Abstract
Gordon Bennett is an artist of Aboriginal descent who, growing up in Brisbane during the fifties and sixties, had to negotiate his way through the Anglo-Celtic identity which the assimilationist Australian state so vigorously promoted. Encouraging its citizens into the identity of the universal subject, the state persuaded all of us, whether we were of British, Italian, Aboriginal, Dutch or any other background, to think of ourselves as Anglo-Celtic Australians and to marginalise those who sought to develop different identities, or to simply think of them as outsiders.
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Notes
This legacy of violence was written out of the public record in the work of historians such as Manning Clarke and Frank Crowly who constructed the influential big histories of contemporary Australia, and by many others. Aboriginal Australia became casualty of mid-century historiography in their accounts. See C.M.H. Clark’s A History of Australia, 6 vols., Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 1962–87; F.K. Crowley A New History of Australia, William Heinemann, Melbourne 1974.
On the relationship between history and memory, see Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations, Spring 1989, 26, pp. 7–25.
Mariana Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1990.
Gordon Bennett, “Aesthetics and Iconography, An Artist’s Approach”, Aratjara, Art of the First Australians, Kunstsammlung Nordrein Westfalen, Dusseldorf 1993, p. 89; Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, Meditation on a Coy Science, Yale University Press, Durham, pp. 54–79.
“Black memories are too deeply, too recently scarred. And forgetfulness is a strange prescription from a community which has referred the fallen warrior and emblazoned the phrase lest we forget on monuments throughout the land”, Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, Melbourne 1982, p. 20.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Hoorn, J. (1999). History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett. In: Reinink, W., Stumpel, J. (eds) Memory & Oblivion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4006-5_120
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4006-5_120
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