Trying to remember what I chose to forget
Works for violin, viola and cello, and piano by composer Frank Millward are an exploration of the way we choose to listen, process and subsequently remember. The titles of the movements of these pieces express the emotional soundscapes of the explorer searching for landmarks and voices that speak of how and what we choose to remember. Memoire Omissions – the left unspoken; The Tangled Tango – the complications that blur remembering; Sadness to Madness – the tragedy and impact of forgetting; Contact; Connect; Tracer – three euphemisms used in remembering wars. As a nation have we forgotten ‘The White Australia Policy’? A policy aimed at limiting non-white immigration to Australia. Its impact, by default, was to embed the binary of white and “other” in Australian and International memories. Terra Nullius, nobody’s land? It was as recent, as the 1967 referendum, that amendments to Section 51 and Section 127 of the Constitution finally acknowledged the existence of Indigenous peoples in Australia. In the current political climate these are some of the things we should remember when voting for, “A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”.