'No time for a history lesson':The contest over memorials to Angus McMillan on Gunaikurnai Country

In Australia, calls for the removal of memorials to white colonists escalated during 2020, as the international Black Lives Matter movement influenced growing demands for a more open reckoning with Australian's past to be reflected in public history. In June 2020, the Wellington Shire Council in Gippsland, Victoria, rejected a motion supported by Traditional Owners, the Gunaikurnai, to remove monuments built to commemorate the 'explorer' and instigator of massacres, Angus McMillan. Those who voted against the removals claimed that the cairns are educative and historically accurate. In this article, we argue that the value and intent of the cairns to McMillan have been contested since their inception, and therefore subject to revision and re-storying. We analyse the campaign behind the erection of the cairns in the 1920s and demonstrate that this public history project was informed by the white supremacist politics of the time, and that the political project of colonial erasure continues to be enacted in more recent public debates over McMillan's memorialisation. We draw connections between the settler colonial politics of the 1920s and the 2020 contest over the cairns at a community level, highlighting the strength of colonial narratives of possession. This article demonstrates how First Nations-led public pedagogies provide a way forward that allows for collaborative, community-based rescripting of McMillan's position in public history.