Geographies of commemoration: Angel Island, San Francisco and North Head, Sydney

Abstract

Memorialising lives, deaths, and events in landscapes can be authorised, official, and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unsanctioned, and anti-authoritarian. Interpreting and connecting two sites spanning the Pacific Ocean, this paper explores the inscribed and affective landscapes of Angel Island, San Francisco, and North Head, Sydney. Both sites encompass multivalent histories of defence, quarantine, immigration and leisure. Both also host a continuum of mark-making practices, from informal graffiti to monuments aspiring to direct national narratives. Elaborating the rich and complex layering of histories at each site, we trace the semiotic and emotive circuits traced by their endorsed and vernacular inscriptions. In particular, we question the work done when individual or even surreptitious texts are appropriated -or marketedwithin formal narratives of inclusiveness, reverence and homogeneous nationalism. Drawing upon scholarship from archaeology, history, geography and heritage studies, this analysis argues that formalised commemoration never escapes the potential for counter-readings -that authority and authorship never entirely coincide.

So ends this day:American whalers in Yaburara country, Dampier Archipelago

“…While maritime historical graffiti are sometimes characterised as commemorative, performative and reiterative, the whalers’ inscriptions do not signal at a distance, but, instead, make an insistent point about the creators’ history, identity and identification with the place (Bashford et al . 2016; Clarke & Frederick 2016). Part of the significance of the whalers’ markings is that they provide insight into motivations for inscribing the landscape generally.…”

“…We refer to these two marking events as inscriptions— contra the definition used by Clarke and Frederick (2016: 524), who understand inscriptions to be “more institutionalised than graffiti, and requiring greater levels of skills and planning”. Instead, we follow the work of Alison Bashford et al (2016: 18), who argue that the historical geography of memorialising and commemoration operates across a continuum, from highly orchestrated state endeavours to intensely private individual mark-making practices […] The memorialising of lives, deaths, and events in landscapes can be authorised, official, and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unauthorised, and even anti-authoritarian .With this memorialisation continuum in mind, we explore the narrative content of the whalers’ inscriptions. Do they represent “a trace of trespass, an act of usurpation [or] […] the colonial reordering of space” (Clarke & Frederick 2016: 524); or are they the spontaneous acts of individuals responding to the foreign antipodean natural beauty and already richly inscribed landscape of Murujuga?…”

Proof of Life: Mark-Making Practices on the Island of Alderney

“…Some scholars have focused specifically on mark-making dating to the Holocaust and oppression during WWII, most notably from Gestapo prisons and camps (Huiskes, 1983; Czarnecki, 1989; Myers, 2008; Jung, 2013). Markings made during periods of incarceration (Casella, 2009, 2014; McAtackney, 2011, 2014, 2016; Agutter, 2014), quarantine, and marginalisation (Bashford et al, 2016; Hobbins et al, 2016) have also been examined in terms of their potential to identify individuals but also as a means of demonstrating emotions and assertions of identity. These approaches are an important advance in archaeological interpretation, suggesting new ways to identify individuals, trace their origin, and map their story during times of conflict.…”

“…Likewise, the role that landscape studies and material culture can play in searches for missing persons and in enhancing historical narratives regarding Nazi persecution has only recently been acknowledged (Sturdy Colls, 2015). Therefore, marks made by individuals during periods of confinement and persecution may offer new ways of tracing individuals and provide a form of what Bashford et al (2016: 52) have termed ‘anti-authoritarian’ memorialization. For the events on Alderney, since only a small number of transport lists and other records exist about exactly who was sent there to undertake forced and slave labour, these marks have provided the only confirmation of several individuals' existence on the island, their mark-making offering proof of life not available by other means.…”