knowing that in ancient Latin, the term memoriae means not only memories but also historical monuments.

Mirko Dražen Grmek (2019: 158)

Memoricide is closely aligned with concepts like cultural genocide, cultural cleansing and ethnocide. Grmek thought memoricide was better suited as a term to label what was being called ‘cultural genocide’. Similarly, Šejla Haračić (2012) recognises memoricide as ‘an element of ethnic cleansing and genocide’ (p. 239). Haračić (2012) explores whether memoricide ought to be a criminalised behaviour under international law ‘as a crime itself or as a base crime’ (p. 235) for already recognised war crimes. Memoricide certainly can be co-constitutive with several war crimes. However, it should not be solely framed as a base crime for one or more of them. This risks maintaining the killing of memory as an extraordinary occurrence – a subordinate element within the ‘crime of crimes’ in genocide (Haračić, 2012: 254). It also potentially restricts memoricide to extreme conflict scenarios which would obfuscate its presence within everyday contexts. Memoricide can be a normalised feature of everyday life performed, often unconsciously, by ‘ordinary people’.

Raphael Lemkin (1944: 91), who originally proposed the concept of genocide – with a core ‘cultural essence’ that was ultimately left out of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bilsky and Klagsbrun, 2018) – emphasises ‘the malicious destruction of works of art and culture because they represent the specific creations of the genius of [national, religious, or racial] groups’ (p. 373). So far cultural genocide seems quite similar to memoricide. However, memoricide targets memory; it ‘squarely means ‘killing of memory’, and it should be analysed as such’ (Haračić, 2012: 237). It therefore can, but does not necessarily, include the wholesale erasure of memory of a group’s cultural existence. As such, although Grmek (2019: 158) emphasised that memoricide’s Latin etymology sets a scope inclusive of historical monuments, it is worth emphasising the inverse as well; memoriae includes memories as well as historical monuments.

Physical destruction is understandably highly visible and distressing. However, when explicitly built into definitions, an emphasis on physical destruction constrains our understanding of memoricide’s processes. This is especially true when combined with specificity about the ‘types’ of material cultural forms targeted. Penelope Hamblin (1999: 40) defines memoricide as the ‘systematic eradication of cultural monuments’ including ‘cultural institutions’, ‘houses of worship’ and ‘historic sites’. In a shift that incorporates artefacts and documents, Halilovich (2016) describes memoricide as ‘the systematic obliteration of archives and cultural heritage’ (p. 82). Porteous and Smith (2001: ix) also frame it as achieved, not solely, but ‘chiefly through the destruction of memory’s physical prop, the cultural landscape’ (my emphasis). The latter two definitions, although outlining scope more abstractly than Hamblin’s, tend to focus on the same targets when applied: archival institutions like libraries, museums and galleries; monuments, memorials and heritage-listed buildings; places of worship like churches, synagogues and mosques; mundane and familiar structures like brick-and-mortar (or ‘fixed’) home dwellings and cemeteries. These are material cultural spaces that largely conform to Eurocentric expectations. The deliberate destruction of these features therefore become more recognisable as destruction – and, most especially, as crimes – compared with memoricide practised against material forms, like the Directions Tree, which do not adhere to such conventions.

Importantly, memoricide may also target the memory of a person, a place, a group or event without being attached to any macro-scale assault on a nation or culture. As noted earlier, a single act of domicide can also be memoricide for the home’s residents. This also highlights how there are personally specific and individual dimensions to memoricide even as it is being conducted at a macro-scale. The fate of Ivan Lovrenovic’s (1994) own extensive collection underpins what he labels the ‘hatred of memory’ during the Bosnian War, ‘the same hatred that had burned down the Vijecnica, that had machine-gunned the paintings. One day we got the news: they have burned your library’. Therefore, reconceptualising memoricide can also illuminate mnemonic assaults across multiple, simultaneous scales even while it is a constitutive element of systematic cultural genocide.

Collective memory and its social frameworks

This article is not an intervention into ongoing debates over the legal recognition of cultural genocide. It holds memoricide and cultural genocide, like iconoclasm, as interrelated but ultimately distinct phenomena. However, it is clear that while neither iconoclasm nor cultural genocide adequately captures ‘killing memory’, memoricide itself also requires significant reworking. Memory must be centred in its definition. But how do we define ‘memory’ itself? This question is integral to understanding what memoricide’s ‘object’ is as well as the avenues through which it assaults. It is also a question that has provoked an expansive range of answers. Across both cultural contexts and academic disciplines, no memory definition can be said to be universally valid (Eckstein, 2018). Therefore, ‘the term is almost always most useful when accompanied by a modifier’ (Roediger and Wertsch, 2008: 10).

