The Pull It Down Reader
Book Announcement and Excerpt
UnMonumental is returning from hiatus to announce The Pull It Down Reader, written by James and Matt to accompany Matt’s new children’s book, Pull It Down.
Pull it Down invites kids to creatively challenge colonial monuments and reimagine the colonised landscape as a place in which they have agency. Drawing from our past 4 years of collaborative work as UnMonumental, The Pull it Down Reader provides a framework for those seeking to better understand and strategise around monuments on Aboriginal Land.
In the reader, we contrast Indigenous and colonial forms of memorialisation and discuss the necessity of decolonising colonial monuments while imagining better relationships between collective memory and landscape.
The Pull It Down Reader may also assist those having broader conversations with children and young people about the objects of colonialism and imperialism so frequently encountered in ‘public space’.
As our longest-standing readership, we’d like to share with you an excerpt, in which we introduce both Indigenous and colonial forms of monument-making:
Indigenous Monuments
There are over 250 Indigenous Nations across Aboriginal Land. Each Nation is defined by its unique territory, language and culture. Aboriginal history is the world’s oldest recorded history, dating back to the first arrival of humans on the Continent. This history is documented through visual art in culturally important places, recorded through oral knowledge, and maintained through ceremonial songline networks stretching across Nations.
Aboriginal oral histories can recall geographical changes of the distant past, such as the flooding of the Continent at the end of the last ice age. Stories like that of Ngurunderi, an ancestor of the Ngarrindjeri Nation, whose wives walked from the mainland to Kangaroo Island, describe a time when seas were about 100 feet lower than they are today, dating the story to around 10,000 years ago.
These histories can also recall extinct megafauna. For example, rock art depictions provide insights into the behaviour and appearance of Wonambi and Yurlunggurm, two genera of the Madtsoiidae family of megafauna snakes that survived on the continent until 40,000 years ago. Fossil study of the snake’s skull, ear and eye structure suggests that both Wonambi and Yurlunggurm were semi-aquatic, inhabiting lagoons, billabongs, lakes and rivers. Aboriginal stories across the Continent can recall the snake inhabiting waterways, travelling during rainy seasons, stalking prey and eating large animals, including humans.
Aboriginal histories communicate crucial cultural information, including historical events, the subjects involved in those events, and the ethical and moral perspectives of the community. Important Indigenous histories are memorialised in the names and stories of the cultural places where the specific stories took place. Their physical representations, found in both natural landforms and human constructions, can be considered as Indigenous monuments.
Natural landforms such as hills, valleys, rivers and plains, or the living species of plants and animals that inhabit a particular area, are named by Aboriginal people to memorialise historical people or events. The shape of existing landforms can also be physical representations or symbols of historical figures, documenting particular events and designating the landform as a cultural monument.
This reader was written on Yuin land, within view of the mountain Gulaga, which is one example of a natural landform as Indigenous monument. Gulaga was once an active volcano, its eruptions forming both a smaller mountain, Najanuka, and the nearby island Baranguba. The form of a reclining woman is described by the mountain’s topographical contours. The geological formation of the area is recorded in oral history:
This story’s about Gulaga, Gulaga mountain which is on the South Coast. It’s a very significant Aboriginal site. This is a story that was told to me by my family and my grandfather, Reggie Walker. My grandfather was a fisherman, he’d row his boat right out to sea and he’d tell us ‘When you’re out there it just looks like a lady, laying down.’
The story goes that Guluga was walking east collecting bush tuckers with her two sons, Najanuga and Barranguba. Barranguba said to his mother, ‘I want to move away and set up my own camp.’ She said ‘Well you can just move out there into the ocean with the fish and the whales and the dolphins, not too far away you can set up your camp because I still need to keep an eye on you’. And so he went out into the ocean and lay down and turned into the island.
When Najanuga saw this he said ‘Well I want to move away and have my own camp as well.’ But she said ‘No, you’re too young, you just stay here at my feet so you’re within arms’ reach of me and I can look after you.’ So he just sits there at her feet and she’s the mountain, and she’s pregnant, having a baby.
