Death and Grief in the Landscape Private Memorials in Public Space MARGARET GIBSON

This article discusses private, informal memorialisation practices that mark scenes and sites of death in public spaces and places. It focuses on changing practices of public visibilities of death and grief – practices that render visible in a semiotic way what would otherwise be invisible or relatively unknown occurrences of death. It argues that roadside memorials and other types of informal public memorials bring to consciousness and signification spaces and places that might otherwise be perceived as death neutral or untouched by death.

and culturally ordered and regulated in modernity, fictional or representational death remains relatively unbounded and unregulated in terms of accessibility and visibility.
This essay discusses private, informal memorialisation practices that mark scenes and sites of death in public spaces and places.It focuses on changing practices of public visibilities of death and grief-practices that render visible in a semiotic way what would otherwise be invisible or relatively unknown occurrences of death.By marking the landscape with signs of death and grief, roadside memorials and other types of informal public memorials bring to consciousness and signification spaces and places that might otherwise be perceived as death neutral or untouched by death.Various examples of non-official or non-state generated memorials (roadside memorials, house memorials, beach memorials) will be used to generate a discussion about the nature of private memorialisation practices in public culture and space.The meaning of public in this essay inevitably shifts with context, referring, at times, to places and spaces outside the legal demarcation and protection of private property.Public can also refer to places and spaces (both physical and virtual) that are regulated by governments and are relatively open to access and use by local, national and/or global citizens.
Research on memorial culture suggests a growing trend in late modernity to more personalised and individualised modes of commemoration in public and private physical space as well as virtual space. 2 For example, Sloane documents shifts in American public memorial culture to more personalised forms of remembrance produced through artefacts such as quilts and interactive design spaces that enable people to leave messages, objects or other materials. 3Sloane also documents changing cemetery cultures that reject standardised headstones in favour of personalised identity imagery etched by laser technology. 4The way people increasingly use object placement to individualise cemetery space not designed for such practices (lawn cemeteries, for example) has become a source of conflict between individuals or families and government regulatory authorities.Furthermore, spontaneous memorials at sites of violence and fatal accidents are now commonplace because of the immediacy of mass media communications.
Within minutes, citizens affected by a locally occurring death-event can alert others and visit physical and/or virtual sites to pay respect with messages, flowers and other artefacts.Pedestrian deaths, deaths from house fires, deaths on building sites, murders: all manner of deaths are increasingly acknowledged by spontaneous memorials which are often the public action of strangers. 5Less temporally and spatially transient memorials are usually the grief work of family and friends. 6Mass media and social networking sites have blurred emotional boundaries between friends and strangers, intimates and non-intimates, and the public and private spheres more generally.Empathy and sorrow between strangers is something that the modern, mediated subject is familiar with seeing publicly enacted and reflected back via news media camera, social networking sites and the digital archive.

-PRIVATE GRIEF IN PUBLIC SPACE: ROADSIDE MEMORIALS
Roadside memorials have a cross-cultural history dating back centuries and are found across the globe. 7Unlike memorials in public parks and other urban or suburban landscapes and environments, highway, freeway or country road memorials are seen (or not seen) from the viewpoint of the car, motorbike or truck in relation to velocities of speed, and in relation to the clearing or covering of the natural environment: These highway or freeway memorials, occupy a precarious space in terms of their meaning and location as place because they are situated in transitional zones or liminal zones-spaces of movement, and spaces between places of destination. 8ile roadside memorials can function as sites of pilgrimage for the bereaved, they are also experienced more impersonally and diffusely by strangers as signs of death and grief in a landscape of other signs (such as advertising billboards) and competing visibilities.Some memorials are literally landmarks acting in ways that go beyond their obvious intention.A highly visible memorial on the M1 Gold Coast highway in Australia not only marks a site of death but potentially functions to indicate that the exit sign to the town of Yatala is coming up.In other words, the semiotics of roadside memorials are not simple and may operate within other sign relationships to indicate meaning and information beyond their obvious intention.
