Concept map

Embodying the Australian Nation and

Silencing History

Mary OʼDowd

The old adage ‘silence speaks louder than words’ does not mean that silence is simply a passive absence. As renowned playwright Harold Pinter demonstrated, silence has a power to communicate and dominate. This article explores the endurance of the Great Australian Silence over the history of our colonial past and the con - tinuing colonization of Indigenous people. 1 Despite the intro - duction of Indigenous Studies and Indigenous History into school and university programs, and despite the heartfelt statements that Australians often use to understand their own history, that understanding remains partial. The desire to engage with this history is problematic. 2 This article argues that the failure of a more 1 I acknowledge the Wiradjuri people as the custodians of the land in which I worked in

Wagga Wagga. I pay respect to their elders, both past and present, and thank them for their help — especially Aunty Isobel Reid, Muk Muk Burke and the staff at Ngungilanna. The article uses the term ‘Indigenous people’ to include both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, except where it specifically refers to Aboriginal people. This is not to homogenize the views of Indigenous people, just as it is important not to homogenize all non-Indigenous people as holding the same view of Indigenous people. This article is written by a non-Indigenous person.

2 The very existence of the so-called History Wars (for example, Macintyre and Clark) indicates the dis-ease of non-Indigenous engagement with this history. Tertiary academics report student resistance to this engagement: for example, R. Williams, ‘“Why Should I Feel

embracing history to penetrate, more than partially, into the educa - tion system and popular understanding is a product of a particular national imagination embodied in projections of the Australian landscape and the Australian individual. The case is put that a particular way of framing the embodiment of national identity and the land has created an imagining of ‘Australianness’ that impacts on our capacity to hear and accept the history of Indigenous coloniza - tion. It argues that this embodiment, when accepted uncritically, perpetuates not simply a silence but an un-history, a not-telling, a non-acceptance of colonial history post-1788.

The silencing of the history of the interface of non-Indigenous people with Indigenous people began around the 1880s at the time when a strong political move was being made for the federation of Australia. In 1968, William Stanner called it ‘The Great Australian Silence’. 3

Yet nearly half a century later in the early twenty-first century, the silence on this past has a disturbing continuity which is damaging to both peoples. Despite some vocal intrusions into the silence, there continues to be a reluctance on the part of students to listen to this history. 4 There is a reluctance of teachers to teach this history. 5 And there is a significant cultural-political movement that reconstructs the rich rewritings of this history as politically motivated exaggeration. 6 Strong attempts have been made to include Indigenous history and culture in schools (including in the new national curriculum) and the pedagogy is informed. 7 There is

Guilty?” Reflections on the Workings of Guilt in White-Aboriginal Relations’ Australian Psychologist, vol. 35, no. 2, 2000, pp. 136–42; N. Aveling, ‘Hacking at Our Very Roots: Rearticulating White Racial Identity within the Context of Teacher Education’, Race Ethnicity and Education, vol. 9, no. 3, 2006, pp. 261–74; M. O’Dowd, ‘Ethical Positioning: A Strategy in Overcoming Student Resistance and Fostering Engagement in Teaching Aboriginal History as a Compulsory Subject to Pre-service Primary Education Students’, Education in Rural Australia, vol. 20, issue 1, 2010, pp. 29–42; A. Clark, ‘Teaching the Past’, Australian Cultural History, no. 23, 2003, pp. 191–202.

3 W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians: An Anthropologist’s View,

Sydney, ABC Boyer Lectures, 1968.

4 Aveling, ‘Hacking at Our Very Roots’; O’Dowd, ‘Ethical Positioning’. 5 Clark, ‘Teaching the Past’; R. Craven, C. Halse, H. Marsh, J. Mooney and J. Wilson-Miller, ‘Teaching the Teachers Aboriginal Studies: Impact on Teaching’, Report to Department of Education, Science and Training, Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, 2005, p. 32.

6 K. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1, Van Dieman’s Land 1803–1847,

Paddington, Macleay Press, 2002.

7 Work on how to teach the subject extends back over decades. There have been many significant texts on teaching Indigenous Studies and Indigenous students, for example: A. Grieve, Review Bulletin, Prahran, State-wide School Library Support Centre, Ministry of Education and Training, 1991, had a comprehensive overview of resources; R. Craven, Teaching Aboriginal Studies, St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1999, was a text endorsed by the National Federation of Aboriginal Education Consultative Group; J. Phillips and J. Lampert (eds), Introductory Indigenous Studies in Education: The Importance of Knowing, Frenchs Forest,

recognition that Indigenous people have a lot to offer the school system, but in practice their tremendous capacity is often ignored or undervalued. 8

The continuity of the general silence, despite occasional clamorous interventions, has significant negative effects, including reducing the likelihood of Indigenous success in schools (as cultural knowledge and inclusion are linked with Indigenous students’ engagement).9 This lack of cultural inclusion also reduces opportunities for non-Indigenous people to gain knowledge and appreciation of the oldest continuing culture in the world; de - creases opportunities to challenge the significant racism that Indigenous people experience;10 and leads to a failure to provide young Australians with a balanced national history of colonization. These educational issues reinforce Indigenous marginalization as lack of success in education, which is linked to poverty, unemploy - ment and poor health. 11 Although the brutality of the colonization of Australia is disregarded, the actions of non-Indigenous people in this respect demonstrate little that is unique. It is in this context that the power of imagination in embodying the silence around colo - niza tion will be outlined, and a way forward for non-Indigenous people to engage with a shared history and country suggested.

