Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia

By Alison Atkinson-Phillips

Memorials make history public. This is a book about a new type of memorial that commemorates the experiences of survivors. These new memorials acknowledge the pain, loss and trauma that ordinary people have lived through. Featuring human stories of resilience from Australia's recent history, it is also a book about why people feel the need to remember such difficult experiences. The book outlines how this new genre of commemoration emerged in three stages: early explorations through community and public art projects in the 1980s and 1990s; the adoption of traditional memorial forms from the late 1990s; and the creation of government-funded and commissioned memorials as a transitional justice practice used for symbolic reparation since the mid-2000s. The book also features six case study chapters, each of which tell the story of the development of a different Australian memorial. Covering a broad range of experience, including bushfire, migration, child abuse and other human rights abuses, this book asks why people have chosen to create memorials to remember these experiences. While the background to each of these case studies contains loss and trauma, the development of the memorials are stories of resilience, and of unlikely friendships and connections. In the aftermath of revelations of institutional human rights abuses, which has generated a new wave of memorial conversation, this book tells the story of two decades of commemoration practice in Australia and offers an opportunity for us to learn from the past. Book jacket.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1760800260
• ISBN13: 9781760800260
• Release Date: August 2019
• Publisher: University of Western Australia Press
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"