The Australian Centre Conciliation Narratives and the Historical Imagination

Conciliation Narratives and the Historical Imagination in British Pacific Rim Settler Societies


Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP0776803

 

Conciliation Narratives and the Historical Imagination in British Pacific Rim Settler Societies

 

This collaborative and multidisciplinary project aims to historicise and explore conciliation events between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the British settler colonies of the Pacific Rim including Van Diemen's Land, Victoria, NSW, New Zealand and British Columbia.

Ideas of 'conciliation' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Britain's Pacific settler societies, including the signing of treaties, have been the subject of much official, legal, and policy debate. However, there has been less scholarly attention paid to the ways that these settler societies have understood the role conciliation incidents have played in the evolution of their own distinctive histories, and in particular how these narratives have circulated within the popular historical imagination, where their cultural meanings havebeen reworked over time and expressed in forms of public history-making such as re-enactments and centenary commemorations, and in material cultural heritage.

The project is thus vitally concerned with nation-building and collective community and national memory, and the ways that the legacies of colonial conciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples have influenced historical consciousness over two centuries to the present.

 

Forthcoming Symposium


Public Lecture

 

 

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