Pearson Education, 2004; and N. Harrison, Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Education, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2008. There is sufficient information on how to work with Indigenous communities, for example, the Board of Studies, NSW, 2010 Statement of Equity Principles, <http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/jobs/statement-of-equity principle.html>, accessed May 2012. The policy assertions on Indigenous education are positive: for example, the Aboriginal Education Policy 1996/2008/2009 asserts that knowledge held by Aboriginal communities needs to be recognized and valued. The NSW Department of Education and Training’s Aboriginal Education and Training Policy 2008 states the importance of collaboration by Department of School Education staff working with local Aboriginal communities, especially elders.

8 C. Sarra, ‘Stronger, Smarter Sarra’, Teacher: the National Education Magazine, March 2007, pp.

32–4, 36–8, 40–1.

9 See L. Russell and S. Wenham, ‘Closing the Gap on Indigenous Disadvantage’, Canberra,

Menzies Centre for Health Policy, July 2010, on the gap between Indigenous and non Indigenous student attainment. The paucity of Indigenous cultural inclusion in the curriculum is considered a factor that could impact on retention; however, there is some contestation as to whether there is substantive research on this issue (N. Purdie and S. Buckley, ‘School Attendance and Retention of Indigenous Australian Students’, Issues Paper No 1, Closing the Gap Clearinghouse, Canberra, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, September 2010, pp. 1–25.).

10 Williams, ‘Why Should I Feel Guilty?’, p. 40. Ross Williams noted tertiary psychology students’ racism and a construction of Aboriginal people that included ‘Aboriginal as damaged object’ and the ‘other’ to normal Australianness; D. Mellor, ‘Contemporary Racism in Australia: The Experiences of Aborigines’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp. 474–86.

11 Z. De Ishtar, Holding Yawulyu: White Culture and Black Women's Law, Melbourne, Spinifex,

2005.

The Strange Continuity of Silence

In 2010 the BBC aired an episode of the television program Who Do You Think You Are? (a program where celebrities trace their ancestry)12 in which actor and singer Jason Donavan explored the life of his mother’s British ancestor, William Cox, who ‘settled’ in Sydney and built a road over the Blue Mountains. The BBC website informed the public that:

Returning to Sydney, Jason traces his family back to one of the earliest Australian settlers — a pioneer who opened up the entire continent to settlement. At the end of his journey, Jason feels reconnected to his Australian roots and realises his family story is no less than the story of the birth of a nation. 13

In the program a local Australian historian speaks of how William Cox demonstrated the courage of the ‘Aussie pioneer’ when he built the road. Both the website and the historian ignore the fact that Cox was thirty-five before he left Britain, so his formative cultural identity is British. Australian national identity (white, heroic and wholesome) is ‘imagined’ into this man. This evidences a process of constructing an Australianness by selecting evidence consistent with an imagined ‘man’ while minimizing or ignoring inconsistent evidence. The BBC program contains one mention of Aboriginal people, with the commentator noting that Australia was sparsely populated prior to the arrival of the British. There is no mention of the impact of Cox’s road on the dispossession and death of Aboriginal people, or of Cox as a key player in the invasion of the land of the Wiradjuri nation. Aboriginal people are simply not even imagined in Australianness. Jason remains in a suitable state of admiration for the actions of his ancestor. By contrast, the 2008 SBS television series called The First Australians reflects that terms like ‘Aussie pioneer’, ‘Aussie’ and even ‘Australian’ are often un - reflectively owned as non-Indigenous. These perspec tives at best reinforce a concept of two histories in one nation, but they also suggest a strong understanding of Indigenous people as outside of ‘Australianness’.

The construction of a history in the Donovan story is immersed 12 This program was later shown in Australia on SBS, 21 May 2011. 13 From the BBC website, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tndyd>, accessed 23

September 2010.

in and inseparable from a view of a national identity, and is totally dependent on the Great Australian Silence. It is not simply the Donovan story, but rather a characteristic non-Indigenous Australian history, that writes of the colonization of Australia predominantly within a discourse of ‘mastering’ the land. This has enabled and continues to enable a particular imagining of the national self. It is the story of popular culture that ‘Aussies’ anticipate. Ernst Cassier wrote, ‘It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology’. 14

In the context of Australia, the mythology of the pioneer has created not only a certain kind of history but also an ‘un-history’.

