Places of Reconciliation: Commemorating Indigenous History in the Heart of Melbourne by Sarah W Pinto

Central Melbourne is filled with markers of the city’s pasts. At its heart are the stories of exploration and settlement, of the so-called first to arrive, and of the building of a colony and nation. But when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the centre of Melbourne has long been a place of silence.

Over the last two decades, Indigenous histories and peoples have been brought into central Melbourne’s commemorative landscapes. Memorials, commemorative markers, namings and public artworks have all been used to remember the city’s Indigenous pasts. Places of Reconciliation shows how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasures of its Indigenous histories. Sarah Pinto considers the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and concludes that the twenty-first century settler city does not give up its commemorative landscapes easily.

Sarah W Pinto is a Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. She is an Australian historian with particular interests in public and popular history, the history and politics of emotion, and the study of place. Sarah has published widely in these areas in local and international journals and edited collections. With Shelley Hannigan, Bernadette Walker-Gibbs and Emma Charlton, Sarah is the editor of Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space: Conversations, Investigations and Research (Springer, 2019).

ISBN 9780522872323

Publisher: Melbourne University Press

$44.99

3 in stock