As a regular traveller of the M1, this particular roadside memorial is etched within my memoryscape.The memorial takes the form of a metal traffic sign pole covered in plastic flowers.Over the years it has undergone additions and changes such as bearing the Australian flag on and after Australia Day (removed at a later date).
Attached to existing road signs, then, memorials create hybridised objects and signs (see Figure 1).Memorials outside houses, facing the public and on roads speak of the mundane reality of constant human movement and travel in modern life.The fact that these memorials are located in transitional spaces-that is, space not occupied and lived in but moved through-perhaps enables them to form part of the everyday social semiotics and landmarks of memorial culture.It is on 'the road' that modern individuals confront each other and the environment with the ever-present possibility of accident and death.As roadside memorials proliferate as a global phenomenon, the autospaces of modernity become concurrently deathscapes.As Paul Virilio suggests, technologies of mobility are simultaneously technologies of the accident.'Every time a technology is invented an accident is invented together with it … people tend to focus on the vehicle, the invention itself, but not on the accident, which is its consequence. 9Not all road fatalities are placemarked by memorialisation; there is always an element of selectivity and absence because 'we only see what has been marked, rather than what has not been'. 10Roadside memorials re-mark the scene of a death in the landscape, thereby working against the modern accident response system of clearing accident sites (including washing away signs of blood) and restoring sites to death's modern invisibility. 11Against the sequestration of death to 'other spaces', these memorials mark the return of the repressed.After the death scene is erased from public visibility in the landscape, memorials erected at the site remind strangers of what they did not witness but can perhaps, in the aftermath, imagine and empathetically respond to.Roadside memorials signify that a life or the possibility of survival ended here, while you, the traveller, continue onwards beyond the here and now.In other words, roadside memorials symbolically and spatially juxtapose the stasis of death with the movement of life.
Memorials are a testament to the mortality of living memory as eventually the people who knew the dead or lived the history or experience that the memorial represents, die.Memorials serve an important remembering function not because they restore living memory, but because they symbolically articulate and engage with the fragility and temporality of living memory's mortality: Memorials always exist in a fraught relation to fear of disappearance: information stored solely as memory has a tenuous existence.Once forgotten, it has disappeared forever.Memorials always articulate this anxiety of forgetfulness when recollection has been instituted as a moral duty. 12dia culture, particularly the internet, blurs or renders defunct many boundaries such as that between public and private, but in the context of lived, physical space, these boundaries, while also subject to regulatory forms and practices, still have meaning.Thus local councils and state governments throughout Australia increasingly negotiate and seek to regulate the acceptable use of public space for private grief and memorialisation.This happens not just on roadsides but also on beaches.Twenty-eight memorials erected on a beach at the southern end of the Gold Coast at Snapper Rocks became the subject of public debate after the local council removed and effectively destroyed them in August 2009.The memorials were diverse in design and in the kinds of death histories they represented.The first memorial erected at the site was by the Woodrick family whose twenty-seven-yearold son, Mark, a resident of Tweed Heads, died of cystic fibrosis in 1991.Mark's mother, Kathleen Woodrick, was pictured in a media report sitting on a rock crying while being comforted by a friend.She was reported as saying: We don't have anything else.He has no grave and this was all we had … We chose this spot because he loved it so much.He surfed here and had a catamaran.Even when he was really sick he still came here. 13is is an example of a memorial in public space that does not mark a site of death but rather one of biography linked to a place of identification and memoryassociation.