Memoricide operates within the processes of what is called ‘cultural’ or ‘social memory’. The foundations Maurice Halbwachs (1992, 2011) provides on ‘collective memory’ and its social frameworks are therefore central to understanding memoricide. This introduces greater flexibility within a concept that has been primarily concerned with material destruction (and, within that focus, the destruction of specific material forms). Moreover, what an alignment with Halbwachs’ theory achieves is the ability to attend to memoricide’s social and discursive aspects. In fact, insofar as Halbwachs (1992: 53, 173) argues that our memories are made intelligible through socially acquired interpretive frames, it even enables us to consider memoricide as not necessarily tied to material destruction at all. Importantly, though, it also attends to how the convergence of memoricide’s social and discursive dimensions produce material impacts that differ from its dominant imagery – as demonstrated with the Directions Tree.

Memoricide intervenes on the repetitions that sustain collective memory. That is, our interactions – with people, places, objects – that function as cues for memories (Halbwachs, (1992: 38). While noting the role of space and objects in facilitating memory, Halbwachs primarily focused on verbal exchange between individuals and within social groups. But these social mnemonic frameworks are also highly and variably mediated, increasingly digital and profoundly accelerated as they circulate along multiple trajectories (Bond et al., 2017; Hirszowicz and Neyman, 2007: 75). Despite this, while our means of interacting have significantly transformed over time, interaction remains key to collective memory. Halbwachs (1992) observes that ‘to remember is to reconstruct the past’ (p. 224) as memory is (often unconsciously) revised for present needs. Collective memory ‘tradition’ emerges as memories incrementally shed their idiosyncrasies and become an ‘idealized image’ (Hutton, 1993: 7, 79). Commemoration figures as ‘a self-conscious effort . . . to stay or at least to disguise the process’ of this gradual change (Hutton, 1993: 79). Eric Hobsbawm (1983: 12) argues that the power of tradition lies in its self-perpetuated ‘knowledge’ as a long-running phenomenon, using ‘history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion’. This ‘knowledge’ though, perhaps inevitably, bears a relationship with the erasure of memories that contradict. Memory politics – the purposeful cultivation (or even invention) of collective memory – therefore becomes a force that orientates tradition.

Memoricide, then, does not simply ‘target’ collective memory. Rather, memoricide is always already bound up in collective memory’s frameworks: cultivating, regulating and producing it. In this sense, I take cues from Lemkin (1944: 79), who argued that genocide has ‘two phases’: destruction and ‘the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’. This insight resonates with memoricide insofar as it is as much the reconstruction of collective memory as the erasure of it. Our attention, therefore, cannot fixate exclusively on acts of mnemonic erasure but also the mnemonic discourse it brings into being.

That memoricide operates both productively and destructively within collective memory’s frameworks might make the killing of memory seem inevitable. Memoricide cannot be distinguished as strictly deliberate acts either. Normalisation innately distorts what ‘intent’ looks like. It becomes unthinkingly subsumed within everyday life – ‘common-sense’; a seemingly naturalised process. However, as repeatedly argued across feminist, postcolonial, antiracist and Marxist literature, what comes to be known as ‘natural’ is often an outcome of ideological mystification and normative power. The critical work of ‘de-naturalising’ norms, then, is to highlight their conditions of emergence, their constructed-ness and to consider what we should do with this understanding. Thus, ‘everyday memoricide’ is intended as a critical and political injunction. It is not interested in the ‘organic fade’ of memory. Rather, it identifies discursive frames that mystify memoricide within everyday contexts – including as the ‘natural course’ of forgetting. The suffix ‘-cide’, charged and always dramatic, is therefore essential for its condemnatory connotations; it anchors a term intended for intervention in situations of ‘mnemonic injustice’ – the denial of freedom to acknowledge ‘the otherness of the past’, to make it ‘present and future through various symbolic and cultural acts, gestures, utterances and expressions’ (Reading, 2011: 380).⁵

Everyday memoricide in Djab Wurrung Country

Colonial negation and systematicity

Australia’s colonial history and present does not feature the same overt war on Indigenous history or memory compared with other contexts explored prominently in memoricide analysis. While Australia certainly has its own brutal figures and violent campaigns, there is no rhetorical equivalent to convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić (cited in Hirszowicz and Neyman, 2007) who, during the Bosnian War, declared: ‘History, if it is not ours, should not exist’ (p. 77). To do so would have contravened the ethos of negation that underpinned terra nullius (Latin for ‘nobody’s land’), the legal doctrine that was distinctive among European colonial projects in its nullification of both native sovereignty and land ownership (Reynolds, 2003: 15–17, 2006).

Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were negated;⁶ their customary practices and laws, histories, relationships to and uses of space rendered as ‘secondary and negligible’ to the colonisers’ needs, even as these same relationships were drawn upon in particular ways to further colonisation itself (Said, 1992: 18–19).⁷ In this sense, colonial negation entails a more complex modality of recognition and visibility than what a surface level understanding of ‘invisibility’ may imply. Aboriginal Australians were not invisible to the colonisers; they were certainly seen, noticed and engaged with in specific ways. But their presence was construed through a complicated negligibility; a dis/enabling ‘present–absent’ paradox that filtered the conditions of recognition in ways that ultimately progressed the colonial project and its memoricide.

