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Monument / Bonny Cassidy.

By: Contributor(s): Publication details: Artarmon, NSW : Giramondo Publishing Company, 2024.Description: 277 pages : illustrations ; 21 cmISBN:
  • 9781922725899
Subject(s): Genre/Form: DDC classification:
  • 929.20994 23
Summary: "An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. This is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past - part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation - it traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of a White Australian family of mixed origins and ancestries. Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Cassidy makes a case for the value of 'collected memory' against the tide of settlement and silence. Inspired by the methods of Natalie Harkin's archival poetics and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre, Cassidy's considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?" -- Publisher.
List(s) this item appears in: March 2024 Australian Titles | March 2024 Biography | Australian Biography
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode Item reserves
New book Melbourne Athenaeum Library Biography 929.209 CAS Available 072981
Total reserves: 0

First published 2024 from the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University by the Giramondo Publishing Company.

Monument is printed with strikethrough.

Includes biographical references.

"An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. This is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past - part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation - it traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of a White Australian family of mixed origins and ancestries. Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Cassidy makes a case for the value of 'collected memory' against the tide of settlement and silence. Inspired by the methods of Natalie Harkin's archival poetics and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre, Cassidy's considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?" -- Publisher.

"First Nations readers are advised that this books contains the names of people who have passed away. It includes references to frontier violence, racist language and colonial trauma." -- Page following copyright page.

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