The debate about this and other memorials emerged in July that year with local councillor Chris Robbins reported as saying, 'You do not have to deface public property with unauthorised plaques-we do not want this city to turn into a graveyard.We must get away from the graffiti and defacing of public property.'This comment associates memorial plaques with graffiti and graveyards.Plaques may or may not indicate that ashes have been scattered in the area but the comment is a slippage, which, by equating memorial to graveyard, suggests the displacement of death from its properly bounded locations.Thus when the city becomes the graveyard, the boundary of identity between the two collapses.In this anxiety of spatial collapse and cross-contamination between death and living spaces, there is continuation of the modernist project of the sequestration of death in what Foucault and Miskowiec called 'other spaces': the removal of the cemetery outside the city. 14her Gold Coast councillors also weighed into the debate against allowing memorials on beaches.In this media discussion, councillors mooted the idea of instituting a policy allowing for memorial plaques in Gold Coast parks at a cost of $5,000 each.In response to this suggestion, another councillor stated that he would hate to see Gold Coast parks overflowing with memorial plaques or a situation 'where we see poor people being buried in graveyards and rich people ending up in nice parks'. 15In real terms, the boundaries between private grief and public space are much more porous and ungovernable as ashes are ritually scattered in oceans, on beaches and in parks all the time.At issue then is the making visible of death and private grief in public, shared spaces.
Further, the equation of memorials with graffiti (judged as the defacing of public property) reveals a concern with the 'writing' of death and grief on the landscape as if the landscape is always already death and grief neutral.To 'deface' implies a violation and injury to an existing face.And in this case, it is the tourist or consumer 'face' of the Gold Coast as a place associated with memories of happy holidaying and life affirming fun.But Australian beaches have always been places and spaces of death and bereavement and this has been acknowledged in surf lifesaving activities.For example, a particularly blatant nation-wide government advertisement in 2008 for surf safety constructed an image of the surf as a graveyard, a place with a history of death and mourning.The advertisement ended with the image of dozens of white crosses dotted on the waves.The image of white crosses superimposed on the beach is a virtual writing of the seascape as site of death and mourning.The spatial geography of death is much less governable in real terms then perhaps the modern subject is prepared to imagine.
The emergence of spontaneous shrines and memorials in public spaces or within public view suggests the ordinary citizen feels entitled to public recognition beyond officially sanctioned categories of death events such as war, natural disaster, or mass murder.By erecting publically visible memorials ordinary citizens make a claim on public space, transforming an area of land into a personalised site of memory, loss and mourning.Whether or not private memorials have community value and meaning for anyone beyond those who erected them is invariably the crux of political and media debate about their legitimacy.When the word community emerges in public discourse it operates on both sides of debate as a mediating and bridging concept between the public/private binary.This is evident in an assortment of online posts responding to the clearing of memorial plaques at Snapper Rocks: Community is about togetherness.I don't think this area has much of a community life at all.Thanks Cr.Robbins for destroying a harmonious tribute area (H, posted 12.02pm Wednesday 2 September 2009).I think everyone is missing the point … we as rate payers are all owners of the parks, waterways and public areas in our community … god knows we pay a premium to maintain them!Therefore we have the right to use them as we choose.Tell me how it is not appropriate for some of us to share a memory of a community member who deeply loved their life here on the Gold Coast and who participated in our community.In some cases these memorials are reminders to other community members of the tragedy of losing a young person to certain circumstances such as suicide, drugs or speed which ever may be the case.As a community if we prevent just one life from being lost in the future, surely this is our role as a responsible community.(Kerriann posted 12.29pm Monday 31 August 2009).I don't mean to be horrible but there are memorial gardens set up for this type of thing, we don't need man made ones on our beaches, it's bad enough seeing these types of memorials set up on the side of the road (Jane posted 8.17am Monday 31 August 2009).

-DRIVING-BY AND PASSING-BY MEMORIALS
In September 2008 I had the experience of walking past a neighbourhood house and witnessing a site of death and scene of memorialisation.The house, in the Brisbane suburb of Clayfield, is situated on a street busy for both road and pedestrian traffic.
The memorial at the front of the house, while temporary, remained in public view for at least two months.I first saw it on the day of its erection, while on a walk.The house is a run-down weatherboard with brick foundations and a brick staircase leading up to its old wooden and glass front door.It is vintage 1950s and quite typical of many Queensland houses of that era.In the early evening, as I turned the corner into the street of this house, I encountered the memorial, with great surprise.