Despite his specific focus on Palestinians and Zionism, Edward Said (1992: 18–19) describes this paradox as a shared discursive function across the broader ‘European mission civilisatrice’, ‘built on notions about the inequality of men, races, and civilizations’. Colonial negation, anchored in the self-evident ‘superior virtue’ of the colonisers’ needs, naturalised a broad range of practices including those that wrought significant mnemonic damage on the colonised. It recruited as practitioners, not only colonial and military authorities, but settlers and convicts who were not necessarily conscious of the impact their labour and livelihoods were having on existing cultural landscapes. Signs to the contrary – such as confrontational encounters or witnessing Aboriginal ingenuity in engineering or agriculture (i.e. established material uses of space) – were ‘selectively filtered’ through ingrained prejudice as evidence confirming that prejudice (Pascoe, 2018: 4).

Larissa Behrendt (1993: 28, 34) observes that, for spaces sacred to women, colonial ethnocentrism in Australia also entailed an intersectional form of discrimination which confirmed sexist prejudices. The assumed absence of artificial construction is a fundamental tenet of colonial negation. Bruce Pascoe (2018: 2) argues that Aboriginal society and culture was more complex in its agricultural and engineering practices than dominant understandings of their ‘hunter–gatherer’ nomadic structure suggests. Similarly, Bill Gammage (2011) highlights how sophisticated Aboriginal land management through fire, combined with an intimate knowledge of local flora and water flow cycles, accounted for the fertility and ‘estate-like’ appearance of much of Australia when the Europeans arrived. However, sites of significance for women – like the Djab Wurrung trees – were further diminished within the broader negation of cultural landscapes due to sexist assumptions that ‘women would hold a similar subordinate place. . .to the one they held in European society’ (Behrendt, 1993: 28). The fact that Indigenous peoples did have material impacts should not be used as a measure for ‘meaningful’ cultural landscapes though. Space does not need to be artificially refashioned for its physical dimensions to function as external cues for memory or as sites of cultural significance.

The killing of memory came to be ordinarily masked through the subtle yet powerful normalisation of colonial negation, providing the conditions of emergence for everyday memoricide in the present-day. Chris Healy (2008: 10) illuminates how this ‘present-absent’ paradox continues to be rearticulated in a modern Australian context: ‘Aboriginal people and things appear in and disappear from public culture in strange but definite ways’. Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander identities, cultures and histories are certainly recognised and acknowledged today – from custodians delivering ‘Welcome to Country’ addresses at sporting events to the newly elected Federal Government’s agenda for constitutional reform that would enshrine an ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament’. Treaties with First Nations peoples are also being explored at various levels of government, including the Victorian State Government, which is notable in the context of the Djab Wurrung trees.

Similarly relevant for this case study is the matrix of state, territory and national laws that attempt to account for and protect tangible and intangible Indigenous heritage such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984, the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986, and the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. However, as Robynne Quiggin (2018) observes, while progress has been made in the protection of Indigenous heritage, this progress ‘is often incidental to, or defeated by, the economic development, commercial or environmental interests of governments and third parties’ (p. 269). Quiggin (2018) argues that, with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 in particular, the volume of unsuccessful applications and legislative amendments that have curtailed its reach indicate it is ‘an almost complete failure as national heritage protection law’ (p. 284). Indigenous sites of significance continue to be constructed as ‘secondary and negligible’ compared with other needs within frames of ‘the greater good’, compounding the destructive impacts of colonisation at a time of apparent recognition and respect.

The Australian myth of ‘peaceful colonisation’ is another form of colonial negation that persists in a complicated state. The myth holds that this colonial theatre was remarkably conflict-free and bloodless compared with others elsewhere (Reynolds, 2013: 5). Consequently, Australian history became one of ‘settlement’ rather than conquest (Reynolds, 2003: xviii). Historical scholarship on Australia’s Frontier Wars and colonial frontier massacres continues to challenge this myth (see Gapps, 2018, 2021; Reynolds, 2013; Ryan et al., 2020). Recent surveys by Reconciliation Australia (2018, 2020) also indicate growing public recognition and acceptance that Australia’s colonial occupation entailed the violent subduing of resistant Indigenous peoples. However, this violence has been contested as part of Australia’s politicised ‘history wars’ (Macintyre, 2004) and remains unacknowledged by key sites and institutions within the nation’s memorial and commemorative landscape – including, notably, the Australian War Memorial and elsewhere in Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle (McKenna, 2018).

