Water as Cultural Memory

This study explores the role of aquatic systems in the preservation of Indigenous cultural memory. Scholarship on cultural memory is mostly rooted in anthropological and archaeological studies, which leaves space to consider how postcolonial fiction can offer valuable insights into the role of cultural memory in excavating buried Indigenous stories. This study is based on a close reading of Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide in which water acts as the retainer of ancestral memory. While existing scholarship situates Flanagan’s text within postcolonial and Aboriginal discussions, this project uniquely foregrounds water as an active agent in storing colonial history and considers the incorporation of magical realism as the most crucial literary technique that facilitates a disclosure of erased stories of the Tasmanian past. This chapter draws on Jan Assmann’s seminal essay “Communicative and Cultural Memory” (2008) in which he distinguishes between historiographic memory and cultural memory. In doing so, this study advances new understandings of how postcolonial fiction can preserve and enact Indigenous resistance through aquatic symbolism that does not merely re-frame Indigenous experience but actively shapes the transmission of cultural memory across generations.