On each step of the brick staircase were lit tea candles.The staircase had wreaths and flowers tied onto the railing.Also on the railing was a large photograph of the man who had died in the house.Near the photo and tied onto the railing was his fishing rod and teddy bears.In the garden below the staircase were other teddy bears and bunches of flowers wrapped in cellophane paper.
Over a period of time, this memorial was transformed by a number of objects and paraphernalia that survived human action and weather conditions (see Figure 2).The fishing rod disappeared after about two weeks, as did the photograph.The flowers gradually withered and died.And the candles, while present for some time, were only lit briefly (perhaps one or two days).In the first few days I experienced the memorial as a living act or event of grieving.The lit candles partly created this sense of people actively engaging with their emotions in a highly public, visible way.
It was a form of communication with strangers.It announced to people walking and driving by that someone had died here and that it meant something, that death should not pass unnoticed even-or especially-to strangers.Like roadside memorials, this kind of public-facing, visible memorial demands the stranger to notice that death and grief happens all the time in the mundane environments we negotiate and move through.I asked a neighbour living close to this particular house what they knew about the circumstances of the memorial.He told me that it was a house rented by Irish tourists-three or four single men-and that one of the men had committed suicide (the reason given was emotional devastation from a relationship break-up) in the house by hanging.
The memorial was clearly, then, in recognition of this tragic death; a very public expression of grief in a neighbourhood setting where the dead man was a transient resident.Perhaps the fact that the young man was a tourist, without longterm connection to this house, street and suburb, made the need to memorialise his death in time and space particularly important and compelling to the bereaved who knew him.The memorial was a clear statement that someone who had lived there was no longer in that specific place and no longer in the world of the living.
As part of death ritual, memorialisation in the form of tombs, mausoleums, headstones, family plots, statues, and obituaries have historically been determined by the social and economic status of individuals and family lineages.Who is officially memorialised in a society and for what reason always invokes the question of identity politics.The lives and deaths of women and other publicly marginalised identity groups are generally under-represented in public memorial culture. 17This has led to what Sue-Anne Ware describes as anti-memorials-memorials seeking to disrupt and contest official histories by offering counter-histories of sacrifice and death. 18Official memorials in public space-public memorials-aim to transcend or subsume individual death(s) into the construct of collective loss and mourning.And the memorialisation of collective loss is usually bound to large-scale events of national and international significance such as wars and natural disasters.While certainly not monumental, roadside memorials, by contrast, privilege individual lives and deaths from circumstances that are neither heroic nor connected to collective loss and grief experience.
In Australia, memorial culture has historically centred on nationalism and colonialism, with war memorials the focus of the former and settler and explorer monuments the focus of the latter. 19In both cases, ideals of heroism, sacrifice, determination and bravery in the face of death (including the danger of the landscape itself) underpin the moral message. 20Like war memorials, roadside memorials are statistically dominated by male fatalities.Memorials at sites of Indigenous massacres are another area of Australian memorial culture that, unlike roadside memorials, sit squarely within the politics of national history, active remembering and forgetting.Roadside memorials do not generate a collective culture of public mourning ritual, although road deaths statistically exceed death by war.Between 1925, when records of death by road accident began, and 1998 160,670 lives have been lost on roads.In comparison, 89,850 deaths occurred in the major wars Australia has been involved in: World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. 21It is not just the scale of death loss that constitutes the reasons for public memorials, however, but the nature and circumstances of death.Road deaths are fragmented both temporally and spatially and this constitutes their meaning and emotional effect outside collectively forming grief and memorialisation practices.These memorials are also publicly meaningful as material representations of the universal reality of death.As expressions of personal loss, grief and memory, these memorials have the potential to be meaningful to strangers in their own or other's recognition of mortality-or indeed their own experience and biographies of bereavement.Roadside memorials are sometimes debated and justified for their public safety function because they may remind people to slow down, to be aware that death is not absent from where they are now approaching.And like official public memorials they speak of the human condition of mortality, the tragedy and sadness of lives cut short. 22me roadside memorials are more visible than others because of where they exist and how they are constructed.For example, between Beaudesert and Rathdowny in northern New South Wales (on Highway 13), a memorial on a rock (see Figure 3) is designed for a public audience.While it is generated out of private grief and memory, its style is nevertheless performative-it is there to be seen.In contrast, other memorials are first and foremost messages of love to the dead.They communicate grief in a more intimate way and their public face is incidental to the death occurring in a publicly visible setting.The memorial to a deceased son, located on an embankment on Mt Tamborine Road (north of Eagle Heights) is an example of the latter (see Figure 4).It is a memorial surrounded by bushland in a still wider landscape of rugged bush and manicured gardens.It is a cross, inscribed with the name of the deceased, dates of his birth and death, with a blue vase (typical of those found at cemeteries) filled with plastic flowers at its base.