The myth of peaceful colonisation might account for why Australia, and similar settler–colonial contexts, is not as prominent within the memoricide literature. It contrasts starkly with the overt destructive displays so formative to understanding memoricide. The campaigns against Palestine, Croatia and Bosnia were sudden and abrupt upheavals, clearly premeditated and in some cases highly visible, with a wide-ranging repertoire that assaulted collective memory’s frameworks over a matter of months or a few years. They achieved, or attempted to achieve, material gains that by contrast colonialism would spend decades, even centuries, achieving. Hence ‘systematic’, imbued with notions of efficiency, became a prominent adjective across memoricide definitions (see Halilovich, 2016: 82; Hamblin, 1999: 40; Lambrichs cited in Grmek, 2019: 157). However, this should not suggest that Australia’s colonisation was not ‘systematic’ or ‘efficient’. Given the immensity of cultural damage inflicted, and the terrain covered by expanding settler social worlds since 1788, the scope of Australia’s assault far outpaces that witnessed in Palestine and Bosnia. But it holds that memoricide is also not broadly systematic; it can be localised and highly specific, even partial – as is currently the case for the Djab Wurrung trees.

Victoria’s Western Highway and the Djab Wurrung trees

Djab Wurrung lands are now known as the Ararat, Stawell and Hamilton districts in western Victoria (Clark, 1995: 57).⁸ The ‘Djab Wurrung trees’ are a sacred women’s site, more than eight centuries old, which include trees known as Birthing (or Grandmother) Trees (Austin, 2020; Djab Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy (DWE), n.d.). Over 10,000 babies with ties to 56 different families were born in the hollows at the bases of such trees (DWE, n.d.; Gorrie, 2019; Hayman-Reber, 2018). Placentas from these births were mixed with seeds and then planted to become Directions Trees; ‘a place where [the child] could come for spiritual guidance’ (Cunningham, 2019; Groch, 2020). In some cases, a Grandfather Tree accompanies a Birthing Tree – ‘like an old man guarding it’ (Thorpe cited in Groch, 2020) – with their roots intertwining and communicating underground. Such trees were flagged for clearing to make way for the Victorian Government’s Western Highway project intended to create 12.5 km of road between Buangor and Ararat (Major Road Projects Victoria (MRPV), 2019a).The Western Highway upgrade began over a decade ago when the ceremonial sod-turning for the roadwork’s first stage was performed by then-Premier John Brumby in April 2010 (Johnson, 2019). Since then, the infrastructure project has been repeatedly delayed through urgent injunctions and long-running court cases at both the state and national levels, an on-site protest presence centred on the Djab Wurrung trees, as well as planning errors with environmental assessments.

In 2013, Martang Pty Ltd provided Victorian Government road authorities statutory approval for the Western Highway works (Glass, 2020). At the time, Martang was the Registered Aboriginal Party (RAP) providing formal representation for Djab Wurrung interests. RAPs are legally recognised as ‘the primary source of advice and knowledge on matters relating to Aboriginal places or Aboriginal objects in their region’ (Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council, n.d.). In providing statutory approval, Martang composed a legally binding Cultural Heritage Management Plan (CHMP) for the roadwork which has not been made publicly available. The agreement between Martang and VicRoads also entailed a land deal that was signed in 2014. This deal provided ‘hundreds of hectares of land east of the highway, as part of a Trust for Nature covenant’ (King et al., 2019). This land was purchased by Martang’s business arm which was subsequently refunded through the covenant. Over 10 years, this exchange entitled Martang to annual royalties ‘amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ for conserving this land from development (King et al., 2019).

VicRoads claims that the possible presence of Birthing Trees along the approved route was first noted in 2017 (Glass, 2020). It was at this point that another RAP, the Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation (EMAC), became involved as part of a wider consultation process. The EMAC also formally represents some Djab Wurrung families and has since filled the void left by Martang.⁹ In August 2019, Martang had its formal registration as an Aboriginal Party revoked under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 S.156(2)(a) (Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council, 2019). This was an automatic deregistration as, due to legislative changes, Martang was no longer registered under the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act 2006 (Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council, 2019). Martang still exists and continues to receive the aforementioned covenant royalties. However, EMAC applied to fulfill the formal representation needs handled previously by Martang (King et al., 2019). It should be noted that EMAC (2020) disputes VicRoads’ account about when they became involved in the consultation process.

In June 2018, as roadwork construction neared the culturally sensitive landscape, protestors established the DWE (n.d.) at a campsite near its proposed route. This on-site presence was spearheaded by Djab Wurrung people, such as Aunty Sandra Onus and Zellanach Djab Mara, and has remained in place since (including throughout Victoria’s many pandemic lockdowns). The Embassy began as a single tent, small in size, but now comprises three large camps – divided into a ‘top’, ‘middle’ and ‘women’s camp’ – with many protestors rotating stays to maintain an obstructive presence (Deadly Story, n.d.). Three protection applications have been lodged by the Embassy to successive Federal Environment Ministers, Melissa Price and Sussan Ley, with each rejected yet overturned through the courts (Johnson, 2019). The third overturned decision also required a Minister other than Ley, advised to be another Minister or Assistant Minister connected with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act, to review the decision as ‘an informed lay observer might apprehend that the Minister may not conduct a reconsideration with an open mind’ (Griffiths cited in Johnson, 2019). The Victorian Government’s consultations with the EMAC resulted in a realignment of the highway route in February 2019. This modification enabled the protection of a further 16 trees of 22 that the EMAC (2020) identified as culturally significant. Among them were the Birthing Trees. The EMAC approved this plan although it did not produce a new CHMP for the project. These newly protected trees represent only a small portion of the 200 trees that the Embassy claims to be defending (Deadly Story, n.d.). Collins et al. (2020: 854) note that the trees amount to 260 ‘sacred’ and 2750 ‘not-so-sacred’.

