AustLit

'Many readers of this volume will have their own memories of the Myall Creek Memorial and the massacre it commemorates. Mine is of seeing the Governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir’s official low-slung black car inch its way through the dry grass to the Myall Creek Memorial Hall (built to commemorate those killed in the so-called ‘First World War’, a war which was neither Australia’s first nor the first time that people had travelled the world enacting wars). I thought then about how fitting it was that a Governor, the figure that was historically so powerful in what unfolded then, was present. The hall is the starting point for the commemorative walk that follows but also where refreshments are served afterwards and where school children, the ancestors of perpetrators and victims, locals and visitors of all orders, will share food.' (Introduction)