Commemorating with stone in Melbourne

A key strategy for conveying ideological meanings, identities and historical interpretations across space is through memorialisation: the erection of a structure or form that is intended to command attention and organise place-identities.

Stone has been deployed as a key constituent of commemorative memorials across human history in marking selective events, commemorating esteemed people, marking out sites of sacred significance or glorifying deities, whether carved into figures and obelisks or serving as plinths for elevated bronze figures. Throughout history, and especially over the past 200 years, groups have competed to commemorate ideas, figures and events in stone in complex and diverse ways. Nevertheless, the built environment is invariably replete with reminders that the powerful are especially able to impose selective meanings and sentiments across space.

This remains the case in Melbourne, with some extremely powerful and enduring sites of commemoration, and yet the city is continuously in a ferment concerning its relationship with the past. Such contestations and challenges are particularly intense in the current era. This presentation will look at the use of stone as a material in commemorating colonial, national, subaltern, critical and indigenous meanings across Melbourne.

This seminar will be presented by Tim Edensor.

Tim Edensor is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University and a research fellow at Melbourne University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj(1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life(2002) and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality(2005), From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom(2017) as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm(2010). Tim has written extensively on national identity, tourism, ruins, mobilities and landscapes of illumination and darkness. He is currently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Place, and completing a project about lithic materiality in Melbourne.