In July 2020, Deborah Glass, the Victorian Ombudsman, reported on an investigation into the consultation process with Martang including the associated land deal. Glass (2020) found that the road authorities had negotiated in ‘good faith’ and their actions in response to raised concerns were ‘legally sound’. Meanwhile, there was no evidence that the associated land deal influenced Martang’s decision-making or that it was unduly lucrative (Glass, 2020). It is noted as a standard practice within such consultation processes. Lee Godden (cited in Groch, 2020) observes that, while Victoria’s heritage laws are notable compared with other state legislations for enabling decision-making by Aboriginal institutions rather than a Minister, they only require consultation with one RAP with relevant jurisdiction. In this instance, the relevant RAP was Martang and then EMAC. Hence, the Ombudsman’s findings that Victoria’s road authorities acted reasonably within their legal obligations. However, Glass (2020) acknowledged that there was ‘limited’ consultation with other elements of the Aboriginal community resulting in significant feeling among Djab Wurrung people that they had not been heard within existing procedures.

On 26 October 2020, Victoria’s second pandemic lockdown was finally eased after 4 months. Concurrently, images emerged of a Directions Tree that had been felled that same day as part of the Western Highway roadwork (Perkins, 2020; Wahlquist and Bucci, 2020). Contractors had begun to clear trees while citizens – including protestors supporting the on-site presence protecting the trees – had to remain at home due to pandemic restrictions (Perkins, 2020). As Senator Lidia Thorpe (2020) – descendent of the Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung peoples – poignantly remarks: ‘While the rest of the state was celebrating and praising Daniel Andrews for the easing of lockdown restrictions, Djab Wurrung first nations people had their sacred heritage ripped away’. Over 50 activists were arrested and charged for violating pandemic restrictions (Bell, 2020). Accusations of opportunism soon followed: ‘It’s very difficult to presume anything other than this strategy being well thought out and opportunistic’ (Thorpe, 2020). ‘No Trees, No Treaty’ has been a prominent slogan across protest gatherings and online (Collins et al., 2020; Johnson and Bell, 2020). Sissy Eileen Austin (2021), a Djab Wurrung woman, reinforced this by resigning from the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria in protest of the felling. This Assembly represents the state’s First Nations peoples as it partakes in the Victorian treaty process.¹⁰ The Victorian Supreme Court issued an injunction that prevented further work (Bell and Johnson, 2020).

In November 2021, the Victorian Supreme Court dismissed Gunnaikurnai woman Marjorie Thorpe’s case against Martang and the relevant government agencies with the Western Highway project (Miles, 2021). Central to the case was the alleged threat Martang’s CHMP poses to culturally significant trees left outside its scope. However, the court decided to grant the government’s request to dismiss the matter on account that Martang’s CHMP was no longer being relied upon. A new consultation process will commence with EMAC to approve a CHMP, expected to be in mid-2022, before construction can return (Miles, 2021). There has been no update since, at the time of writing.

The felled Directions Tree as everyday memoricide

Public safety features prominently within the ‘greater good’ discourse that frames the Djab Wurrung tree controversy. Since 2013, the Western Highway has seen 100 vehicle crashes with 11 fatalities, which the planned lane duplication is meant to alleviate (MRPV, 2019b). Sussan Ley (cited in Latimore, 2019), responding to the successful appeal of her decision to reject an emergency protection application, stressed that ‘this is an urgently needed safety upgrade that has involved many years of planning and consultation’. Jacinta Allan (2019), Victoria’s Transport Infrastructure Minister, wrote an op-ed for The Age entitled ‘Western Highway upgrade must go ahead to save lives’. It opens with an account of how ‘a massive B-double truck crashed’ before anchoring the consultation narrative in due process proceduralism, noting ‘the truth is we have followed every requirement and regulation when it comes to progressing this project’ (Allan, 2019). Environmental and economic benefits are also consistently emphasised. The chosen route is held to be both more environmentally (5000 less trees cut down) and economically sustainable than the ‘northern alternative’ mooted earlier in the planning process (Allan, 2019). We are told the Western Highway forms an ‘important conduit’ between Melbourne and Adelaide with the upgrades designed to maximise efficiency – namely, to save ‘two minutes’ on travel time (MRPV, n.d.-b, n.d.-c). The constructed value of time-as-resource for economic activity (2 minutes’ worth) is mobilised against eight centuries of enduring cultural significance for the Djab Wurrung, rendering the latter ‘secondary and negligible’.

