Nudging Public Memory: Bicentenary Commemorations of the Hume & Hovell expedition, 1824 - 1825
— Bruce Pennay (PHA NSW & ACT Associate) and Yalmambirra (Charles Sturt University).
Hamilton Hume and William Hovell won and still hold much respect. Theirs is an intrepid explorer story that earned national acclaim. Their statues are on the Lands Department building in inner Sydney. Representations of their faces appeared on stamps and on currency in the heady 1950s. Their names dot the map. Nationally popular memory has admired their achievement as the first Europeans to trace what has become the principal inland route between Australia’s largest capital cities.
Along that route, state patriots and local patriots have seized on the expedition stopping points as local founding moments associated with the spread of white settlement. The centenary of their expedition in 1924 was hailed as the anniversary of the discovery of Victoria and acclaimed locally as Albury’s founding moment.
Professional historians called on to help with bicentenary commemorations in 2024, find the congratulatory memory of the Hume and Hovell expedition has evolved into a more sober memory of the expedition as a prelude to the conquest of the southern river lands of New South Wales 14 years after their cross-country expedition.
Professional historian Kiera Lindsey, now South Australian History Advocate, detected a movement in public memory when she wrote of the expedition as, amongst other things, an act of intrusion into Aboriginal peoples’ countries (Lindsey, ‘Drawing a Line’, Ormond Papers, 2006). Lindsey alluded briefly to how the peaceful interactions of 1824-25 gave way to violent resistance and reprisals in the late 1830s. She anticipated additional work on the ‘story of the road as a story of colonisation’.
Similarly, other historians and storytellers, nationwide have increasingly adjusted stories of explorers facilitating the expansion of white settlement to include stories of the impact of the subsequent expansion on Aboriginal peoples. Expedition tories became those of the invaded as well as the invaders and stories of those displaced and dispossessed .
In 2024 Aubury-Wodonga, we find community remembering stories of contested territory as pastoral expansion moved westwards to Bathurst in 1824, and later northwards to the Gwydir River in 1838. Stories of dispossession and resistance, of resilience and survival.
It can be anticipated that the people of Albury-Wodonga will remember in November 2024, not only the arrival of Hume & Hovell in 1824, but also the arrival, 14 years later, of mounted police at the Murray River. The mounted police were sent to protect pastoralists moving down to and across the Murray River in 1838.
In the wake of the failed national referendum in 2023 and the new emphasis on reconciliation at the local level, the 2024 commemorations along the route of the Hume and Hovell expedition will have moved beyond celebrations of the expansion of white settlement to acknowledge a nuanced dimension of the local past. We hope to help with that when we showcase a preview of our work on a digital education resource at Albury Library Museum on 13 November 2024.
Map attributions: Courtesy: Albury & District Historical Society. https://alburyhistory.org.au/the-hume-hovell-expedition/