Imagining a Father: Visioning a Nation

Imagination is a powerful force creating great literature, inspiring great acts and, in propaganda, creating great injustice. It is a way of seeing and non-seeing. It is a way of fostering an imagining, and in the case of a national imaginary, a way of embodying a projected self. John Hirst15 and Richard White16 identify the construction of the formative man of Australian national identity — often referred to as the ‘National Father’ — as in part political, concerned with forming a federation, and in part a desire to remedy the convict stigma and challenge the negative British image of Australia. To assist in establishing Australia as a nation there was a deliberate search to establish a heroic past. Ken Inglis describes this largely unsuccessful search for a hero in the years prior to 1870, suggesting that the poet Henry Kendall had the first major success in creating a figure that was appealing to the populace when he drew on certain explorers in the heroic tradition. 17 Later Australian poets and writers, particularly Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson (also Furphy, Miles Franklin and a host of other minor poets writing in the same genre) embraced the settler in the same way. In construct - ing the figure of national identity as an idealized national man, Australia was no different to many other nations. 18 The pioneer 14 E. Cassier, cited in C. Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press,

1970, p. 158.

15 J. Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, Journal of Historical Studies, vol. 18, 1978, pp. 316–37. 16 R. White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1788–1980, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1981. 17 Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, p. 319.

18 S. Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

became Australia’s idealized National Father who metaphorically seeded a nation.

The personality characteristics of the created National Father are indicated by various writers. Coral Lansbury describes this national identity as embodying ‘a robust egalitarian spirit expressed with a sardonic humour’. 19 Vance Palmer describes Australian men as:

Tall yet robust, sardonic in temperament, daring in action, they had the idealistic qualities Lawson was to emphasise in his stories of mateship just as Masefield was to celebrate their kingly bearing in describing the soldiers of Gallipoli.20 The personality of the national man is summarized by Richard White as embracing ‘independence, manliness, a particular fond - ness for sport, egalitarianism, a dislike of mental effort, self confidence, a certain disrespect for authority’. 21 In poetry and storytelling the development of the pioneer National Father was proselytized, particularly through The Bulletin. This imagining of the National Father was co-dependent on a particular imagining of the land as threatening, unnatural, violent: ‘A blazing desert in the drought/ A lake land in the rain’. 22 It was a land where, ‘brown summer and death have mated’ and `Where the dead men lie’. This hostile land, the wilderness, was a place of death, where the land killed:

Out in the wastes of the Never-Never — That’s where the dead men lie! There where the heat waves dance forever — That’s where the dead men lie. 23

The white men who faced this landscape were created as heroes for their survival, but particularly for their death. They were constructed as having the taciturn courage of soldiers as they went 19 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, p. 1. 20 V. Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties, South Yarra, Currey O’Neil Ross, 1954, p. 21. 21 White, Inventing Australia, pp. 76–7.

22 H. Lawson, ‘The Never-Never Country’ (c1901). An indication of the endurance of the power of the imagery of the pioneer as the National Father is evidenced in the title of Marjorie Pizer’s collection of Lawson’s poems — (M. Pizer, (ed.), The Men who Made Australia: Stories and Poems by Henry Lawson, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, revised edn, 1956) — and other titles, such as M. Leyland and M. Leyland, Where Dead Men Lie: An Adventurous Journey that Spanned Australia, Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, 1967, which commences with B. H. Boake’s poem of the same name.

23 B. H. Boake, ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’ (c1891) , in M. Leyland and M. Leyland, Where Dead

Men Lie.

into a land anthropomorphized as a foe with malign and alien qualities:

And hunger and thirst were banish words When they spoke of that unknown West; No drought they dreaded, no flood they feared, Where the pelican builds her nest!’24

It was as if being in the land was akin to being in a war. The names used to describe these men evoked the terms used for soldiers in war. They were ‘loved sons’ and `our brave dead’. 25 This non Indigenous imagining of the land can be juxtaposed to that of its Indigenous people, for whom the land was a mother, a part of self, something to be cared for; a country to be lovingly sung to; a land whose seasons were accepted; a land through which they walked softly. 26 The pioneer, in the same landscape, is imagined as facing a land with a ‘devouring’ capacity to kill:

And never from the blue hills breast Come back — by the sun and sands devoured Where the pelican builds her nest.27

The ‘new’ country’s National Father was also embodied in the high culture, particularly in the Heidelberg School of landscape painting. Here the artists’ impressions were of men idealized in terms of an emerging national identity — robust men triumphing over the land. These male subjects had a desirable masculine physique and a robust vigour. For example, Tom Roberts’ classic painting Shearing the Rams depicts tall, lean, broad-shouldered men undertaking activity that evidences vigour. The men’s faces and bodies have a quiet grace and, in the case of Roberts’ work, their faces are serene, almost Christ-like.

