Monument (Bonny Cassidy, Giramondo)

In an author’s note, Bonny Cassidy explains that Monument, her genre-bending literary memoir, structured around the branches of her White Australian family, began as a private project, but in clarifying her own story, she found growing interconnections, gaps, and questions. One of those questions: ‘Can I talk of a settler family’s forgetting as a cumulative condition? The hardening of millions of soft denials into unknowing?’ Denial and forgetting—often interrogated here on the scale of the familial, even while referencing the British invasion of Australia—are central to this book. So, too, then, is remembering: the titular monument(s)—and other forms of remembering recurring throughout (inheritances, paintings, exhibits, public holidays)—might be altered, debated, moved, or even removed, but something struck through is not gone. Long shadows are cast. As a poet, Cassidy unsurprisingly uses evocative imagery; one image that stayed with me was of the empty locket she receives as an heirloom: ‘a memento of what might be’. Monument questions how non-Indigenous people can ‘stand by’ First Nations truth-telling, examining colonial histories ‘once obscured by elevated figures’—whether leaders, ancestors or parents, or a controversial statue of John Batman since quietly moved into storage. For readers of lyrical memoirs such as Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and of examinations of Australia’s colonial past and present, such as David Marr’s Killing for Country and Chelsea Watego’s Another Day in the Colony.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Angela Glindemann is a queer writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works as an editor for Books+Publishing. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews