Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia by Alison Atkinson-Phillips (review)

Alison Atkinson-Phillips has written a wide-ranging and insightful book about survivors and their memorials in contemporary Australia. Survivor Memorials explores a shift in memorial practice and what is remembered publicly. Namely, it highlights an expansion in the concepts of grief and loss that move us “beyond death.” The earliest of the memorials she examines dates from the 1980s. And although loss is a key component of the survivor memorials under analysis here, Atkinson-Phillips does not get lost in the insular miasma of trauma studies. Memorials are analyzed as socio-political constructs with evolving relationships to different communities of memory that hold different levels of power and agency. In fact, most of the memorials under consideration are also described as “monumemorials” (48), carrying both memorial (funerary) and monumental (celebratory aesthetic) traditions. Most importantly, they do political work. As Atkinson-Phillips puts it, “They lay claim to a particular narrative of the past, with sadness, but also with a political impulse to use that narrative to teach future generations” (49).

The book builds on, in the first instance, survey work conducted in Australia by public historians Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton and their Places of the Heart study from the early 2000s. Atkinson-Phillips takes this work further. She contends that those who critique and analyze memorials must also consider the background, interests, and skill of the artists or creators, as well as the “memory activists” or instigators behind them. As the book highlights, not many memorials are initially led by survivors themselves. This issue of participant-led practices of memorialmaking is followed through in the book’s exploration of the memorial processes, methods, and eventuating memorial forms and events that empower or disempower individuals and communities who have experienced loss and trauma.

Survivor Memorials moves us beyond considerations of form and material in order to speak to other studies in public history and collective memory, drawing on key works by Michael Rothberg and Dolores Hayden. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that Atkinson-Phillips sought with her research to make visible the “hidden public” for whom survivor memorials offer a point of connection, communication, and sometimes official redress for their experience of loss. That is, her research began with existing sites and objects, and then extended to reveal the public discourse in which memorials are discussed and come into being—the process through which they are made public and political, in a sense. Interviews with implicated individuals and community representatives were a key part of this research process.

The book is organized into two parts. The first explores key concepts around memorial traditions and form, and debates issues in the distinction between community art, commemoration, and memorial practice. The second reflects the breadth of Atkinson-Phillips’ research, offering six case studies from across Australia. With the possible exception of the Enterprise Hostel case study, they explore memorials that address a community who experienced a sense of loss (the loss of country, culture, childhood, or personal autonomy) due to government and institutional abuse or ill-treatment (including systemic race and classbased discrimination), natural disaster (bushfire), or hate crimes. The case studies demonstrate the shifts in private and public witnessing that Atkinson-Phillips flagged in the first half of Survivor Memorials—grounded with reference to separate Senate Inquiries and Royal Commissions that centered and publicized personal testimony. These include the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991), the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1997), the Commonwealth Senate’s Child Migrants Inquiry (2001), and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017).

Another key historical change that emerges from these analyses is the increasing role of governments in managing memorial spaces, and the movement from grassroots to government-endorsed memorial practices. This leads to some interesting comments about the...