Remembering with Stone

Abstract

This chapter examines how stone is deployed in composing urban memorials, and many commemorative forms in Melbourne. As in many other cities, nineteenth-century marble and bronze figures on elevated stone plinths continue to occupy public space. I examine how these colonial installations have been supplemented by equally selective twentieth-century nationalist commemorative forms, many of which commemorate military sacrifice and participation. I then discuss how since the Second World War, a plethora of alternative, subaltern and oppositional memorials have emerged to challenge and decentre these authoritative and official monuments, and I argue, they have multiplied representational and textual meanings across urban space. I focus on various recent Aboriginal memorials, vernacular and peculiar monuments, and creative commemorative forms that undermine conventional stone monuments. In investigating the meanings and ideologies encoded in these diverse stony creations, I consider how they are hylomorphic commemorative endeavours, through which meaning is imposed on space. As such, they contrast with Aboriginal ways of understanding how memory is embodied by already existing stone forms in the landscape that are saturated with symbolic, historical and practical meanings.