Aboriginal history: Omitted, brushed over, changed

"Australian history started with Captain Cook," is what a lot of people, even today, tell me when asked what they learned at school. Secondary history books, published just a few years back, sometimes brush over Indigenous history in twelve pages only.

Until we get it right with the teaching of Aboriginal history, then I don't think that we can pretend to be Australians together.

— Dr Jackie Huggins, Indigenous educator, author and activist ^[2]

In the 1950s Aboriginal history was virtually absent from school curricula. Historian Henry Reynolds remembers well how he learned about the frontier violence from students—not books.

“The extraordinary thing was that as I became every day aware of the whole question of Indigenous Australians... there was nothing in the book. I mean, the Aborigine [sic] didn’t even make the index. They weren’t in the history.” ^[1]

It's a view that author Marcia Langton can relate to. "When I studied history at the ANU [Australian National University] in the 1970s there was still a widely held view, and I think it was the conventional view, that there was no Aboriginal history," she remembers. ^[3]

Things changed in the 1980s, but not by much. At least Aboriginal history was not denied entirely. "When I went to high school in Tasmania in the late 1980s, we skipped across the state’s original inhabitants in one lesson. The teacher said Tasmanian Aborigines were no more," remembers Melissa Fyfe, a senior writer for Good Weekend magazine in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Former Liberal Tasmanian premier Will Hodgman agrees. "It was almost like a silent part of our lives. We didn’t really get anything near an accurate picture of our state’s history." ^[4]

Some governments attempt to keep that accurate picture away from us. When historian Anna Clark researched curriculum documents issued in the 1990s by successive Labor and conservative governments, she discovered that Labor's documents described colonisation as a "European invasion" while, less than two years later, the conservative documents labelled it a "British settlement". History, she concluded, is "something we do". ^[5]

There is the truism, ‘Australia’s history is never read, the black man keeps it in his head.’ White Australians ensured it remained there.

— John Pilger, journalist and author ^[6]

Today more and more Aboriginal people are telling Aboriginal history. And when they do, Captain Cook doesn't matter much. What they want you to know it what happened to them: the frontier wars, the massacres, the taking of their children, the loss of their lands. They want you to understand, and be able to empathise with, their history of destruction, pain and suffering. They want truth-telling.

Great nations don't ignore their most painful moments ... they embrace them.

— Joe Biden, US President ^[7]

Until we are mature enough to embrace First Nations people and their knowledge, we won’t be able to really shine as a nation.

— Kim McKay, CEO, Australian Museum, Sydney ^[8]

Have we learned nothing from history?

In 2020, after four years of investigation, Major General Paul Brereton AM, a judge of the NSW Court of Appeal and a senior officer in the Australian Army Reserve, published a report that detailed the actions of some of Australia’s most elite soldiers in Afghanistan.

What members of Australia's Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) had done in Afghanistan is strikingly similar to what settlers and colonisers did to Aboriginal people. The following table offers a comparison. ^[10]

The question is: Have we not learned from our more recent history? Would this not happen if we acknowledged our dark past, told the truth and compensated the victims?

The last mission in New South Wales

In July 2010 Warangesda Mission and Station received heritage listing. The station, just outside Darlington Point in the Riverina District of New South Wales, is located about 630 kms south-west of Sydney.

Warangesda Mission is the only mission left in NSW that still has a suite of original buildings. The heritage area includes the mission block and cemetery. ^[11]

Warangesda is the last known location of an initiation ceremony for the local Aboriginal population and the site of a strike in 1883. At its peak it was home to more than 200 Aboriginal people.

Aboriginal history resources

Browse Aboriginal history books or check out my large collection of Aboriginal movies.

Or explore the online collection of the State Library of NSW which has a separate section on Aboriginal history.

A very good resource is the Aboriginal-owned website The Koori History Project which has articles, cartoons and videos about significant historic events.

Native American history mirrors Australia's

It is fascinating how similar history is in these two different countries.

Australia and the United States share a history of white supremacy. Both were founded as invading settler colonies whose existence depended on driving indigenous peoples from their lands. Both denied political and economic rights to indigenous people, whose labour was exploited. And both countries adopted restrictive immigration laws to keep their national complexions white. And in both countries non-indigenous people continue to offend by using blackface to make themselves look indigenous.

If you know another similarity, please let me know!