I’m in the process of renewing my British passport. I got it when I was sixteen, when my parents became naturalised British citizens and more or less committed to staying here. The first trip I made with it was home, to Australia, the first time I’d travelled alone. I remember being deeply anxious about keeping track of my identities, being nervous about showing the wrong passport at the wrong time – leaving London as a Brit, arriving in Sydney as an Australian, obsessively checking both documents and convinced I’d lose one.

I am the empire’s success story. I am the child who’s come home to the kingdom, the blonde colonial born on Gadigal land, raised in Hong Kong speaking only English, maintaining the tidy violence of the link between here and there. I am the product of the fragile balance of white imperialism, my ancestors deemed acceptable by the paranoiac lawmakers as they drew their maps and broke their treaties.

One step forward – the Uluru Statement from the Heart is delivered at the 2017 National Constitution Convention, inviting settler Australians to ‘walk with [Indigenous Australians] in a movement of the Australian people for a better future’ – and one step back—their proposals are dismissed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as unnecessary and unconstitutional (‘Statement from the Heart’ 2017). Never Forget and Move On, white blindfolds and black armbands.

What the Anglo-Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner termed the ‘great Australian silence’ in 1968 is more accurately a process of aphasia than of forgetting. It is the impossibility of speaking the truth. Beneath the denial of history lies a fear of its consequences: somewhere, the knowledge that Australia was born out of violence and theft is buried, and if it were to be dug up then the control and privilege held by settler Australians would be taken away. The danger and power of aphasia is that it produces absence, and generationally stories are lost, so that with each passing year the process of remembering becomes harder.

My relationship with my settler identity has largely been mediated by art and fiction, a necessity of geographical distance. Again and again I find myself obsessing over stories of arrival, departure, the translation of the strange into the mundane. My connection to land and country is dislocated, but I still play a part in reenacting these tropes and living with their echoes. The strange, invented nostalgia I feel looking at pictures of a landscape I have never really lived in, the yearning driven more by a rejection of where I am than a desire to be elsewhere, the knowledge that while I may not feel at home in England I have no real or justifiable claim on Australia. It’s not mine and it never will be, but I can tell myself that if I was there I’d be at home.

Of all the stories of Australia I’ve clung to, none is more persistent than Picnic at Hanging Rock - both Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel and the 1975 Peter Weir film adaptation. On Valentine’s Day, 1900, a group of schoolgirls from Appleyard College take a day trip to Hanging Rock, a real place in Mount Macedon, Victoria. Four girls climb the Rock, three (Miranda, Irma and Marion) vanish while the fourth (Edith) runs away and is found hysterical and disorientated. A teacher, Miss McCraw, also disappears, and is seen by Edith running up the Rock partially clothed. Weeks later Irma is found alive, unconscious but unharmed, with no memory and no trace of the others. The ‘College Mystery’ haunts the area, and leads to the collapse of the College and the death of its headmistress in an apparent suicide on the Rock. Miranda’s is the loss felt most intensely - she is a beautiful, blonde, Australian-born ‘Botticelli angel’, the darling of the settlerocracy and even after Irma (the sole survivor) is found it is Miranda’s absence that dominates the story.

Irma is completely silent on the events at Hanging Rock, unable to recall or to speak of what happened. She suffers from a literal amnesia, traumatised and mute at the sight of the landscape that almost claimed her. When she visits Appleyard College to say goodbye before leaving for Europe, she triggers a hysterical outpouring of rage and emotion with Edith - previously left similarly silent by Hanging Rock - as its ringleader, and they attack her, demanding a truth she cannot give them. Irma is haunted by fears that she cannot express, desperate to forget the events that she does not remember and therefore cannot exorcise.

Reading Picnic, I love Miranda as I should, with the urgency of teenage adoration that she commands at Appleyard College, but it is Irma who fascinates me most. She is the little immigrant princess to Miranda’s gone-native fae, desperate to leave Australia to ‘learn something of the world’ in Europe. She is saved from the Rock to be restored to civilised society - the landscape spits her out at a site which has been searched before, as if she’s been tasted and found unpalatable. This is not her home, the land doesn’t want her.

My fascination with Irma and her lost memories comes from my own inherited absences: I know my ancestors, white colonists in frontier regions, participated in the destruction of Indigenous Australian lives and cultures. I feel compelled to find these stories, but the great silence that surrounds them overwhelms me, and instead I am trying to reckon with the fact that I will most likely never know what they did. Hanging Rock is filled with stories, but they are not the ones being told. It is located near the lands of the Wurundjeri, Taungurong and Dja Dja Wurrung nations, but the records of its traditional names and significances are scant, either not shared with the colonists or not considered worthy of recording. Stanner was writing a year after Lindsay’s novel came out - to me, what he calls the ‘cult of disremembering’ that defines settler-Indigenous relations is rooted in the same horror as Irma’s repeated insistence that ’Nightmares belong to the past’. It’s the refusal to look at what you’ve done, because you know you can’t come back from it.

‘To be Antipodean is to be out of place in one’s place’; this is the alienation that overflows in me (McLean 1998). I am the consequence of a violently imperialist ambition, one that relies on silencing all else to maintain itself. I think that’s why I keep coming back to Miranda and Irma, to all those other stories of white women lost in the bush. I obsess over Eliza Fraser and Barbara Thompson, ‘saved’ by white men from the Badtjala and Kaurareg people who cared for them after shipwrecks, or the White Woman of Gippsland, who didn’t even exist but whose spectre was used as the justification for the massacre of Kurnai people. I know their myths and retellings, I reread their memoirs and the accounts of their rescuers, like maybe if I look from the right angle the surface will crack and the text will rewrite itself into something more true, and the displacement I feel is born from the knowledge that it’s impossible. I’m trying to talk my way out of aphasia, to name again and again the circumstances that created me, to try and find the lie at the heart of the story.

The very fact that I can have my British passport, that the only barrier between me and it is my own disorganisation, is why I can’t let go of calling myself Australian. Realistically, practically, London is my home, but there’s a splinter in my heart, a stabbing need to remember and remind that I’m Not From Here.

It’s not quite a retro-cultural cringe, more like a compulsion to own up before people notice. There’s a peculiar kind of provincialism to it, a need to over explain, the guilty urge to get in first and flash my anti-imperial credentials, beg for a pass. More than that, though, I want to see the messiness laid bare. I want to drag up the nets and maps, the bitter roots that made me, the knotted chords that bind me to the acts of the dead. I can’t remember what happened then, but I don’t want to forget it. 

Alice Procter is a historian of material culture, with a background in both Art History and Anthropology. Alice leads Uncomfortable Art Tours at heritage sites and galleries in the UK and curates exhibitions, organise events, make podcasts and write things under the umbrella of The Exhibitionist. Alice’s academic work concentrates on the intersections of postcolonial art practice and colonial material culture, settler storytelling, the concept of whiteness in the 18th and 19th centuries, the curation of historical trauma, and myths of national identity.

theexhibitionist.org

Alice’s current book The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it was published in 2020 by Cassell.

 This article features in the Autumn 2021 edition of Sluice_magazine