2 - Colonial Violence

Summary

Dark tourism surrounding colonial violence against First Nations populations differs substantially from Australia's more common dark tourist destinations, such as prisons. First, there is less acknowledgement of such sites, second, sites are less developed and ‘commodified’ and third, there has been a historical focus on silencing Aboriginal narratives of colonial violence, which has made the development of such sites ‘hidden’ or neglected. Despite the lack of knowledge (or recognition) of such sites, it is clear that the violent dispossession of Australia's Aboriginal population has led to some ‘dark tourism’ activities, particularly in rural and regional parts of Australia.

For the most part, dark tourism relating to Aboriginal people and the colonial invasion relates to ‘warfare tourism’, which includes (but is not limited to) travel to battlefields, war memorials, cemeteries and peace parks that may include areas where human remains are located, sites of incarceration and enslavement and locations of frontier violence (Lemelin et al, 2013). In many instances, Aboriginal perspectives of these events have been missing from tourism destinations, and Aboriginal people have been trapped in ‘a sort of tourized confinement in the suffocating straight-jacket of enslaving external conceptions. They are caught in the objectifying slant of “Whites”, “Westerners” and “Wanderers-from-afar” in an anonymous but continuing process of subjugation’ (Hollinshead, 1992, 44). This absence of Aboriginal voices, and a rigid colonial narrative, results in ‘selective, partial, biased and distorted’ storytelling within sites of colonial violence (Lemelin et al, 2013, 258).

Further, as Wilson (2011b, 211) recognises, ‘although sites of Aboriginal suffering abound on Australian soil, very few as yet are widely known’. While these sites may be less well known, tourism does occur, and this is not a recent phenomenon, for example, tourists have been visiting the boab trees since the nineteenth century (to be discussed further in this chapter). For Stone (2006), such locations are categorised as ‘dark conflict sites’ which ‘essentially have an educational and commemorative focus, are history-centric and are originally nonpurposeful in the dark tourism context’ (Stone, 2006, 156).

Colonial violence sites within Australia are less frequented by tourists, and perhaps the main way that tourists are exposed to colonial violence narratives (through tourism activities) is via travel to museums and art galleries. Many local, state and national museums and art galleries have been showcasing colonial violence for decades in much the same way that prison museums showcase past penal practices.