I wasn’t able to get to Paul Gough’s presentation, but from Rachel notes I can see that remembrance and memory was a key topic, so I have written a bit about that here.

I’ve been talking to my dad about the Russell Street Bombing over the last couple of days, sort of as a pre-interview for my project. He mentioned that for him, Building 20 will always be associated with the Russell Street Bombing. For me however, it’s a quiet, sort of -out-of-bounds RMIT building. This got me thinking about places that I will always associate with something dark, where many people wouldn’t.

The first place that came to mind was Warrandyte. Warrandyte is a lovely suburb, down by the Yarra with cute little cafes and shops, it’s the perfect place to visit on a warm weekend. But the cemetery in Warrandyte is the first cemetery where someone I know was buried. I’m lucky that I have experienced much death in my life so far, so when my great-grandma died when I was 12, it was a new situation for me. While it’s not the same as a bombing, I will always associate Warrandyte with a grave, the first grave that I ever had to visit.

While I may not associate Building 20 with the terror of March 27th 1986, this may because I am too young, not even born when the bomb went off. I wonder if, a few years down the track, there will be a generation of young people who will look at a photo of the Manhattan skyline without immediately knowing whether the photo was taken pre or post 2001. In 100 years, when no living person can recall 9/11, will downtown New York still feel eerily devoid of towers?  As Shelley Hornstein writes in Losing Site, remembrance is ‘always linked to others (people)’ (2011, pg19).