Continuing their studies of post-Pinochet memorials in Chile, the authors analyse a recent trend in the interpretation of trauma sites in Santiago which regards the need to resolve the tensions raised by the Pinochet years as more important than dwelling in detail on what was visited upon the victims. We argue that this significant shift from previous interpretations is carried by the younger generation of guides who did not undergo the repression personally. We note these changes with approbation, while noting that the desire not to discuss the worst excesses of the Pinochet regime has led to to a corresponding downplay of the highest points of human experience manifested by the victims themselves. We cite several instances that mark a peak of human experience in Chilean history, and suggest that several might well be used by the site interpreters to further instil a sense of pride among Chilean young people, rather than despair.
We two Australian public historians recently published a history of memorials in Santiago, Chile, to the victims of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, Narrow but Endlessly Deep: The Struggle for Memorialisation in Chile since the Transition to Democracy. Our different upbringings and experiences (one a migrant from Cuba, the other Anglo-Australian) produced disagreements as to how we should interpret the memorializations. In particular, the foundational narratives of Cuba and Australia in which we were raised affected our differing interpretations. The article explains these differing foundational narratives and then cites examples of textual disagreements and how we resolved them. We believe that this challenging interrogation of lifetime values improved the monograph and may offer insights for other cross-cultural collaborations.
The online project http://historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au, now based at the University of Western Sydney, takes the educational and digital initiatives of today in a new direction. Dividing the city of Sydney into six geographic regions, we created a site based on the history of the Aborigines of Sydney since the invasion by the English colonisers. The site incorporates new forms of tagging, time line and digital maping to present multiple pathways of information in textual, video and photographic form. After seven years of investigation, we can offer our website balanced between unearthing lost knowledge and discovering new sources of information. We have incorporated all these into the site while exploring the potential for digital mapping and animation for purposes both of education and research. After carefully consulting professional Aboriginal educational groups, we believe that we have created a digital Indigenous history of Sydney, while at the same time returning to the Aborigines the history of which they have been deprived for so long.([10])
Review(s) of: The invincibles. New Norcia's Aboriginal cricketers 1879-1906, by Bob Reece, xii + 161 pp., Histrionics, Fremantle, 2014, ISBN 9780646920375 (pbk), $25.00.
The Australian Government, referring to thousands of Abo-riginal children allegedly stolen from their parents, responded that "the Commonwealth does not seek to defend or justify past policies and practices, but it does assert that the sature and intent of those events have been misrepresented, and that the treatment of separated Aboriginal children was essentially lawful and benign in intent..." In 1998 the Chilean government opposed the proposed trial of Gen-eral Pinochet in Spain, protesting at the grave damage it would cause to the process of democratic transition and national reconciliation. The Government of Chile believes that whatever are the intentions of those promoting the process, this does not help the intended reconcili-ation — on the contrary, they will deepen for many years the differ-ences which exist between Chileans. Are national reconciliation and oral history compatible?
Of the 200,000 exiles who fled Chile after the coup, between one third and one half went to Eastern and Western Europe. They arrived in the midst of some of the most turbulent years in Europe since the Second World War, manifest in both street violence and radical intellectual currents. The European milieu, especially through the more moderate political programs offered by Eurocommunism, attracted many of the refugees, traumatized as they were by state violence in their own country, and already questioning the ideals they had held so strongly. We argue that these moderate programs of social reform that the returning exiles brought back with them were highly influential in forming the coalition of centrist partners which supported the center-left Concertación government, and helped maintain a stable and reasonably popular government in Chile for a further 20 years.
