Colebrook Reconciliation Park, Eden Hills, South Australia

The suburb of Eden Hills, located on the edge of the Adelaide Hills, is now a busy urban area, with few remaining areas of natural bushland. However, in 1944, when the Colebrook Home for Aboriginal Children moved there from Quorn, one of the reasons this site was chosen was its remoteness from the city. This was as close to ‘civilisation’ as a home for Aboriginal children was to be allowed.
The bush block on which Colebrook was built is now mostly empty of buildings, and instead is covered in original and recovering bush vegetation, a 'dancing circle', a shed and toilet. The site of the old 'home' has been reclaimed as the Colebrook Reconciliation Park. This is probably the biggest and most significant Stolen Generations memorials in Australia - so this will be quite a long post as I try and do it justice.

The Reconciliation Park is located on Shepherd's Hill Road, next to the Karinya Rotary Reserve. For commuters driving through the surburb, its most visible part would be the mural painted by Kunyi McInerny in the mid 2000s. The mural tells the story of children from both the riverlands and the inland APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) lands, where Kunyi herself was from, being brought to Colebrook. It tells this story truthfully but also with a sense of hope. To the left it reads,

“We cannot forget the past, but we can come together and unite as one, in friendship and forgiveness, and honouring each others culture.”
Although she was not a resident of Colebrook herself, Kunyi had sisters in the home, and is a member of the Tji Tji Tjuta group, meaning "all the children". Along with this group of ex-residents, the other group involved with and responsible for the Reconciliation Park is the Blackwood Reconciliation Group, a grassroots community organisation that grew out of a study program in the early 1990s as part of the Australian Government’s decade-long focus on Reconciliation which was funded 1991-2001.

For visitors who leave the road and pull into the small carpark, the main memorial area is a peaceful park area where the natural bush has partly re-grown and a few more established trees provide shade. Pathways are punctuated by large boulders and two simple seats. Some of the larger boulders contain plaques with various dates, often around or just after 26 May, the date the Bringing Them Home report was tabled in Parliament, which has come to be known as "Sorry Day" and marks the beginning of Reconciliation Week.
The first plaque is dated 1997 and was unveiled by former resident Prof Lowitja O'Donahue just days after the tabling of the Bringing Them Home Report. A community barbeque planned as a reunion events for a few hundred ex-residents and community members drew a crowd of around 2,000 over the course of the day, and a hastily passed around bucket became the start of the funding for the two formal memorials onsite, both created local artist Silvio Apponyi.

The "Fountain of Tears" was installed in 1998. Water bubbles out of the fountain onto an empty coolamon, a traditional bowl-like tool often used to carry babies. The water then runs down over faces carved into the granite surface of the memorial before collecting in a small pond at the bottom. The models for these faces were ex-residents of Colebrook, but as adults they also represent the faces of the people left behind in the communities from which children were taken.
In 1998, a bronze statue was installed. This sculpture is called the “Weeping Mother” and represents all the mothers of the children who were taken to Colebrook. Although the sculpture is of a woman staring down at her empty hands, she is rarely found without something in those hands, as
people bring flowers or beads as a mark of respect.
There are also a number of plaques on rocks around the pathways the crisscross the park. One of these plaques honours two women who were in charge of the Home in the early days, and also shows a composite image of some of the ex-residents as children. Writing in her autobiography, Kick the Tin, Doris Kartinyeri says they are “just like the pictures in my house" – photos of our brothers and sisters from the home.
An important part of the development of the Reconciliation Park has been reclaiming this space as a positive place for ex-residence and the community. Many residents of Colebrook suffered abuse and neglect, on top of the pain of being removed from their families and communities, and re-claiming the space has allowed them to return and to remember the bad but also the good times they shared growing up. A short way away from the memorial
space is a fire pit surrounded by rocks and wooden seats to form a story circle. The Blackwood Reconciliation Group still meets here in good weather, and students from Flinders University are regularly brought to hear the stories, passing on the history to another generation. In 2014, local high school students completed an art project to decorate the shed which can be used for shelter.
Colebrook is different from many other memorials sites, because it is not one single memorial, but a site layered with acts of remembrance from 1997 right up to the present. The reason for these memorials has changed over time. As the remaining original residents have aged and many have died, the focus has shifted from acknowledgement and mourning for residents to advocacy and education for future generations.

Stolen Generations Memorial, Sydenham Green Park

In a corner of Sydenham Green, a green space in Marrickville, Sydney, stands a sandstone and
concrete wall. Its surface is covered with boomerangs, an easily recognised Aboriginal motif that maybe in this context can be a metaphor for return. Two niches contain water bowls. A metal plaque is inscribed with these words of testimony from Link Up (NSW), an organisation that supports Aboriginal people separated from their families:

We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhood's. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers,
sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot re-live the 20, 30 40 years that we spent
without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were
separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks
inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to
eliminate us as Aboriginals.

A post on Monument Australia identifies the artist as Joe Hirst. However, despite its image being used on the cover of the Sydenham Green Draft Plan of Management in September 2013 the artist is not acknowledged in the document, and no mention is made of this work on the Marrickville Council's Public Art web page.

The wall seems to have been created as a memorial to the Stolen Generations, those Aboriginal people who were taken from their families as children as part of a Government policy of assimilation. The water bowls are a traditional memorial device, representing pools of tears shed. However, rather than simply a place of mourning, the text on the plaque makes this memorial challenging and confrontational. Nonetheless, the Marrickville Council describes it simply as part of telling the story of the local area.

Questions:

Is this memorial used for Sorry Day (26 May) or other local commemorations of the Stolen
Generations?
Why was this sculpture created in 1999?

Illa Kuri Sacred Dreaming Track, East Perth

Winding along the edge of the Derbal Yerrigan (Swan River), near the entry of the Claisebrook Inlet in East Perth, Illa Kuri by Toogarr Morrison is generally understood as a public artwork rather than as a memorial. Nonetheless, Morrison has made use of many elements used in other memorials looked at on this site to tell the story of the loss of land and culture since colonisation. 

A plaque on the one of the stones at the beginning of the bath reads: 

This sacred path representing the Illa Kuri journey is where initiates walked through the Claisebrook valley on the way to their homes. The path leads from one freshwater lake to another. These are represented by the twelve granite rocks that stand as silent sentries.

The names of the tribes and totems are there to guide you through the sacred Illa Kuri dreaming and the sacred totem emblems which gave the indigenous people their identity.

The sacred dreaming path is never ending.

Despite the hopeful note at the end of the plaque, I understand Illa Kuri as a memorial to a lost landscape. This area of Australia is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, but most of these lakes and wetlands have been filled in or polluted since the arrival of Europeans. 

The Nyungar people are the traditional owners of the South West corner of Australia, although Morrison favours talking about the Bibulmun nation rather than the Nyungar people, since Nyungar is the name for ‘man’ in the language of his people. He is a well respected local artist and Elder. 

One of the reasons the East Perth area has a strong connection with Aboriginal people is because it was a camping ground on the edge of the city at a time, at the beginning of the last century, when they were banned from Perth after curfew. That connection has been maintained throughout the 20th century. 

The area around the East Perth foreshore has been renamed Ngango Batta’s Mooditcher, translated as ‘Sunshine’s Living Strength’ and, according to the City of Perth, is now seen as a place of reconciliation and renewal.

Bomaderry Stolen Generations Memorial

This particular memorial is located on land now owned by the Nowra Aboriginal Land Council. I have no photos on the blog, because when I visited the site at the beginning of January 2014, there was no-one available to give me permission to enter the land or take photographs*.

The land on which this memorial sits was previously the Bomaderry Children's Home, run by the United Aboriginal Mission. It was opened in May 1908, and for some people this marks the start of the Stolen Generations in NSW, as it was one of the first, if not the first, home where Aboriginal children were sent after being taken from their families. Bomaderry specialised in small children, up to the age of ten. They were not allowed visitors and were not permitted to speak in any language other than English. The home did not close until 1988.

