Publications
SPACe and CULTURE, 2022, FEBRUARY 2022
Journal article: The Blacktown Native Institution as a Living, Embodied Being: Decolonizing Australian First Nations Zones of Trauma Through Creativity
Special issue, Place, Memory & Justice: Critical Perspectives on Sites of Conscience of the journal Space and Culture.
In this article the co-authors Brook Andrew and Lily Hibberd consider the Darug Nation reclamation of the former site of the Blacktown Native Institution in Western Sydney as a distinct memorialization of the land as a powerful identity through restoring ceremonial and land care cultural practices that predate invasion.
The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and design, 2021
Book chapter: Fridge in a tree: On curating and memory, remembrance and representation
In this conversational text, Brook Andrew and architect Carroll Go-Sam reflect on the possibilities of representing the magnitude of Indigenous loss and survival in a national memorial in Australia and the responsibility of architecture and design practitioners and curators to engage with community approaches to remembering frontier violence and sovereignty in the context of exhibiting architecture and design.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA, February 2019
Feature article: Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial
The RR.Memorial Forum, held in June 2018, explored the future of memorials in Australia to the Frontier Wars. A series of Indigenous-led design charrettes revealed the possibilities and challenges involved in creating places of healing. Collected here are reflections from those charettes.
Text by Brook Andrew, Jessica Neath, Corina Marino, Jock Gilbert, Christine Phillips, Carroll Go-Sam
Remembering the myall creek massacre, edited by Jane Lydon and lyndall ryan, newsouth, 2018
Book chapter: Walking on Bones
This chapter relates the community-orientated memorial at Myall Creek to other Australian and international memory sites dedicated to addressing traumatic histories. We draw from interviews conducted for the visual arts research project ‘Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial.’ Led by artist Brook Andrew, this project examines the Australian Frontier Wars and the possibilities for future memorialization. By connecting the example of Myall Creek with other memorial sites, we intend to highlight the significance of Myall Creek internationally, and the need for greater visibility in Australia of the Frontier Wars and their ongoing legacy.
Text by Brook Andrew and Jessica Neath, with contributions from Neil Carter, Lyndon Ormond-Parker, Youk Chhang, Marcia Langton, Rueben Berg, Andreas Huyssen, Peter Eisenma, Faye Ginsberg and Fred Myers.
history of photography, 2018
Journal article: Encounters with Legacy Images: Decolonising and Re-imagining Photographic Evidence from the Colonial Archive
By way of a dialogue between the two authors – an artist and an art historian – this article reflects on the artistic method of repurposing the colonial archive, in particular the vast collection of photographs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Important contexts for this work include the international practice, established in the 1990s amongst artists, communities, and museums, of addressing hidden histories of war and genocide in the public sphere. In Australia, this included challenging colonial visions and the damaging history of representing First Nations peoples. At the same time, Australian colonial archives increasingly became more accessible and an important cultural and political resource for First Nations peoples. This article considers both the debate around cultural protocols of Indigenous knowledge that has emerged in the last twenty years and the relentless ideology of primitivism that has restricted the visibility of Indigenous loss. Pervading these developments has been the persistent emotional, historical, and political dilemma of how artists access these archives and produce decolonial readings of the ‘mess’ and trauma of colonial events.
Text by Brook Andrew and Jessica Neath