Other images reinforce this male beauty and sinless vigour in the land: paintings such as Roberts’ A Mountain Muster and Streeton’s The Selector’s Hut (Whelan on the Log). The images equally emphasize the colonizing of the land by actively clearing trees (not Indigenous

24 M. H. Foott, ‘Where the Pelican Builds Her Nest’ (c1885), C. Hadgraft, ‘Foott, Mary Hannay (1846–1918)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, <http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/foott-mary-hannay3546/text5473>, accessed 21 May 2012.

25 H. Lawson, ‘The Never-Never Country’ (c1901), in Pizer (ed.), The Men who Made Australia. 26 De Ishtar, Holding Yawulyu; K. Kemarre Wallace with J. Lovell, Listen Deeply, Let these Stories

In, Alice Springs, IAD Press, 2009; M. Somerville and T. Perkins, Singing the Coast, Canberra, IAD Press, 2010.

27 Foott, ‘Where the Pelican Builds Her Nest’.

people). The presence of horses, cattle and sheep, introduced pasture and other non-indigenous vegetation indicate a taken-for granted displacement: Hans Heysen’s A Lord of the Bush depicts a giant tree in a cleared landscape (it harks back to earlier depictions of forests with an Aboriginal presence),28 and Fred McCubbin’s The Pioneer demonstrates advances in the colony as linked to clearing of the bush, as do Charles Condor’s While Daylight Lingers and Summer Idyll; and Arthur Streeton’s The River, The Land of the Golden

Fleece and The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might.

From the 1880s, Australian painting evidences the enveloping silence in relation to the Indigenous presence. In the early period of colonization that presence was included and there is a comparatively large number of paintings in which Aboriginal people appear, including amazing images of corroborees, such as John Glover’s Corroboree (c. 1840), Captain J. Wallis’s Corroboree at Newcastle and W. Liardet’s Corroboree on Emerald Hill (c. 1840). The presence of Aboriginal people in painting, however, gradually disappears after that time, until by the 1880s they are almost completely absented from the landscape. 29 They are absent from all the works cited above, including the shearing shed of Tom Robert’s Shearing the Rams. In some works it is as if the subconscious of the artists relates the history. In Robert Dowling’s Aborigines of Tasmania the Aboriginal people seem to be disappearing or melting into the land, which in the context of the poignant history of that state is particularly accurate. H. Johnstone’s painting titled Evening Shadows (c1880) shows tall trees reflected on water, to which the eye is drawn. Then, as if by accident, a man dwarfed by the trees becomes visible. To the right of centre is a tiny humpy with two indistinct figures. Only the humpy conveys that these are Aboriginal people — ‘shadows’ moving into an ephemeral state. The vibrancy of Aboriginal people as conveyed in earlier works has disappeared. 30

Tom Roberts’ one painting of Aboriginal people on country, 28 Such as, Alexander Schramm’s (1814–1864) Adelaide Tribe of Natives on the Banks of the River

Torrens (undated), which shows a landscape teaming with Aboriginal people; or John Glover’s (1767–1849) Aborigines Dancing at Brighton, Tasmania (undated). 29 G. Dutton, White on Black: the Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art, Sydney, Macmillan and

Art Gallery Board of NSW, 1974, provides a comprehensive record of art depicting Aboriginal people in Australia from 1770 to 1970. It evidences the paucity of artworks featuring Aboriginal people from the 1880s until they re-emerge with a strength and power in the 1950s.

30 The only artwork that captures the power and beauty of other works is G. B. Nerli’s (1863–1926) Corroboree (undated), a stunning work conveying Aboriginal power. G. B. Nerli was an associate of the Heidelberg School, an Italian visitor.

titled Corroboree, Murray Island (c1892), echoes the older, powerful painting of corroborees. Yet this is a sad image devoid of vibrancy and action, depicting blanketed, sitting, almost invisible Aboriginal people. As such the title seems ironic — there is no sign of dance; the people’s backs face the artist; there is an ominous ‘un Heidelbergian’ grey black sky. Geoffrey Dutton’s comments that ‘It is odd that Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Condor and other excellent artists who revitalised Australian landscape painting at the end of the nineteenth century should not have been more interested in painting the Aborigines’. 31

It appears ‘odd’ indeed if not understood in the context of Australian nationalism and the general silence, amplified in the Heidelberg artists’ perception that being born in Australia gave them a distinctly Australian eye for capturing the bright, illuminated land scapes that define their work. 32 In these celebrated landscapes, Indigenous presence is erased. In the cleared landscapes that stretch forth on kind canvas, there are no stains of Indigenous disposses - sion. There is no celebrated remembering of Aboriginal people. The proclaimed colonization was of the land — Australian history and the Australian man had arrived.

