Making Visible the Australian Frontier Wars and Comparative Memorialization

This chapter draws on research conducted as part of the Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial (RRM) project, which considered the memorialization of the Frontier Wars in Australia in an international context to investigate the possibility of an Australian memorial that shifts public consciousness in ways comparable to the effect of monuments to the Holocaust, genocide, war, and state violence in other countries. The authors used a variety of research methods such as interviews, site visits, and forum activities with community leaders, artists, historians, and memory scholars and architects in an approach that prioritised lived experience. The case study for this chapter is the proposed National Resting Place for unprovenanced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestral remains in Canberra.