Julie Gough's current exhibition "The Missing" in Hobart is another journey down memories lane. Gough's obsession with her past always seems to deal with the negative. In all her shows I am yet to experience any positive feelings for a brighter future for our indigenous peoples. No one of the present Australian generation denies past injustices , but to continually force feed the public with suggested guilt becomes counter productive. If the Australian population is ever to move forward to a fully integrated future then we need to put this continual negativity behind us.
I feel as person of Armenian descent I could very easily have spent my life portraying the Turkish atrocities towards the Armenian population after the First World War,events that took some one and half million lives. Events that even today require some form of acknowledgement, But life is not like that, nearly every country on this planet has experienced invasion, occupation or persecution at some point in their history. Most have had to pick themselves up and move on.
There are of course people with long memories who refuse to forgive. One only needs to look at Yugoslavia to see such hard line attitudes in action were they refuse to bury past wrongs but to what avail. Humanity for all it's faults needs to embrace each other and not spend their life reliving past grievances. Alexander the Great was right to require his troops to take foreign brides and create a new world that is were the future lies.
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