An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. A powerful and timely work of non-fiction, Monument traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of an Australian settler family of Anglo-Irish origins, and the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they come into contact. Bonny Cassidy’s fourth book moves seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past – part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes imaginative speculation. A poet and critic, Cassidy follows the threads and detours signalled by research, historical objects and testimony, to make a case for the value of ‘collected memory’ against the tide of settlement and silence. Monument considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?