Un/Settling Accounts: Telling Holocaust Stories in Colonised Australia

Cultural fascination with the Holocaust in Australia is often thought to distract attention from the history and legacies of colonialism. Here I tell fragments of stories about my family's implication in both issues, in order to explore the ways in which they turn out to be part of the same narrative, or rather the same failure to narrate. The issue of Australia's implication in the Holocaust does not so much compete with colonialism, as it cohabits in the 'Great Australian Silence.' Searching for ways in which to bring the story of the Holocaust 'home', I find myself 'displaced' by my inability to avoid this failure of narration, but also, in accordance with Butler's theorisation of the ethical possibilities of such failures, brought to a space of ethical exposure in the present.