Monument

by Bonny Cassidy

An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact.Monument is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy’s fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past — part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation — it traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of a White Australian family of mixed origins and ancestries.Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Cassidy makes a case for the value of ‘collected memory’ against the tide of settlement and silence. Inspired by the methods of Natalie Harkin’s archival poetics and Katrina Schlunke’s Bluff Autobiography of a Massacre, Cassidy’s Monument considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?

Genres: History

Paperback

Reviews

[Declan Fry]

Bonny Cassidy walks into a bar / with Fiona Apple / being kind to her / writing whatever is unseen / she’ll make the most of it / she’s an extraordinary machine

Bonny Cassidy is the author of three books of poetry. I remember, for many years, citing a line from one, The Budawangs, its chewy, sonorous rhythm like a Fiona Apple lyric ("the coast unseen yet guessed by Augustine"). Monument is her marvellous non-fiction debut. It is a book with blood in the veins.

Monument might be placed alongside the work of other poets who have mixed different modes — essay, poetry, memoir, image — to sound out the overlapping edges of histories and hidden truths in our communities, that global history of colonisations and incarcerations poet John Kinsella has called "the syntax of claim and settlement".

I am thinking here of work like Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, or the explorations of poetry, memoir and history whose exemplars include authors like Charmaine Papertalk Green, Natalie Harkin, Maria Stepanova, Bhanu Kapil and Polina Barskova.

Cassidy traces the guerilla resistance, walk-offs, letter-writing campaigns, petitions and art of First Nations communities, as well as settler forgetting. Traversing three colonies (Australia, Aotearoa, and the US), Monument focuses particularly on histories of colonisation and life around Victoria. A million tiny volitions and small forgettings frame its recognisably "Cassidy-ish" style (cool, cerebral).

Cassidy examines her familial archives and genealogies, unearthing lives lived amid burial, ("Nan's family is leaving the Wimmera Mallee […] they will find three mounds that 'had been extensively used, the soil at each site black and sterile' from many meals"). The soil remembers what the archives forget, earth devouring the human and non-human, remembering, regurgitating.

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You may read on, my love:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-0...

[Mariana Steula · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://honisoit.com/2024/02/monument...

[Vannessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poetry and prose underpinned by robust historical research. An enviable piece of writing. Deserving of multiple awards and nominations for awards.