Australian Studies / History
Book Details

Memory, Monuments and Museums

The Past in the Present

Marilyn Lake

'At a time when we are continually urged to move on, to put the past behind us, the perverse persistence of the past is everywhere evident … (it) retains the power to haunt and seduce us, to shame us and make us proud.'—Marilyn Lake

Why does it matter so much that we get our history right?

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About this Title

'At a time when we are continually urged to move on, to put the past behind us, the perverse persistence of the past is everywhere evident … (it) retains the power to haunt and seduce us, to shame us and make us proud.'—Marilyn Lake

Why does it matter so much that we get our history right? And why can't we let it go?

In Memory, Monuments and Museums: The Past in the Present, a collection of Australia's leading writers and scholars, including Nicholas Shakespeare, Henry Reynolds, Dawn Casey, Iain McCalman, Ien Ang and Graeme Davison, discuss the ways in which we record, preserve, and sometimes re-create, our histories, and how the power of memory and the past shapes the present and our identity.

In the past, attitudes to history and its preservation were clearly defined: public statues and monuments were erected to prevent the failure of collective memory, and historical museums and cultural institutions were charged simply to 'collect, study and display'. Now the way in which we defend and remember the past is not so straightforward. Our national museums, archives and libraries are forced to meet an ever-changing list of imperatives to satisfy investors, curators and governments, as well as a marketing-focused public. Our shifting attitudes to memory and history have implications for our landscape, as a precious site of public memory, and in our literature, which is important in re-imaging our past. Establishing a single, true historical account has never been more difficult.

Memory, Monuments and Museums is published in association with the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

About the Author

Marilyn Lake holds an Australian Professorial Fellowship based at La Trobe University and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Her most recent book is the award-winning FAITH: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (2002). A new work, Connected Worlds: History in Trans-National Perspective, co-edited with Ann Curthoys, will be published by ANY Press in 2006.

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978-0-522-85250-9