The Birth of a Nation in the Man of History

In the punctuated silencing of Aboriginal presence we find evoked the ‘Australian’ man: white and taciturn. He is imagined into a harsh land where Indigenous people need scarcely be mentioned in the art and literature (and of course history) of the nation. The art, songs and ballads created a powerful physical presence of a National Father that has echoed down the generations about who ‘Australians’ are: cavalier heroes, noble, brave, humble (albeit with a larrikin streak), with soldier-like courage. This man walks tall in the national imagination. He is constructed as fighting only the land. The fact that this national identity was often accepted uncrit - ically by historians, and was iconic in popular culture until as late as the 1950s, suggests its power. All but a few voices were hushed on the continuing colonization.

The National Father thus was a model of how to be, aspects of 31 Dutton, White on Black, p. 59. 32 I. Burn, ‘Beating About the Bush: The Landscapes of the Heidelberg School’, in A. Bradley and T. Smith (eds), Australian Art and Architecture, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 83–98.

which had quiet resonance for the lives of white men as codes for relating to each other. The links of the pioneer myth with the Christian tradition of sacrifice, death and new life were probably unconscious but added to the power of the imagery and helped to embed it emotionally in the national imaginary and ‘historical’ memory. Not uncoincidently, perhaps, The Bulletin was known as the ‘Bible of the Bush’. Manning Clark wrote that for the poet Henry Lawson there was no God in the Outback. 33 Nevertheless, for Lawson, like others, there was no need for a God. The National Father they created was a sacred–secular (white) being. The National Father was a Son-of-God figure, a complex God-man, as well as a larrikin man who would happily change water into wine for a party.

The theme of sacrifice and redemptive death is implicit in the pioneer story and the construction of the National Father. It was later explicitly used politically to serve other powers when carried over to named wars. It was, and is, contingent on a relative silence: whispers about Indigenous peoples’ story of resistance; relative silence on non-Indigenous people’s fear of Indigenous resistance (the land as the only enemy); and in this art, literature and idealisation of the pioneer there is almost complete silence about dispossession, rape and massacre. 34 The National Father was a a legend. Texts like Russell Ward’s The Pioneer Legend became classics. 35 This understanding, particularly the carry over to soldiery, has a secular fundamentalist religiosity that muffles the likelihood that any ‘other’ history could be heard. In the adherents of this religiosity, ‘other’ history is regarded (and politically constructed) as a betrayal of national self and nation.

Why Canʼt We Hear?

It was 1968 when W. E. H. Stanner drew attention to the Great Australian Silence, yet in 1975 the eminent Australian historian Russell Ward published his re-edited classic A Short History of Australia and wrote, ‘The Australian Aborigines … were among the 33 M. Clark, ‘Lawson’, in L. Kramer, R. Ward, T. Kennedy, R. Martin and R. Walsh (eds), The

Greats: The 50 Men and Women Who Most Helped Shape Modern Australia, Sydney, Angus and

Robertson in association with Nine Network and The Bulletin, 1980, pp. 74–8.

34 This is not to state that all non-Indigenous men/people committed such crimes, nor to jump from one position of the ‘great national father’ to another binary of the pioneer father as a murdering bastard. Clearly, not all non-Indigenous pioneers were rapists and murderers, but all were involved in dispossession and even positive colonial relations have to be contextualized as products of power relations stemming from dispossession. 35 R. Ward, The Pioneer Legend, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1958, rev. edn 1966.

most primitive and peaceable peoples known to history … From Phillip’s time until today Australian Governments have had to be much more concerned with protecting the Aborigines than with fighting them’. 36 Russell Ward’s text continued largely to ignore the history of Indigenous resistance. It maintained the silence on dis - possession and promoted a benign view of non-Indigenous ‘entry’ into Australia. The above quote evidences a construction, not un - common in such texts, of non-Indigenous people in a role of benign paternalism, ‘protecting’ Aboriginal people. School and tertiary textb ooks reinforced a perspective on the history of Australia that focused on white Australians as pioneer colonizers of land and Indigenous people as an incidental presence — the observers of progress. Other voices were published: Bill Beatty, Alan Moorehead and Charles Rowley37 wrote historical texts some thirteen years before Ward’s revised edition, and clearly relate the impact of British colonization on Indigenous people. The titles of those texts were explicit; for example, Beatty’s With Shame Remembered, Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact and Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society. But despite such shouts into the silence, its endur - ing blanketing indicates the history of colonization of Indigenous people was not only avoided but also ‘dis-remembered’.

