It’s tough being young and interested in Australian history. From having to sit through the schoolyard slander of the subject, to forming rote-learned justifications for my love of the topic, it’s clear many Australian students are disengaged from our own history. Yet connecting sensitively with our own history is an essential component of making Australia a better place to live for everyone.
Luckily, there is one aspect of Australian history that Australians are uniquely disposed to connect with: place.
Place and history are intimately intertwined. Without an understanding of place, history becomes a fuzzy abstract. Visiting the places where history happened, can grant colour and understanding to a stereotypically bookish discipline.
In Australia — a settler-society where a key point of conflict was and remains land and place — this relationship is complex, rich and sobering. Our country has a messy, contested history that is best understood by connecting our places with the past.
This can be an excellent excuse for a road trip.
Gungardie (Cooktown) is a good place to start, if a bit of a trek away. Over 2000km north of Brisbane, on the lush edge of Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula, Gungardie, as anywhere, is lathered in history. The modern town is named for the protracted encounter between Guugu Yimithir people and the Cook expedition in 1770. Following a near-catastrophic brush with the Great Barrier Reef, the Endeavour was forced to beach at Gungardie for months-long repairs – during which Cook’s crew and Guugu Yimithir first came into conflict before engaging in what the Queensland National Trust heralds as “Australia’s first recorded act of reconciliation” between Europeans and First Nations Peoples.
The site is still there: you can go and stand before “reconciliation rocks”, tucked away on a back-street near the mangroves. It’s a rather inconspicuous spot, but marks the site of an important event. Seeing the real rocks brought a vision of the encounter: sweaty, sunburnt sailors correctly interpreting a Guugu Yimithir Elder’s broken spear as a symbol of peace on neutral ground. To be able to hear the Dove calls these people heard, and feel the muggy heat against my own skin, humanised the history.
Place is also essential in understanding the brutality of Australia’s settler-colonial history. The most confronting site I have ever visited in Australia was the Myall Creek Massacre Memorial.
The brutal 1838 murder of at least 28 Wirrayaraay people by a group of stockmen on the Gwydir river was one of countless acts of violence in this continent’s longest war, but was a key milestone in frontier conflict. The massacre was the only such crime to lead to any sort of prosecutions, with seven settlers eventually facing the gallows. However, according to historians like Henry Reynolds, it contributed considerably to a culture of silence, particularly on the Northern frontiers (settled largely after the 1840s) that shrouded massacres in euphemism and obfuscation.
The memorial itself is deeply moving, featuring an interpretive walk through quiet dry bushland to the site, where a large stone and plaque memorialises the murders. Amongst blue-grey eucalypts and beige dust one, the reality of being in a place of violence is forced upon you: the brutal reality of Australia’s settler-colonial history becomes impossible to brush under the carpet.
You don’t need to drive hundreds of kilometres to connect with Australia’s history. Our own city, Sydney, has a rich, complicated and often violent history permeating through our Permian sandstone.
One such place is Captain James Cook’s landing place at Kurnell. Here in 1770, on a fairly non-descript little beach with views across to the Port Botany Industryscape, Cook made his first landfall on the Australian continent. Not only is the site important for its history of cultural collision, but it demonstrates how Australia has understood its history over time. The imposing cenotaph, erected in 1870 and towering over the beach, tells of a white Australia beginning to scrub First Nations people entirely from its popular memory. The modern inclusion of First Nations contemporary artworks and information about Goorawal and Gweagal cultures tells the story of a post-Mabo shift in Australian identity towards a still incomplete recognition of our First Peoples and colonial history. Moreover, the site is a testament to the fact that history will always be a contested space.
Overall, these places demonstrate the important connection between history and the sites at which they happened. To better understand Australian history, we must move past the classroom, and experience it: physically and emotionally. This will ensure our more active citizenship: if we want to move towards a better and more inclusive Australia, a more empathetic understanding of our history is essential.
