It’s tempting to assign a binary split to fiction and non-fiction. If fiction is fabrication, then non-fiction must be true. When dealing with historiography, however, and despite using factual resources, the end product’s ‘truth’ should always be in question, because while the facts may be constant, their interpretation will depend on the writer and audience. Cassidy encapsulates this mutability perfectly in this mix of prose, poetry, history, memoir and travel writing. ‘Remembering is not about repetition. It is about re-rereading history / that is not yet ready to be forgotten’.
Cassidy probes her family’s history and its interaction with Indigenous Australia. Her starting point is an experimental monument to two Indigenous men, Tunnerminnerwait, a Parperloihener man, and Maulboyheener, a Panpekanner man, from the north-west region of lutruwita, Tasmania, where her family’s fortunes originated. Cassidy follows her family’s history from there to Victoria. She questions what it means to be White, and associates it with willful forgetting, ‘stealthy’ language and ‘gentle lies’.
Cassidy documents the career of George Augustus Robinson. His vocational appellation of Chief Protector of Aborigines was a title bestowed and accepted without irony yet oversaw the almost complete destruction of Indigenous peoples and culture on lutruwita. Cassidy uses a wide range of sources, from WEH Stanner, Bruce Pascoe, Lyndall Ryan and more.
Monument is a candid insight into one family’s history, told in a way which makes the reading not only accessible, but erudite and convincing. Despite monuments being permanent fixtures, the thinking around them changes over time … just as the writing of history does.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bonny Cassidy is the author of three poetry collections – Certain Fathoms, Final Theory and Chatelaine (shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award) – and co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry.
Her essays and criticism on Australian literature and culture have been widely published, and her awards include an Asialink fellowship and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She teaches Creative Writing at RMIT University and lives in the bush on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Central Victoria.
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