13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

McCUBBIN, Maryanne

Memorialising the Pioneers: monuments and generational history in Melbourne, 1880s - 1910s

The 1870s and 1880s were a crucial point of development for colonial Melbourne. The first generation of ‘eye-witnesses’ to the city’s colonial foundations was rapidly passing, while gaining and maintaining hereditary acceptance for the order they had instituted was becoming an increasingly complex proposition. It was in this environment that the practice of public history was born.

Drawing from long-established funerary and other traditions of monumental masonry, civic leaders moved commemoration of the city’s pioneers from the cemetery in to the central civic sphere. In so doing, they were building a personalised and heroic material complement to the grand civic buildings that contained the sphere.

The period from the 1880s to World War One represented a high point for monument making in Melbourne’s central civic sphere. This paper analyses the development and unveiling of two very different monuments: the statue of Sir Redmond Barry, unveiled in front of the Melbourne Public Library in 1887, and the Eight Hours’ Day monument, unveiled near Parliament House in 1903.

The paper explores some of the politics around contemporary social relationships and the act of permanent public commemoration. It also identifies some of the relationships between these two monuments, including their major similarities and points of departure. In particular, it seeks to understand how the role of generational politics, and particularly specific and purist notions of ‘pioneerism’, underlay the development of and interaction between the two monuments.