Overcoming the silence is not frequently approached as an issue of cultural imagination in formal education. The focus is often on a transfer, engagement and reflection on Aboriginal knowledge as ‘their’ culture and ‘their history’. In parallel vein, the title of Henry Reynolds’s book Why Weren’t We Told? suggests the issue was one of not knowing. 38 Yet the book itself clearly highlights that many students simply did not want to know or that they already ‘knew’ about Aboriginal people and did not want this ‘history’ (they held racist views). The New South Wales (NSW) Institute of Teachers has made Indigenous Studies mandatory for teacher registration, as if ‘knowing’ automatically embodies a willingness to teach. Michael Dunkin’s research notes that 50 per cent of pre-service teachers

some study in Indigenous Studies. 39 Yet ‘knowledge’ under take 36 R. Ward, A Short History of Australia, Sydney, Ure Smith, revised edn, 1975, p. 26. 37 B. Beatty, Early Australia: With Shame Remembered, Melbourne, Cassell, 1962; A. Moorehead, The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific, Melbourne, Penguin, 1966; C. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Canberra, ANU Press, 1970. 38 H. Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, Sydney, Viking, 1999. 39 M. Dunkin, ‘The Place of Indigenous Studies in Pre-Service Primary Teacher Education in Australia’, unpublished report to the SELF Research Centre, University of Western Sydney, 2002.

and ‘being told’ have not been very successful it seems, as the nation moves towards a half-century since the Great Australian Silence was first named.

University educators have documented the issues in student learning: resistance to the content; stereotypic, but false beliefs about Aboriginal people (including that Aboriginal people are ‘advantaged’ in terms of government benefits); and guilt and defensive denial, including mocking history as ‘black armband’ and complaining about Aboriginal welfare payments. 40 When stu - dents are ‘told’ the history, some react with a desire to take action arising from a sense of outrage at the injustice experienced by non Indigenous people;41 others react with outrage at what the history imputes about the national story and self (as non-Indigenous); and some silently endure compulsory units in Indigenous studies which are viewed as exercises in ‘political correctness’. 42 Given such observations by tertiary educators, we see that the dominant discourse, or (willing) understanding, of Australia in universities, schools and popular culture is not one of it as a colonized country that Indigenous people never ceded. If there is any sustained national discourse on Indigenous questions, it is one of a problem to be solved so that an unreflected ‘we’ (non-Indigenous) can ‘get on with it’ (where ‘it’ is mining, education, life). Indigenous people in this construction are a sort of complicated social work or edu - cational problem to be ‘fixed’, which will require understanding them (as an ‘other’ culture). Thus while Aboriginal Studies is man - datory for pre-service teachers in NSW, there is no compulsory Postcolonial Studies. For Robert Nichols this means there has been little sustained reflection on the postcolonial as an ethical way of life:

[T]here has been little investigation of the modes of living and daily practices that bring forth and sustain such an atti - tude ... ‘postcolonial’ has been primarily used as an adjective 40 For example, Aveling, ‘Hacking at Our Very Roots’; J. Phillips and S. Whatman, ‘Decolonising Preservice Teacher Education: Reform at Many Cultural Interfaces’, in

Proceedings The World Educational Quality: 2007 AERA Annual Meeting, Chicago; O’Dowd,

‘Ethical Positioning’; A. Pedersen, B. Griffiths, N. Contos, B. Bishop and I. Walker, ‘Attitudes toward Aboriginal Australians in City and Country Settings’, Australian Psychologist, vol. 35, no. 2, 2000, pp. 106–17; M. Augoustinos, K. Tuffin and M. Rapley, ‘Genocide or a Failure to Gel? Racism, History and Nationalism in Australian Talk’, Discourse & Society, vol. 10, 1999, pp. 351–78; and Williams, ‘Why Should I Feel Guilty?’.

41 S. Maddison, Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political Culture, Sydney, Allen

& Unwin, 2009.

42 Aveling, ‘Hacking at Our Very Roots’.

— modifying a specific noun in relation to a spatio-temporal ‘thing? or ‘event’. It has not been used as an adverb, as modifier of our verbs, our actions. In short, the prevailing semantics of ‘postcolonial’ in the western academy has not been in relation to a specific ethical attitude, a manner of living or stance towards oneself and others — an ethos. 43

The modes of teaching and learning that contribute to daily practices of continuing informal colonialism (hence postcolonialism) are reflected in an interesting study assessing the impact of educating pre-service teachers in Aboriginal Studies. Rhonda Craven and her colleagues followed now qualified teachers who had been through training, and found that the mandatory study was effective as these teachers were more knowledgeable of content and of the impor - tance of the subject for reconciliation and social justice than their peers who had not undertaken such study. 44 However, of particular interest were the qualitative comments of some of these teachers. Some teachers indicated that Aboriginal Studies was relevant for Aboriginal students but could otherwise be omitted. Some noted overt racism in the white community, including the use of the ‘most horrible names’ and views that Aboriginal students got too many privileges in school. A number of teachers said that they did not know how to teach Aboriginal Studies and had not sought to develop these skills. A careful reading of this research reveals the most concerning finding: that almost 25 per cent of these teachers did not teach the subject and an unspecified number would only teach it to Aboriginal students. 45 This was despite it being a man - datory perspective in the NSW curriculum. This finding, which was not mentioned in the report’s conclusions, might assist in under - standing why significant numbers of tertiary education students continue to say they have not been taught this history (which raises concerns about how effective Australia’s new national curriculum will be in bringing change to teachers’ daily practices).

