The Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs (JSCATSIA) has continued its work on the Truth and Justice Commission Bill 2024. (Earlier post.) The Committee had a public hearing in Sydney on 18 February (extracts here, with emphasis on Truth-listening as well as Truth-telling).
There are three references in the JSCATSIA evidence to the work of the anthropologist, WEH Stanner (1905-81), who famously wrote about 'the great Australian silence'. (Australian Dictionary of Biography article by Professor DJ Mulvaney, a distinguished Australian archaeologist.)
PROFESSOR HEIDI NORMAN, Gomeroi, Research Professor and Director, Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group, University of New South Wales
'The story of Australian history is one of contact history and is a dominant colonial story. In the last 50 years there's been a phenomenal amount of what is termed "Aboriginal history" in response to that provocation of the great Australian silence. There have been 50 years where you could say that the silences have been filled, Aboriginal history has been restored and there has been a renovation, of sorts, of the story of the nation. But we are reminded—say, in the Voice referendum—of the lack of awareness. We are also reminded when our students join Aboriginal studies or Aboriginal history and politics subjects. They continue to ask, "How come we didn't know this?" So there is something there about what is happening in our schools, in our universities and in the wider public about the level of awareness of Australian history as a shared history.' (Proof transcript, page 32)
DR ANNE MAREE PAYNE, Senior Research Fellow, Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group, University of New South Wales
'I guess Heidi has been arguing that Stanner's "great Australian silence" has largely been addressed, but we still hear this lament: "Why didn't we know?" Heidi and I are dubbing it "the great Australian unknowing", which is this persistent resistance to engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and with being able to absorb it, for non-Indigenous Australians.' (Transcript, page 32)
BLAKE CANSDALE, Anaiwan, National Director, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTAR)
'The anthropologist WEH Stanner described Australia's national narrative as "the great Australian silence", a deliberate exclusion of First Nations history, perspectives and truth from our national consciousness. The Uluru Statement from the Heart called for an end to this silence. Whilst First Nations peoples do not need permission to tell our truths—we've been doing so for over 200 years—what we do need is for governments, institutions and the Australian public to truly listen. The path forward must be led by First Nations peoples. Without real action and commitment, we risk repeating the failures of the past. But, if we get this right, we can move forward beyond the great Australian silence and towards a truthful and just Australia and a shared vision of the future that all Australians can be proud of.' (page 38)
That 'why didn't we know?' trope has been common for decades. Historian Henry Reynolds published a book in 2000 titled Why Weren't We Told? a Personal Search for the Truth about Our History. The blurb for the book said it was 'a frank account of [Reynolds'] personal journey towards the realisation that he, like generations of Australians, grew up with a distorted and idealised version of the past'. Historian Anna Clark in 2018 gave a detailed study of historians' treatment of First Australians before and after Stanner's 1968 lecture - and she noted that her father, historian Manning Clark (died 1991), also wondered why we hadn't been told.
First Nations leader, Gangulu man, Mick Gooda, spent three years gathering evidence to support the Truth-telling process in Queensland and recalled, “The white people were more angry about not knowing the truth than the Indigenous people, because we live our truth every day ... They got really angry – non-Indigenous people – saying "Why aren’t we telling these stories? Why aren’t we teaching this in schools?".' (The new LNP government stopped the Truth-telling initiative in Queensland.)
Audiences at David Marr's book launches of Killing for Country (2023) were still asking why they hadn't been told. Then, in December 2024, Monash University historian, Professor Bain Attwood, published an article in Australian Book Review, 'The Great Australian Denial: W.E.H. Stanner on mourning and disremembering' (paywall). Professor Attwood has kindly made a copy of the article available to Defending Country and here are some of his main points:
Stanner used the word 'silence' as a metaphor for 'forgetting' or 'disremembering'. His concern was 'not a history that was never or even seldom told but a history that was unexamined'.
A passage in Stanner's 1968 Boyer Lecture mentions 'the unacknowledged relations' (Attwood's emphasis) between whites and blacks that whites would not discuss with blacks.
Stanner paraphrased Freud about how individuals or communities know about something but are 'unwilling and thus unable to acknowledge what they know'.
Stanner believed, says Attwood, historical white-black relations 'had been disremembered over time by non-Indigenous Australians and so weighed heavily on "the continuing anatomy of Australian life"'. Narcissistic white storytellers, Stanner had argued, "had not only disremembered their own people's relationship with the country's first peoples but barely represented Aboriginal perspectives of those relations'. Histories that Aboriginal people say and write needed to be included in what Stanner called 'the sweep of [the Australian] story'.
Non-Indigenous Australians today, says Attwood, are more willing to learn the truth about Australia's Black history, but 'a good deal of the historical writing has tended to disconnect the past and the present ... not least when it has told stories about the mass of killings that occurred on colonial frontiers in a way that draws attention away from the process of dispossession, which has had much more lasting consequences for Aboriginal people'.
Finally, writes Attwood, most non-Indigenous Australians continue to have a weak understanding of 'the relationship between the historical (or past) dimensions and the contemporary (or present) dimensions of the plight of many Aboriginal people'. As well, 'the connection between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution has been severely weakened. Too little of the current discourse about the need for truth-telling broaches these twin problems, let alone considers how they might be addressed and what role history might play.'
Attwood's work circles us back to Stanner in 1968: 'What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale' (emphasis added). Stanner knew, as Attwood does, that this part of our history did not slip down the memory hole by accident; it was stuffed there. Payne, Norman, and Cansdale pretty much nailed that point at JSCATSIA. (See also: Attwood in 2017; Norman and Payne in 2023 with more on the work of historians and others over many years).
Finally, there is this about one of the strange contrasts in the way Australians view their past:
Henry Reynolds' title, "Why weren't we told?" is really the wrong question (as he himself knew). The question should be "Why didn't we find out?" We have encouraged successive generations, child and adult, through Anzac Prizes and Gallipoli Study Tours and Darwin re-enactments and Kokoda Track hikes and the returning home of the Long Tan Cross to know the minutest detail about our Australia's Overseas Wars but we have shown nowhere near the same diligence with the Australian Frontier Wars, the wars that created the foundation of modern Australia.
Henry Reynolds is one of Defending Country's distinguished Patrons. Anna Clark is one of Defending Country's distinguished Supporters.
Photo credit: WEH Stanner as Major, commanding 2/1st North Australia Observer Unit (NAOU), known as 'Stanner's Bush Commandos' or 'the Nackeroos', observing Japanese activity in Northern Australia 1942-43 (AWM). Stanner worked as an anthropologist in Northern Australia before the war (and again after) and the NAOU employed Aboriginals.
