Papers by Thea Adele Gardiner
‘The Nation’s Health Is the Nation’s Wealth’: Portia Geach (1873–1959) and the Good Health Movement in Interwar Australia
Australian Historical Studies
Australia's Monumental Women: Pioneer Women's Memorial Gardens and the Making of Gendered Settler-Colonial Place, 2019
© 2019 Thea GardinerFrom its inception in the nineteenth century, Australia’s public commemorativ... more © 2019 Thea GardinerFrom its inception in the nineteenth century, Australia’s public commemorative landscape has centred on a white, nationalist and masculine identity. In recent years, Australian public memorials have been subject to increasing public and academic scrutiny. Occupying public space, colonial monuments legitimise settler-colonial narratives of Indigenous dispossession, effacing Indigenous histories, counter-narratives, and claims to land. An important absence from this debate over physical markers of historical consciousness in Australia is the discussion of memorials dedicated to white settler women. These monuments make up only twenty per cent of all Australian monuments, those conceived of and produced by women even less. Australia’s ‘monumental women’ are in need of critical historiographical analysis as the question ‘whose history are we telling?’ continues to permeate both public and academic historical debate. As is broadly accepted in Australian historiography, white settler women – at once coloniser and colonised – contributed to the processes of colonisation in a myriad of ways. The analysis of their historical markers of memory is challenging yet necessary historiographical terrain if Australia is to reconcile with its settler-colonial past and present and find new ways of memorialising in the future
Thesis Chapters by Thea Adele Gardiner
Minerva Access, 2019
From its inception in the nineteenth century, Australia’s public commemorative landscape has cent... more From its inception in the nineteenth century, Australia’s public commemorative landscape has centred on a white, nationalist and masculine identity. In recent years, Australian public memorials have been subject to increasing public and academic scrutiny. In 2017, public debate ensued after journalist and Wiradjuri man Stan Grant opposed the erection of a Sydney memorial commemorating the ‘discovery’ of Australia by James Cook. This debate, according to Australian historian Mark McKenna, whilst appearing to be about the ‘wording of inscriptions’ is more about how the history of settler-colonisation and Indigenous dispossession should be publicly acknowledged and memorialised. Occupying public space, colonial monuments legitimise settler-colonial narratives of Indigenous dispossession, effacing Indigenous histories, counter-narratives, and claims to land. An important absence from this debate over physical markers of historical consciousness in Australia is the discussion of memorials dedicated to white settler women. These monuments make up only twenty per cent of all Australian monuments, those conceived of and produced by women even less. Australia’s ‘monumental women’ are in need of critical historiographical analysis as the question ‘whose history are we telling?’ continues to permeate both public and academic historical debate. As is broadly accepted in Australian historiography, white settler women – at once coloniser and colonised – contributed to the processes of colonisation in a myriad of ways. The analysis of their historical markers of memory is challenging yet necessary historiographical terrain if Australia is to reconcile with its settler-colonial past and present and find new ways of memorialising in the future.
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Papers by Thea Adele Gardiner
Thesis Chapters by Thea Adele Gardiner