43 R. Nichols, ‘State of The Disciplines’, p.118. 44 R. Craven, C. Halse, H. Marsh, J. Mooney and J. Wilson-Miller, Teaching the Teachers

Aboriginal Studies: Impact on Teaching, Report to Department of Education, Science and Training, Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, 2005.

45 Craven, Halse, Marsh, Mooney and Wilson-Miller, Teaching the Teachers Aboriginal Studies, pp.

30, 60. It might be assumed that this figure is an underestimate as some teachers might be embarrassed and/or too astute to acknowledge their inaction in formal research.

National Identity and Un-history in Popular Culture: the Ethics of Identity

This article argues that imagination has a role in the perpetuation of the silence about Indigenous colonization into the twenty-first century. A social imaginary has become embodied, co-created and co-dependent with a particular history and national identity. National identity has been deconstructed by academics, but the co-lateral image of the land has not been so fully challenged. Graeme Turner, for example, identifies one of the key tropes in Australian film as the theme of exile and imprisonment in a purgatorial landscape, 46 but the images endure through appreciation of art and literature of the colonial period as well as its popular manifesta tions in ballads, bush tales and in film. This is evidenced in the archetypal image of the Australian man in a harsh land in the film Crocodile Dundee.

Felicity Collins and Therese Davis in their discussion of cinema after Mabo argue that film has been in a marriage with historical theory and has contributed to a long period of historical amnesia about the effects of and responsibility for Indigenous disposses - sion. 47 They contend that the story that the land belonged to no one remained the national story until 1992. Their study points to the endurance of this, arguing that film has played an important role in deconstructing and reconstructing national imagining in ways that are necessary, informative and ethical. Disengaging from the National Father thus requires more than ‘hearing’ another history or rejecting the dominant history. It is not simple. It involves an unravelling of how that history is embodied and dis-embodied in the land and national self (and, at another level, how that plays out in Australia’s international politics). The national identity of the 1880s has en - dured and is alive in images of self, land, war and soldiery arising out of its unarticulated Indigenous positioning. Those who died in other lands are still celebrated, as are the brave pioneers, as our ‘loved sons’ and ‘our brave dead’. With un-history the imagined man dom - i nates and creates a sacred space for men in other frontier lands.

Interestingly, the tales of the National Father’s mateship, larrikinism and implicit codes of bush honour as a model of how to be may have become a partially embodied reality, and may perhaps 46 G. Turner, in F. Collins and T. Davis, Australian Cinema After Mabo, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 2004, p. 3.

47 F. Collins and T. Davis, Australian Cinema After Mabo, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 2004.

be adapted to provide a core base from which to launch ethical challenges to that identity and the silences of un-history. Arguably, this might occur when identity is seen as ‘national’ (and global) and not relegated to some exclusive, race-based non-Indigenous privilege. There have always been non-Indigenous people (teachers, students, national leaders, station hands) who have challenged the silence and the simplistic comfort of national identity’s supremacy. 48

Attempting to ‘end the silence’ as an issue of simply providing more information and teaching Indigenous Studies, however, ignores the deeply embedded nature of national identity in art, literature and popular culture. Understanding and addressing the broader socio-cultural imaginary may assist in quelling powerful hostile responses. Negative responses to this history are not limited to recal - ci trant tertiary students, but extend throughout society, authorized even by former Prime Minister John Howard, who argued vehemently against ‘Australians’ accepting a ‘black armband’ view of history:

I sympathise fundamentally with Australians who are insulted when they are told that we have a racist, bigoted past ... to tell children whose parents were no part of that maltreatment, to tell children who themselves have been no part of it, that we are all part of a, sort of, racist, bigoted history is something that Australians reject.49 The statement evidences a possessive nationalism as non-Indigenous, and is far from the ‘ethics of friendship’ seen as a part of a positive postcolonialism. 50 Leela Gandhi’s ethics of friend ship asks, ‘Does loyalty to “my own” liberate me from loyalty to those who are not my own nation, family, community?’ In such questions the issues of history move beyond ‘controversial history’ 51 into the ethics of un othering and engage an ethics of what it means to live with a people who have been colonized.

48 For example, the non-Indigenous men who refused to ignore the silence surrounding the murder of Aboriginal people and reported the Myall Creek massacre (1838, when the first trial of non-Indigenous men who murdered Aboriginal people took place). They had to demonstrate great courage against peers who would despise them. They had little to gain materially, slipped from history, and remain uncelebrated individuals who acted ethically. 49 John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, December 1996, cited by B. Mitchell in ‘Howard

Faces New Rebuke on Race Debate, The Age, 12 December 1996, in S. Perera and J. Pugliese, ‘A School for Racism: Pedagogy in the Face of Ethnicity’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol. 2, 1998, pp. 158–9.