Bomaderry is a small town two hours south of Sydney, NSW, on the other side of the Shoalhaven River to Nowra. The train line that runs down the coast to Nowra actually stops in Bomaderry. The land on which the Home was situated is opposite the TAFE Illawara, just off the Princes Highway. The land is heritage listed, and some of the original buildings still exist on site.

The original memorial is located at the back corner of the property, near the Brinawarr St entrance. The project was instigated by Aboriginal leader Uncle Sonny Simms and the memorial was dedicated in 2001. It consists of a circular formal rose garden with an inner circle containing two flagpoles for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, kangeroo paw plants. Concrete tiles with imprints of feet lead towards and away from the plaque, which reads:

This plaque and memorial garden is dedicated to “all” the Aboriginal children of the “Stolen Generation” who were resident here at Bomaderry, the former “United Aborigines Mission” (U.A.M.). Also to honour and respect the children who are now deceased. This site is the birthplace of the “Stolen Generation” here in New South Wales.

A second plaque was installed later to mark the 100 year anniversary 2008.

Since 2011, a project has developed in partnership with TAFE Illawarra to extend the memorial site into a Stolen Generations Memorial Garden. The garden leads away from the earlier memorial along the edge of the property, using native plants and rocks to create a tranquil space. The project has been led by Jason Groves and Uncle Noel Butler, who is an Aboriginal elder and a teacher at the TAFE. At the time of my visit, the project did not seem to be fully completed, but media reports suggest that the idea is for students to graduate with Certificate II and III in land management as well as developing cultural knowledge. The style of this section of garden has a more 'natural' feel, although both part of the memorial involve paths that take those visiting them on a physical journey.

* The memorial is visible from the path, which is how I can describe it here.

Edge of the Trees, Museum of Sydney

The Edge of the Trees is an art installation by Fiona Foley and Janet Laurence commissioned as part of the development of the Museum of Sydney, which opened in May 1995. Althought most often referred to as an art installation, it is also a memorial that calls to mind not only the local Eora peoples or the colonisers and convicts of Sydney's history, but the painful history of their relationship to each other.
The title of the artwork is taken from a passage of text by Rhys Jones (1985) describing the moment of first contact between Aboriginal people and colonisers:

...the discoverers struggling through the surf were met on the beaches by other people looking at them form the edges of the trees. Thus the same landscape perceived by the newcomers as alien, hostile or having no coherent form, was to the indigenous people their home, a familiar place, the inspiration of dreams.

The Museum of Sydney is a heritage site located where the State's original Government House once stood. Just on the other side of the entry path, visitors to the Museum of Sydney and view the excavated foundations of this early colonial building through a glass display case. It is designed to be passed through by visitors on their way into the museum, but is set off to the side, so this is optional.

For those people who do choose to enter, the installation offers a strangely overwhelming experience, considering that it is near a very busy road in the centre of Sydney. Visitors find themselves surrounded by posts, a little bit like tree trunks but made of a variety of different materials that reference the history of Sydney, including aged timber, sandstone, and industrial steel girders. Some of the posts are inscribed with words: Eora place names; the names of convicts; fragments of colonials text. Others contain materials that reference the kinds of keeping and categorising that might be found within a museum, but also refer to Eora culture: ash, sand, shells.
Alongside these visual and tactile elements are sound recordings in both Eora and English. The artwork does not tell the story of colonisation, and may be 'unreadable' for visitors who don't already know this history. But, much like any memorial, for someone who understands something of the story it creates a sense of complexity and sadness.
Edge of the Trees was created in the 1990s, during Australia's official decade of Reconciliation. But Janet Laurence, an Aboriginal artist, has said that both the process of creation and the artwork itself were more about negotiated co-existence than reconciliation.

Questions:

Where is the line between an artwork and a memorial, if the artwork is about memory?