At the cross's centre is a small silver heart-shaped plaque with an inscription dedicated by the deceased's mother and brothers.At the base of the memorial a small bed of succulent flowers are planted in a circle.This memorial shows signs of care, suggesting ongoing visitation by the bereaved.Indeed, this is another aspect of informal public memorials: the extent to which they signify an ongoing practice of mourning through ritual attendance and maintenance.A memorial that decays, that gets lost in the landscape much like the overgrown graves of centuries-old cemeteries, signifies the death of living memory or the transitional passage of grief beyond needing to maintain contact with the particular site.This memorial does not have a public face; that is, its mode of address is not to the stranger passing by but to the deceased.It is a private, discreet memorial.
One of the psychologically disturbing aspects of road deaths is that they are deaths in transit.The driver and/or passengers are travelling between home and work, home and holidays-they are not anchored by the specificity of place, particularly as it relates to the construction of identity: This makes road death seem out-place, a kind of atopia (atopos)-neither here nor there but an in-between place or space.In other words, the memorial turns 'space' into place-by assigning meaning and anchoring a space with a specific identity and memory-scape. 23urthermore, roadside memorials, like other memorials marking sudden and unexpected death, invoke a relatively new metaphysics of mourning attached to the site of death rather than (as in prior periods) the place of repose.That metaphysics stresses death as event, not as process, and 'process' death (due to old age or chronic illness) is still the distinctively unmemorialised rule. 24e memoryscape of the roadside memorial exists not just in relation to the bereaved who personally knew the deceased but to all travellers who come to expect roadside memorials as objects and as signs.Travellers who frequently return to roads that have specific memorials alongside them internalise this memory landscape, as it becomes part of their own.The roadside memorial is not just an external form of memory, it has the potential to encrypt the memories that drivers have of the roads they come to know.This is true of my routine driving experience.
On each day that I drive to university I pass a memorial erected on a seventy kilometre speed zone sign.When I see this memorial, which comes into direct view through my car front window, I am aware that other colleagues and students exiting into this road (which is geographically close to campus) also see it and thus share a memoryscape.It is a relatively simple memorial of flowers and photograph tied to the sign pole.Over the last three years, I have noticed the memorial go into stages of disrepair for a long period of time only to be attended to.If this memorial were to disappear in the future, it would alter an open-ended network (although fragmented and diffuse) of memoryscapes in which this memorial is etched.Indeed, its absence could be experienced as a lost object or missing sign within and across this travelling landscape of memorial memories and memorialised memories.
Unlike wars or natural disasters that are temporally, spatially and historically delineated, road deaths are open-ended, ongoing tragedies that have a past, present and future.The discussion so far raises important questions about how, or in what ways, roadside memorials are public.Memorials located outside houses, on beaches or roadside are public in terms of their visible accessibility and/or spatial placement.

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Margaret Gibson is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia.Her book Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life (2008) explores transformations in the perception and valuing of objects and property after a loved one dies.She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on mourning and memorialisation practices in both physical and virtual world contexts.