Driving by: visiting Australian colonial monuments

The tempo of the long-distance car journey and the locales constituted by road-side monuments define the itinerary of this article, which visits four widely-scattered examples of (post)-colonial Australian placemaking: The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument near Mt Isa in Queensland's redneck ‘deep north’; Victoria's Grampians/Gariwerd National Park; the site of the Blacktown Native Institution in western suburban Sydney; the Coniston Massacre Memorial in Central Australia. As Australian society attempts to come to terms with its colonial past, these places express public narratives structured by physical acts of remembering and knowing. They reveal a profound shift from settler assertions of the possession of landscape and history effected through practical techniques of inscribing the land, to the acknowledgement of the Aboriginal experience, opening new spaces for reconciliation through harnessing the inertia and insistence of place.