ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author attends to an unravelling of the complex tapestry of remembering, forgetting, healing and reconciliation enshrined in the process of creating memorials or monuments to survivors of atrocities and trauma, namely, in this instance, Australia's Stolen Generations. She stems from a long-term, on-going relationship with fieldwork in Australia among Indigenous Australians, removed from their families. The author discusses the importance of memorialisation in its reparative and symbolic senses, and explores how the project of materialising memory is connected to healing and reconciliation. However, such attempts at memorialisation have been met with a persistently significant degree of recalcitrance, and have been deemed part of a 'black arm band view'. With widespread debate among Stolen Generations about the proposed memorial sliver to commemorate the story of Aboriginal child removal for Reconciliation Place, the National Sorry Day Organisation undertook its own consultations among Stolen Generations in different Australian States and territories.
