This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Tasmanian Aboriginal leaders have accused the mayor of Hobart, Sue Hickey, of double standards after she said she did not want a proposed memorial to Aboriginal people killed by settlers to be a “guilt-ridden place”.

Non-Indigenous people should not be made to feel guilty by the memorial, Hickey said.

“I didn’t kill the Aborigines, and nor would I,” she said. “It was a different era.”

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The Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) has unveiled a concept plan for a $2bn waterfront development at Macquarie Point, which would include a Truth and Reconciliation Art Park.

The park would serve as an acknowledgement of the frontier wars, which were so bloody in Tasmania that they led to the longstanding, mistaken belief that Indigenous Tasmanians, of which the largest group is the Palawa people, had died out.

Mona was asked to deliver the plan to the Tasmanian government but is not managing the development.

Hickey, who ran for the Liberal party in the 2010 state election, said she supported the idea, but only if it was backed by the Aboriginal community, “because I wouldn’t like it to be tokenistic”.

“Whether they want this to be a shrine, [or] equally if it’s just a place where they can explain their culture and show off some of the things that they do that are very significant to them, well I’d be very supportive of that,” she told the ABC.

“I think it very much has to be something that the Aboriginals are on board with, but also that it’s done tastefully and it’s not a guilt-ridden place ... Whatever happened 200 years ago is really, really sad, but lots of atrocities have happened. People came away here in ships, torn away from their families for stealing a turnip.”

The chief executive of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), Heather Sculthorpe, demanded Hickey apologise for “ill-informed, outdated and provocative” comments.

“The mayor’s comments just highlight how badly this sort of thing is needed and how many people in Australia just don’t understand that you can’t just say that the past is the past – that won’t cut it any more,” Sculthorpe told Guardian Australia.

“I think this does give an opportunity for the white community in Tasmania to come to terms with what they have done to us.”

Hickey wrote to Sculthorpe on Monday to apologise for causing offence but Sculthorpe said the TAC would be seeking a public apology.

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The Macquarie Point site is next to the Hobart cenotaph, the war memorial where Hobart holds its Anzac day ceremony each year.

Tasmanian Aboriginal leader Michael Mansell said it was disingenuous of Hickey to commemorate Australian soldiers killed in conflict overseas but talk about Indigenous deaths in terms of guilt.

“It’s got nothing to do with guilt, it’s got nothing to do with what any of us today have done,” Mansell said. “She doesn’t understand the difference between admitting fault and making a memorial to acknowledge the failings of the past.”

Both Mansell and Sculthorpe also criticised Mona for failing to consult the Aboriginal community before unveiling the plans.

Greg Lehman, a Tasmanian Aboriginal writer and consultant on the project, said the concept was intended to be the first stage in a long community consultation process.

“Mona is in the business of being provocative and shocking and if we had gone out to a consultation process there’s no way we could release this with any degree of surprise,” he said.

Mona’s creative director for the Macquarie Point project, Leigh Carmichael, met Sculthorpe and the TAC on Monday to discuss better engaging with the Aboriginal community.

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Lehman said he was pleased Hickey had publicly aired her concerns with the project, saying he was sure others would share her views.

“If people with these concerns didn’t get an opportunity to talk about them then people could end up feeling like they have been drawn into a corner,” he said. “Then they would get defensive and they would dig in.”

He said there was a national reluctance in Australia to frame the frontier wars as a war, and the park was framed as a war memorial to encourage people to mourn the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples killed defending their land in the same way that they mourned those killed in the world wars.