The felled Directions Tree, in particular, is illustrative of everyday memoricide’s discursive frames. Its intelligibility as a sacred tree was undermined through several epistemological fronts. It was declared a ‘fiddleback tree’, third-party arborists found the tree ‘highly unlikely’ to pre-date European arrival and there was no evidence of cultural modification (Allan cited in Bell, 2020; EMAC, 2020). Importantly, this indicates reliance upon non-Indigenous knowledge and heritage frameworks, which has not gone unchallenged. For example, unconsulted Djab Wurrung custodians argue that a ‘small circular scar’ on the felled tree and the close proximity of a ‘quartz blade fragment’ did confirm it as culturally significant (Wahlquist, 2020). Following the felling, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews (2020) emphasised a need for political compromise: ‘If we waited around for an absolute consensus, then that deadly stretch of road would go unimproved, and we would see more people dying’. Demands for ‘absolute consensus’ become unreasonable and irrational by comparison. This forms a powerful alliance with the urgency of safety to produce discourse that is, conversely, ‘reasonable’ and ‘civil’. It strongly contrasts with the vision of arrested protestors, cast as irresponsible violators of public health orders, and the anguish of Djab Wurrung and their supporters.

Images of the Directions Tree – cut down, chain-sawed into several trunk segments and packed onto an ordinary semi-trailer – connote seemingly mundane scenes (Perkins, 2020; Wahlquist and Bucci, 2020). No doubt, it blended in with other highway traffic as it departed Djab Wurrung lands. MRPV (2020) assures (in a now deleted statement) that the resulting ‘timber’ is ‘being safely stored while we work with the community to identify uses’. As public statements go, it may seem unremarkable and even routine. Indeed, it matches the rhetoric deployed regarding the felling of trees across Victoria for other infrastructure projects (MRPV, n.d.-a). However, it demonstrates once more how the epistemology of resource is weaponised. The Directions Tree is reduced down to mundane ‘resource’, its cultural significance effaced as a use with community interest, in favour of that more legible to non-Indigenous Australia.

As part of the Embassy’s broader call for the ‘remains’ to be ‘respectfully returned’, Chelsea Lovett-Ahern (cited in Mahomet, 2020) declares ‘we need her body back, not turned to mulch like our other trees’. MRPV becomes like a morgue in Lovett-Ahern’s poignant conflation of human and tree, hindering a proper mourning process by withholding a ‘body’. It is not clear what might be done with the remains if they are returned. It seems unlikely that MRPV would relinquish them under these circumstances – an act that might be construed as an ‘admission’ that what they possess is more than just ‘timber’. The grieving tone of Lovett-Ahern’s words, and their underlying feel of a being that has been killed, might suggest that a memorial of sorts is appropriate. However, that impression is certainly shaped by my particular understanding of how grief and memory work are performed. For those most intimately affected, it might be enough that a ruptured presence on Djab Wurrung Country is restored in some form.

Memoricide has ironic potential to incite memory into discourse. As noted earlier, this is witnessed in how traces of erased everyday spaces in Bosnia and Palestine have been subsumed into mnemonic discourse that is subsequently mobilised against memoricide.¹¹ It is possible, then, to consider how memory might survive the termination of material forms to which it is attached. This has been explored by theoretical and analytical turns in memory studies that critique ‘container-culture’ views of memory and its forms (Bond et al., 2017: 3; Erll, 2011: 7). That is, memory as ‘contained’ or ‘fixed’ within objects, sites, communities and national borders. However, within this same literature is recognition of how memory’s movement across manifold trajectories transforms it (Erll, 2011: 11). Memory becomes, and is always becoming, something other than what it was. Therefore, critiques of container-culture approaches should not be mistaken for arguing that materiality is inconsequential; material mnemonic forms still matter. It follows that memoricide which incites memory discourse is not necessarily ‘thwarted’ by this discourse. Or, rather, such discourse – insofar as it persists socially over time – might undermine memoricide in some ways but this does not mean memoricide’s impacts on memory’s material anchors are insignificant. It certainly does not diminish the hurt felt by its victims. The Djab Wurrung trees may yet incite mnemonic discourse should they be cleared. Indeed, they may already have in the form of ‘No Trees, No Treaty’ rhetoric. But the trees themselves bear material cultural and mnemonic significance for Djab Wurrung women and their ways of being; these are relationships that cannot be replaced or substituted.

Boundary objects and multidirectional memory

You can’t recognize some parts of a church. You have to recognize the whole church.

Zellanach Djab Mara. (cited in Kwai, 2019)

The Djab Wurrung trees are subject to various translation efforts that highlight either disjuncture between settler and Indigenous epistemologies or multidirectional memory through boundary objects. One of the latter’s more common forms, especially among Djab Wurrung, are church and cathedral analogies. As concerns over this cultural landscape were beginning to acquire national attention, international headlines were concurrently preoccupied with the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and its devastation by fire. As Thorpe (cited in Martin, 2019) explains: ‘The outcry over what happened to [Notre Dame] – a significant cultural, spiritual place that people feel they have a deep connection with – that’s how we feel’. Such statements invoke memory’s multidirectionality, highlighting how grief over the Cathedral’s damage parallels that which would be felt by Djab Wurrung should their heritage be destroyed.

