Space, Commemoration, and Iconography: Scottish Monuments and Memorials in Australia

Space, commemoration, and iconography: Scottish monuments and memorials in Australia Benjamin Wilkie∗ in Fred Cahir, Anne Beggs Sunter, and Alison Inglis (eds), Scots under the Southern Cross, Ballarat, 2014, pp. 157{165. Introduction Historians have explored a variety of manifestations of Scottish culture in Aus- tralia, including religion, literature, sport, dancing, food and drink, and ethnic associations and celebrations. An emerging field of interest is the cultural geog- raphy of the Scottish diaspora in Australia, and there has been a specific focus on the iconography of Scottish monuments in addition to the relationships be- tween space and commemoration.1 Australia provides ample material. There are close to one hundred `Scottish sites' remembering various prominent Scots or Scottish Australians, including monuments dedicated to Scottish colonial pioneers, statues of the Scottish politicians, depictions of Scottish national heroes, memorials to Scottish military units and fallen soldiers, and handful of `cairns' commemorating the Scotland-Australia connection. Add these to a variety of other Scottish marks on the landscape { including cemeteries, churches, streets, and place names { and the sum is a remarkable and persistent record of the Scots in Australia and the variety of ways they have represented and commemorated their culture and identities. While Ken Inglis has famously described, in his Sacred Places, how the ubiquitous war memorial became important centres around which Australian cultural and national identities have been articulated, what of those places and spaces where the identities and culture of migrants were set in stone? Dianne Hall and Lindsay Proudfoot have recently investigated the ways in which Irish and Scottish immigrants engaged with place and space in the colonial era, giving priority to the `local worlds' that settlers imagined, constructed, and inhab- ited.2 They argue that the Irish and Scots \enacted and inscribed their lives [in] loosely bounded local worlds." 3 Through a variety of case studies, including explorations of colonial architecture and the pastoral landscape, the authors demonstrate the importance and utility of giving attention to space and place in the construction of migrant lives. The aim of this chapter is to continue ∗Email: [email protected] 1 Benjamin Wilkie Space, commemoration, and iconography the discussion and investigate the variety of ways Scottish lives, deaths, culture, and identities have all been inscribed on monuments and memorials across the Australian landscape over the past two centuries of European settlement. Public monuments have been, and continue to be, the focus point for collective participation in the life of towns and cities, and, Inglis' war memorials aside, are an underutilised source for revealing the richness of community identity and memory. This chapter does not intend to interrogate specific monuments in de- tail, but rather aims to give a sense of the possibilities and importance of such a project. Such monuments as those examined in this paper are, in Pierre Nora's words, lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory where \memory crystallises and secretes itself" because there are no longer milieu de mémoire, or real environments of memory.4 Sites of memory, such as statues, become foci for individual and group memorialisation and commemoration. In the diaspora, such processes also feed into the construction and maintenance of cultural identity. Indeed, public monuments and statues remembering figures from Scotland's past are representative of the process whereby migrants create or recreate symbolic traditions of ethnicity in their adopted countries, often disconnected from the historical realities of their homeland and set apart from their everyday lives.5 Sometimes, however, symbolic traditions do intersect with a migrant's social and political environ- ment. As suggested in Max Weber's concept of `social closure', ethnicity can be instrumental in itself for a migrant group. The invocation of ethnicity { and the establishment of rules, practices, and boundaries { in the process of self- identification can be a strategic choice made by migrants for social, economic, or political security and expediency.6 As lasting and highly visible statements of culture and identity, statues and monuments are particularly salient examples of social closure. As Kirk Savage has observed, monuments are integral to understanding the creation and negoti- ation of cultural identity because they \impose a permanent memory on the very landscape within which we order our lives."7 Monuments provide public and enduring credibility and legitimacy to particular groups, although they must necessarily marginalise others in the process. Monuments are especially useful entry-points into the nature of group identity because the process of their creation is democratic, representative, and collective; we can recognise monuments as both products of, and stimulus for, the public imagination.8 What follows is a survey of the varieties of Scottish sites of memory and identity in Australia. The discussion covers sites representing the specific commemoration of both lives and deaths, which reflect the presence of Scottish migrants Australia and their contributions to all manner of fields and endeavours, but also indicate something about the ways in which Scots imagined themselves. The identities and cultures Scottish migrants carried with them to Australia were etched onto the landscape and are manifest in a variety of statues commemorating Scottish national heroes such as Robert Burns and William Wallace, and here a plurality of interpretations of these heroes across time and space were evident. Benjamin Wilkie Space, commemoration, and iconography Life, death, and remembrance There are over sixty public monuments to famous, prominent, or influential Scots registered in the Monuments Australia catalogue. Found across Australia are at least nine monuments dedicated to Scottish colonial pioneers more generally and, among other colonial and twentieth-century politicians, four statues of the Scottish governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie. It is likely there are more to be recorded, and private statues erected by families are not included.9 Many of these public statues are of well-known Scottish settlers in Australia, and often commemorate their lives in an exultant, sometimes highly revisionist, manner. Take, for instance, the bronze statue of the Rev. John Dunmore Lang in Wynyard Park, Sydney. Erected by the Lang Memorial Committee of the Presbyterian Church and sculptured by Giovanni Fontana in 1890, the statue was unveiled by his wife in January 1891. The original plaque notes that he was a \Patriot and Statesmen", while a new plaque added in 1999 provides more biographical details of his life. Although recording that \Lang respected the intelligence and culture of the Aboriginal people and he worked to remove the discriminatory poll tax from the Chinese population", the plaque does not note that the migration schemes he promoted { primarily designed to attract Scottish Presbyterians { were partly shaped by his deep antipathy towards the Irish and the Catholicism they brought to Australia.10 If such statues as these reflect, triumphantly, upon the achievements of Scots in colonial Australia, cemeteries and gravestones perhaps provide a more personal insight into the ways in which Scottish identity was imagined and constructed by migrants in Australia. As Ken Warpole observes, cemeteries func- tion \as libraries of past lives, beliefs, and artefacts, able to be read again and again by succeeding generations."11 Leigh Straw has investigated how Scottish immigrants engaged with their identities, and how different constructions of Scottishness were reflected in memorials to the dead in cemeteries and grave- yards across Tasmania.12 In particular, Straw noted that the inscriptions on headstones acted as a vital \public communication of identity", and served the purpose of \illuminating important features of individual lives and identities."13 Reiterating historian Richard Finlay's argument that regional identities were perhaps \more significant in the everyday lives of most Scots than the abstract notion of national identity", she demonstrates that regional and personal identities were commemorated on headstones in cemeteries across Tasmania.14 Nev- ertheless, national identities were also communicated on Scottish headstones, as were class and linguistic identifiers. Symbols and poetry reflected on themes of loss, hope and resurrection, as well as personal, familial, and spiritual love. The most common feature of headstones, however, were simple statements of ori- gin, identifying an individual's belonging to a particular locale or region within Scotland. In addition to personal sites of remembrance, evidence of collective forms memorialisation is also found across Australia. Take, for instance, the Glen Huntly Pioneers Memorial at St Kilda in Melbourne, commemorating the arrival of the barque Glen Huntly in Melbourne in 1840. The ship left Greenock in Benjamin Wilkie Space, commemoration, and iconography December 1839, but the voyage left many of the immigrants on board emaciated and with fevers; ten died at sea. The ill passengers were landed at Victoria's first quarantine station { the Red Bluff, St Kilda { on April 24, 1840. A few days later, three Scottish men, John Craig, James Mathers, and George Armstrong, died of an unknown disease. In 1899, the

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