Now the landscape itself of the mountain, around this area which is the Central Tilba, Tilba Tilba area, that’s traditionally all birthing place for the South Coast women. The possum cloud there is actually her possum skin cloak, and when it’s cold the cloud comes over Gulaga like a big possum skin cloak . . .
These stories are from my ancestors, and they’re probably thousands of years old. They’ve just been handed down from generation to generation, and I’m pretty lucky to know the story and be able to pass it on to my daughter, Tamsin, and hopefully my grandkids.
—Cheryl Davidson, Walbunja and Ngarigo artist1
Aboriginal monuments also include human modifications to the land, including rock art, stone rock arrangements, stone structures, and culturally modified trees. Human-made Indigenous monuments use local materials, respond to the local environment, conform to the spatial and material nature of the landscape, and have a low environmental impact.
An example of Indigenous monument construction is Nawarla Gabarnmang, the world’s oldest human-made stone structure. It was built by Jawoyn people on their land and dates to over 45,000 years ago. Nawarla Gabarnmang means ‘place of hole in the rock’ in Jawoyn language.
Nawarla Gabarnmang is a sandstone structure held up by columns, originally formed naturally, eroded by wind and rain to create an outcrop first occupied by Jawoyn people around 50,000 years ago. However, 45,180 years ago, Jawoyn people began altering the natural sandstone outcrop by excavating the sandstone and constructing new open rooms with pillars. They moved existing pillars and built new pillars to engineer supports for the large ceiling of the sandstone outcrop. The excavation and construction of the site continued until about 11,000 years ago.
The ceiling of the structure is decorated with ochre pigment paintings and is the oldest painted rock art produced on the Continent, dated to 28,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating of the ash found on a slab of painted rock in the floor of the structure was dated at 27,631 years ago, indicating that the painted ceiling is older. The most recent painting at Nawarla Gabarnmang dates to the 1950’s. The region where Nawarla Gabarnmang is situated contains over 1,000 rock art paintings.
Colonial Monuments
Colonial monuments are human-made structures that commemorate a colonial story or person. On Aboriginal Land, colonial monuments most frequently memorialise a historical European colonial event or European person, and reflect British or US imperialist or Australian nationalist ideologies and narratives.
Australian colonial monuments are primarily chosen and erected by colonial governments. They are designed to reinforce, celebrate and normalise the presence of colonialism and imperialism in the region, and to sanctify Australian imperialist violence abroad. Australian colonial monuments express the values of European class society: a hierarchical culture drawing its wealth and power from the gains of political and military dominance.
Aboriginal people have well-established cultural names for everything on their land. For European colonisers, language was a tool of supremacism and expropriation. Places, plants and animals were renamed by colonisers in the process of dispossessing Indigenous people. The colonial renaming of rivers, mountains and other landforms after European places and people was inherent to the attempted eradication of Indigenous cultures, languages and recorded histories from the landscape; a form of genocide.
In the same way, European structures were built to dominate the land and impose a new colonial culture upon Indigenous people. Colonial markers such as statues, obelisks, cairns and plaques have been erected to emphasise the supposed material stability of the colony, and to communicate the supposed impermeability of British or US imperialism, and of Australian nationalism, to those who are forced to share the landscape with these objects.
Other physical structures may be less apparent in their status as colonial monuments but may nonetheless be considered as such due to their location, naming or ‘heritage listing’. These may include colonial infrastructure, houses, roads, bridges, churches, town planning, Aboriginal Missions, government buildings, and institutions. For example, Cook’s Cottage, ANZAC Bridge, Parliament House, The National War Memorial, and Macquarie Road may all reasonably be included in a discussion about colonial monuments.
We’ll be sharing another excerpt from The Pull It Down Reader next week, in which we discuss the policing and desecration of monuments.
Meanwhile, you can pick up the reader from Slingshot Books online, or from your local independent bookstore.
Both Pull It Down and The Pull It Down Reader are designed by Dennis Grauel and published by Slingshot Books. The reader is beautifully risograph printed by Helio Press. Pull It Down also features an index by James, providing caregivers with an honest biography for each of the colonial figures on its pages.
Thanks to Cheryl Davidson for her kind permission to republish her telling of the story of Gulaga.