In this way, the church analogy resembles Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s identification of religious belief as a ‘domain of ultimate value’ when in 1991 he prohibited mining exploration at Coronation Hill in the Northern Territory (Merlan, 2018: 208). ‘Coronation Hill’ is located on Jawoyn lands and its landscape is held as integral to the Bula tradition; an apocalyptic figure that will wreak widespread (even global) destruction should the land be disturbed (Merlan, 2018: 188). Francesca Merlan (2018: 208–209) writes that, in publicly acknowledging Bula in this way, Hawke was articulating a ‘boundary object’ – ‘a means of translation’, bearing ‘different meanings in different social worlds’, yet ‘common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable’. Peter Jatbula – one of the ‘principal’ Jawoyn men called upon to (repeatedly) testify to the nature and specifics of Bula – would similarly create comparative frameworks around emerging boundary objects like ‘rule’, ‘law’, and ‘believe’; ‘your god in heaven, our law; your property law, our legacy of relationship to country’ (Merlan, 2018: 210).

Therefore, the church analogy is not simply a reflection of the timeliness of the Notre Dame fire. Nor is it only translating affective responses to heritage loss. It is interesting that, unlike Hawke’s approach to religious belief or Jatbula’s positioning of rule and law, the church analogy within the Djab Wurrung context refers to something less abstract and intangible. A church is a material structure and, within this specific context, such materiality is notably resonant. Despite being a tragic accident, the damage to Notre Dame is reminiscent of conventional examples of memoricide. Words and phrases like ‘church’, ‘cathedrals’ and ‘places of worship’ appear in existing memoricide definitions as a reflection of how their destruction were prominent features of formative case studies. The analogy, then, speaks of the ethnocentrism innate within common-sense notions of heritage and cultural landscapes, as well as their destruction, and challenges them.

Mara’s church metaphor above also challenges calls for compromise. As Godden (cited in Groch, 2020) notes, Indigenous Australians often face having to decide what features of a landscape can be ‘let go’ to protect other culturally significant sites. Merlan (2018: 197–198) observes this with the three men considered as bearers of Jawoyn cultural knowledge on Bula, as each came under intense scrutiny and pressure to identify culturally significant sites with increasing specificity. Mara’s metaphor instrumentalises the church boundary object to counter this ‘negotiability’. The Djab Wurrung trees become not isolated from but intrinsically tied to each other and the broader landscape. In this sense, the metaphor intervenes on the discursive frames deployed to legitimate everyday memoricide as seen with the Directions Tree – specifically, ‘reasonable political compromise’ driven by the imperatives of public safety, environmental and economic benefit.

It is tempting to consider the Djab Wurrung trees, and especially the felled Directions Tree, as a focal point between competing discourses that frame memoricide at opposite ends of the extreme-everyday binary. The Andrews Government, its road authorities and even the EMAC have varyingly cast the tree felling as an outcome of ordinary procedure. Likewise, any further fellings would also be the outcomes of standard, everyday operations. Meanwhile, Djab Wurrung people and their supporters position the planned tree fellings as exceptional acts of heritage vandalism. In this sense, the church analogy connects the destruction of culturally significant trees to spectacular optics. It would be akin to the flames of Notre Dame, to the willful destruction of a church or cathedral, memoricide in its extreme modality. This was coupled with powerful articulations of affect when such destruction was realised with the Directions Tree – ‘chainsaws through the heart’ – which highlight ruptured (or, indeed, murdered) nature–culture dynamics (Wahlquist and Bucci, 2020). However, even if a shift in recognition is achieved, the destruction of any Djab Wurrung tree cannot be considered as extreme memoricide. It would be the outcome, not of the breakdown of social order, but of the continuing legal, political and cultural status quo of Australia’s colonial present. Therefore, like the destroyed Directions Tree, any further destruction of the remaining Djab Wurrung trees would constitute everyday memoricide.

Everyday memoricide ‘here-now’

Felicity Collins et al. (2020) note that the circumstances of the Djab Wurrung trees do not map neatly onto a simple oppositional model of ‘virtuous Indigenous people versus the White State’ (p. 854). The Victorian Government’s actions come against the backdrop, brought to the foreground, of a treaty process that remains novel in an Australian context. Moreover, critiquing the discursive formations of everyday memoricide does not necessarily mean invalidating its claims. The potency of greater good discourse often rests in persuasive need, as can be seen here with infrastructure that does bear notable safety concerns. The consultation process, meanwhile, reveals disputations within Aboriginal communities over formal representation and authoritative voices on cultural heritage (Austin, 2020; Groch, 2020; Thorpe, 2020). Porteous and Smith (2001: 20) observe that, with the everyday destruction of home, the identification of culpability (i.e. who is to blame) is not always straightforward. As with everyday memoricide, this is further complicated by normalisation and how it distorts what intent looks like, where seemingly ‘innocent’ decisions and actions remain bound up in hostile processes that have long been naturalised. As concepts, these everyday ‘-cides’ are intended to grapple with these difficulties, which appear especially pronounced in colonial presents.