50 L. Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics

of Friendship, Duram, Duke University Press, 2006.

51 Accepting an inclusive Australian history as controversial is an approach to the fore in other colonized countries that are still occupied. See, for example, the work of Keith Barton and Alan McCully in Northern Ireland on teaching controversial history where they recognize

Conclusion: Re-imagining

Bill Beatty completed his book Early Australia: With Shame Remembered, describing the brutal colonization of the Aboriginal peoples, in 1962. If an active remembering of history entailed simply providing more information, this raises the question of how half a century could pass with that history still either not well known or rejected. Today, ‘Aboriginal’ history is still ‘dis-remembered’ and remains an un history for a significant number of non-Indigenous Australians. There is a problem with acceptance of the history and, related to this, how this history has evolved with the Anzac myth. 52 While the efforts to teach and disseminate this history are commendable and increasingly forceful (some teacher registration authorities and state education authorities have made this subject compulsory), research indicates that significant numbers of teachers have silently refused to teach this mandatory subject. It is hard to gauge how widespread the decision not to teach the subject is. It is apparent then that the issue of ending the silence is more than one of information provision, and even of attitude change. The key question is not, ‘Why weren’t we told?’ but ‘Why can’t we hear?’ — par - ticularly in the context of a generally respected view that if we forget the past we are doomed to repeat it.

The discourse of the National Father as a pioneer of the land is a construction that is still present, one that creates an un-history. Un-history has been mediated, circumvented but not avoided by the creation of the term ‘Aboriginal History’, which encompasses the history of the interface of non-Indigenous colonization of Indigenous people. 53 This allows Aboriginal History/Aboriginal Studies to be voiced but to remain ‘over there’ — not a part of the shared Australian story. Aboriginal History and Aboriginal Studies can be ‘done’ and then set aside as the non-Indigenous story prevails

that history is learned outside as well as inside the school and advocate for strategies that enable students to reflect on history (for example, K. Barton and A. McCully, ‘You Can Form Your Own Point of View: Internally Persuasive Discourse in Northern Ireland Students’ Encounters with History’, Teachers College Record, 2010 and Barton and McCully on teaching history: <http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=15801>, accessed 16 May 2012). 52 It also becomes a problem for those who live that myth. Thus the bravery of individual

pioneers and soldiers is diminished in asserting these are qualities they all hold, especially if killed. It adheres to a formula for reporting death, an Orwellian newspeak, where the ‘brave’ who are especially ‘brave’ become a sort of ‘double plus brave’ when they die in service. 53 This is not to dismiss the authority of Indigenous people in writing this history or their ownership of their part of this history. Nor is it to dismiss their struggle to get this history into the public domain. It is to argue that it enables a subversive politics that treats the colonization of Indigenous people as ‘their’ history and not part of the shared history of all Australians.

in so many other discourses. Those who publicly resist the wider history, such as ex-Prime Minister Howard, tend to be (understand - ably) pil lo ried as racist and right wing. But this is not enough. If the depth of the silence and un-history are to be overcome, a com - prehensive change in the social imaginary is needed.

In the Australian context it would need to embrace a post colonial ethics as part of understanding history; including the social world that shapes non-Indigenous imagination in its role in remembering and forgetting, both the past, and the past in the present. Without such a shift a silencing imaginary will remain dominant, drawing upon an often invoked national character and a com - mercialized ‘national’ image. To educate about the colonization of Australian land with Australian people is to deconstruct the National Father in the social imaginary. It is to face and unravel the cultural context in which such images are embedded, embodied and reinforced in art, literature, song and film in and outside schools — the postcolonial legacy. This is not to dismiss, or to refuse to cele - brate, the bravery of individual non-Indigenous pioneers; it is not to dismiss the dark side of colonization (rape, murder, dispos session).

Ironically the source of un-history, the National Father, might, drawing on Nichols’ ideas, provide the starting point for post - colonial reflections on ‘an ethics of friendship’. Many of the National Father’s national traits are ethical: a fair go, mateship, and respect for the battler. In an alternative educational discourse however, the ‘confirmation bias’ 54 of un-history would need be explored and unravelled. This alternative discourse would involve not just inter - posing an Indigenous History or Indigenous Studies against main - stream history, but also developing a post-colonial non-Indigenous studies. Until that time the powerful and passively accepted message of a glorified national self will refuse a shared history and allow Australia’s continuing un-history.

54 B. O’Brien, ‘Prime Suspect: An Examination of Factors that Aggravate and Counteract

Confirmation Bias in Criminal Investigations’, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, vol. 15, no. 4, 2009, pp. 315–34.