Swinburne University of Technology - Melbourne Australia

How memories of past injustice can travail the future

Story by Gio Braidotti

Time is meant to quarantine the past and absolve the present - or so some would have us believe when trying to escape the ripples of historic injustices.

The desire to cleanse a society's memory, to dismiss an unpalatable past as merely a 'black armband view of history', goes to the heart of research by Professor Klaus Neumann. To the German-born historian, based at Swinburne University of Technology, the past is very much capable of an afterlife and can haunt the present even if unbidden, unwelcome and officially unacknowledged.

He calls them 'ghosts', the remnants of past injustices haunting contemporary societies, sometimes with devastating effects on descendants of both victims and perpetrators. Seeking out their traces in the present is his speciality - he can talk you through villages in Germany that once abutted a concentration camp, or rural towns in Australia that witnessed settler violence, and identify the ghostly impacts on contemporary lives.

"I think these ghosts become really important when it concerns instances of historical injustice that have not been resolved," Professor Neumann says. "Irrespective of whether we were personally responsible for particular injustices, we need to take responsibility for how we remember the past. And maybe that means trying to identify means whereby we can live with these ghosts rather than trying to pretend they don't exist, or that it's not worth the trouble to remember difficult and bothersome pasts."

To further the understanding of this particularly human trait, Professor Neumann has created a global network of researchers who are studying how contemporary societies deal with past events that continue to affect subsequent generations.

As an example, he points to the Stolen Generation debate in Australia during the 1990s that stalled and morphed into debates about who has the right to 'do' history and the validity of particular research methods. "That was a missed opportunity," he says. "To me, the 'history wars' demonstrated the need to think about how particular colonial histories live on in the present. It would be great if outside perspectives - from international colleagues writing about memories of the Dirty War in Argentina or human rights violations perpetrated by the French in Algeria - could help us gain a fresh understanding of what is happening in Australia."

He says his own understanding of contemporary Germany was broadened after meeting Australian historian Dr Chris Healy. The two historians discovered that juxtaposing memories of the Holocaust and memories of settler-colonial violence showed that while these pasts are not comparable historically, the way they both 'haunt' present society becomes remarkably similar.

Professor Neumann provides an example from his own work on Geraldton, in Western Australia: "For a long time, the town's non-Aboriginal residents did not seem able to publicly talk about Aboriginal-European conflict. Yet they seemed obsessed with events that happened in the 1620s; events that had nothing to do with Geraldton itself, but had become the focus of the town's history. These events revolved around the Dutch ship Batavia and the mutiny that happened after the ship struck a reef near the Abrolhos Islands."

The violent story of the Batavia provided an opportunity to acknowledge and discuss a violent past, but with a sense of distance in time not possible when discussing the settler-Indigenous conflict.

In recounting the story of the Batavia, Professor Neumann notes that the murders perpetrated by the mutineers and the torture used to extract their confessions provided a framework capable of hosting veiled references to settler-Indigenous conflicts. "So the question is not so much why people in Geraldton didn't talk about Aboriginal dispossession until the 1990s, but rather how they talked about it previously, including times when the past was seemingly not remembered at all."

It was the value of this Australian perspective on how societies frame their historical memories that prompted Professor Neumann, in conjunction with Dr Chris Healy and the assistance of Swinburne scholar Dr Maria Tumarkin, to set out in 2008 to build an international research collaboration. With its hub at Swinburne's Institute of Social Research, the collaboration is dedicated to understanding how democratic societies across the globe both forget and remember the victimisations and genocides of the past.

With research collaborators in Europe, North America and South America providing a range of resources, interests and expertise, the initiative is also bringing on board young Australian researchers who will have access to the network and the pick of PhD topics from a broad range of case studies.

On board already is newly enrolled PhD student Michaela Callaghan, a former dancer and choreographer, drawn to explore the use of music and dance as a tool of remembering among Peru's indigenous Quechuas.

"I was very excited by the possibilities that this project offers, such as the chance to connect with academics who have a wealth of experience not only in my specific field, but who have also written about social memories and historical justice in other places, be it Canada, New Zealand or Guatemala," Ms Callaghan says.

Dr Tumarkin, a postdoctoral fellow funded through the project, will explore memories of totalitarianism in Chile and the former Soviet Union, two cases selected, in part, to maximise the contrast provided by such profoundly different social contexts.

"I am interested in exploring how memories linger in all kinds of unexpected ways and often across generations," she says. "How memories determine the way people behave - from what they read, who they marry and whose hands they shake, through to whose loss they grieve - and how all these private feelings have a powerful social and political dimension."

Professor Neumann intends to continue his juxtapositions of memories in Australia and Germany, extending it to include Austria and New Zealand. Other topics of interest to the team include Spain's Year of Historical Memory and the contested memories of Italy's colonisation of Eritrea in the 1930s.

With scholarships still available, Professor Neumann is hoping to recruit more students, and not just from history departments, since a range of disciplines is relevant to the project, including political science, media studies, sociology and philosophy, as well as cultural and literary studies.

With the network taking form and discussions under way between collaborators across the globe, Professor Neumann is seeing the germ of his original idea blossom: "This is not something that has been done a lot before," he says.

"The usual approach is to do case studies concerned with memories of comparable pasts. We claim it's immaterial whether or not the pasts themselves are compatible. What interests us is what we can learn from juxtaposing comparable presents."