Collins et al. (2020: 850) argue that this complexity makes Australia promising, in ways that are specific to it and that cannot be abstracted to contexts elsewhere, in what it might contribute to memory studies. This potential is highlighted through the conceptualisation of the ‘here-now’ which is illustrated across three case studies, one of which is a protest led by Djab Wurrung women on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament. The here-now entails ‘the coming into presence of an experience of place/time that belongs fully neither to historical time’s linearity nor to the “deep time” or “continuous being” of Australia’s Indigenous cultures’ (Collins et al., 2020: 857). The Djab Wurrung women demonstrated this here-now-ness in their affective invocations of strength drawn from Country, from generations giving birth and being born within the Grandmother trees, while chanting ‘No Trees, No Treaty’. They are described as ‘becoming Indigenous in new ways for a future that needs plural forms of remembering and new memory concepts’ (Collins et al., 2020: 857).

However, this does not mean the structural presence and material consequences of settler–colonialism dissipate. The here-now is situated and, in this case, situated in a powerfully felt experience of confrontation with an antagonistic settler–colonial apparatus. As Marni Tuala (2019), President of the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives, argues, ‘[t]o disregard the significance of this birth site would be a continuation of the ethnocentric practices that were the foundation of colonisation and the catastrophic policy eras that have followed’. Collins et al. (2020) note that, ‘along with its intimations of a yet-to-be fully realized Australia, the here-now prompts recognition of the hard truths of settler-colonialism that stand in its way’ (p. 857, my emphasis). The latter is important for, if the here-now were not attentive to the ongoing power relations of settler–colonialism, it would risk having something to say for memory studies but at the possible expense of diluting what it might say about mnemonic injustice. After all, it was an act of mnemonic injustice, as well as the threat of more to come, as perceived by the marching Djab Wurrung women that enabled the conditions for what the authors observed and used compellingly to theorise the here-now. Perhaps, then, what we need alongside new concepts for emergent forms of remembering are new concepts that address complex formations of mnemonic injustice; I propose everyday memoricide as one of these hard truths of Australian settler–colonialism.

Conclusion

Memoricide, the killing of memory, can be ordinary. It is more than iconic material–mnemonic forms being destroyed typically during (or soon following) extreme scenarios of armed conflict and open warfare. Memoricide has social and discursive dimensions, alongside material ones, which become more centred once its conceptual framework is aligned with Halbwachs’ collective memory theory. It is through these social and discursive means that memoricide can become naturalised as part of everyday life; normalisation that I call ‘everyday memoricide’. Such mnemonic destruction, significantly underpinned by the normalisation of colonial negation and the legacies of terra nullius, has persisted in Australia since colonisation began in 1788. The Djab Wurrung trees – a sacred women’s site threatened by the planned upgrade to Victoria’s Western Highway – provides a case in point. In particular, a felled Directions Tree reveals how reasoned discourses of public health and safety, economic and environmental benefit, ‘neutral’ due process proceduralism, and competing epistemological frameworks on heritage and resource converged to legitimate an act of mnemonic injustice. It was an act of everyday memoricide. Notably, the felled Directions Tree also highlighted how socially perpetuated interpretive frames can produce material impacts that differ from memoricide’s dominant imagery. The latest development of a new Cultural Heritage Management Plan (CHMP) may be cause for cautious optimism. However, it may also present a renewed opportunity to anchor forthcoming mnemonic damage in ‘reasonable’ discourses of legalism and proceduralism, public safety and negotiability.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Scott Webster

Notes

Author biography

Scott Webster is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Sydney Environment Institute at The University of Sydney. His research explores the ‘killing of memory’ (or memoricide) as a phenomenon that bears both everyday and more-than-human dimensions. Scott investigates these with a focus on quotidian practices within settler–colonial contexts and how they entangle forms of mnemonic, multispecies and climate injustice. He also explores the intersections of memory, space and technology, and their potential to augment existing mnemonic practices – in particular, those resisting deliberate mnemonic erasure. Scott has a long-standing interest in the destruction of home and is currently researching how more-than-human entanglements complicate our theoretical frameworks for understanding home loss during disasters and through climate change.

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Revisiting memoricide: The everyday killing of memory

Abstract

Keywords

The memoriae in memoricide

Memoricide and iconoclasm

Memoricide and cultural genocide

Collective memory and its social frameworks

Everyday memoricide in Djab Wurrung Country

Colonial negation and systematicity

Victoria’s Western Highway and the Djab Wurrung trees

The felled Directions Tree as everyday memoricide

Boundary objects and multidirectional memory

Everyday memoricide ‘here-now’

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References