Noted local historian Dr Ian Willis OAM will give a presentation at the 45th Australian Historical Association Conference 'Changing Minds' at Macquarie University next week called 'The memory landscape of the Cowpastures in monuments, memorials and murals'. The Cowpastures was a vague area south of the Nepean River, named by Governor Hunter in 1796. A small mob of cattle that arrived on the First Fleet had escaped from the Sydney settlement in 1788 and found their way to the Nepean River floodplain. Governor King created a government reserve in 1803, and the first land grants were allocated to John Macarthur and Walter Davidson in 1805. The Cowpastures became the colonial frontier as the Indigenous people were displaced and dispossessed of their country. This led to violence and the Appin Massacre in 1816. A pseudo-English-style landscape of gentry estates ensued, and the Cowpastures became a functional geographic region that largely disappeared when the village of Camden was established in 1840. Dr Willis will maintain that there are reminders of the early-19th-century colonial Cowpastures hidden in plain sight throughout the local area. These reminders include roads, memorials, monuments, bridges, historic sites, community commemorations and a host of other things that are a legacy of the colonial Cowpastures. These reminders are the community's collective memories of the Cowpastures, expressed in the language, action, and material culture of daily life. Historian Jay Winter maintains that forgetting is part of the commemoration of these cultural objects, after their creation and memorialisation. Storytelling is a powerful cultural tool, and in an increasingly diverse demographic area, the story of the Cowpastures may help build bridges across divisions of race, ethnicity, and income, and strengthen community engagement and resilience. Dr Willis will examine three case studies that illustrate attempts to re-engage the Cowpastures community with cultural memory through storytelling and public art. The case studies demonstrate how the past speaks to the present and that it is all around us.
Ian Willis (Thu,) studied this question.