Monument is an undoing that doesn't claim a reconstitution. Rather, Bonny Cassidy offers a way of reading out of the lacunae of settler history and documentation through a personal investigation of ancestry and resultant culpability alongside community connection and abrasion across three colonies and many Indigenous lands. If Benjamin Duterrau’s The Conciliation is an anti-beginning to the brutal misrepresentation of the crimes against humanity it camouflages, so is the journey through restoration of rights of telling of Indigenous peoples pertaining to any false narratives relating to colonial 'inheritance'. The Risdon Cove 1904 centennial monument 'falls' into a conscious 'disuse', as an affirmation of Indigenous presence and refusal of official erasure is declared through the counter-monumentalising — the red slashes and other interruptions/disruptions/ruptures — on returned Aboriginal Lands. In these markings is the purpose of Cassidy's remarkable, essential and self-critiquing undocumenting-in-order-to-redocument via family history and asides. The racist subjectivity of reports, qualifications of family, and modes of 'discovery' are all overturned in this compulsion to analyse varieties of truth, to take another approach to archival material. In creating this 'adjacent history-memoir', Cassidy is driven by necessity for redress and justice, entirely eschewing an unproductive and ultimately self-exonerating 'guilt', asking 'Can I talk of a settler family’s forgetting as a cumulative condition?' and most vitally, 'I wonder what we settlers are doing with the truth in our books: pulling it further apart or putting it together for the first time? Am I cementing stories to fix them for good, or am I preparing for them to be dismantled, forgotten, when the time is right?'. It is always difficult to talk of 'us', but the overlapping narratives of personal connection, familial denial, the erasures and rewritings implicit in reportage and social machinery, are so entwined in this work that the 'settler we' is made undeniable in the modes of unwinding and rethreading on offer here. I consider this an essential amendment to 'settler memoirising' and de-monumentalising the colonial assault on country and its peoples. Superbly written and pivotally deconstructive.

— John Kinsella