Provisional Title: Placing the Post in the landscape of colonial memories: revisiting the memory of a colonial frontier

Paul Fox closes his exploration of the institutionalisation of memory within museums with the question “do Australians inhabit a postcolonial world or a landscape of colonial memories?” [Fox, 1992, 317] The question forms for him out of an analysis of the ways in which the orderings of aboriginality and space of the colonial museum continued to haunt Australian cultural imaginaries in the early 1990s. Fox traces how colonial museums ordered their knowledge always in reference to the imperial centre, accomplishing a kind of double colonialism – reinforcing “the European acquisition of space” while ensuring that, for the “former peripheral city of empire ... memory exists in and belongs to a system of knowledge created elsewhere” [ibid, pp. 308-9]. It seems to me Fox posed his question to invite a response affirming the colonial quality of Australian memory. However, considering his question in 2005, ‘post’ the debates over race, reconciliation, and history that dominated the turn of century, elicits a more uncertain response in me. Institutionalising memory in Australia is now a highly politicised process involving a complex array of stakeholders, such as governments, museum professionals, and indigenous and non-indigenous communities. The outcomes often redraft imperial knowledge into self-aware narratives of colonial domination and appropriation, albeit inciting new debates over the ‘balance’ between recuperation of indigenous loss and survival and celebration of successful settlercolonial subjects as tropes of national memory. Do such outcomes unsettle the ‘knowledge from elsewhere’, rescripting landscapes of memory in post-colonial tropes? Are colonial memories always a landscape constructed from the past? Or is the present making new nets of it’s own that make the ‘post’ in the colonial ambiguous or uncertain?