What was it about the nature of frontier conflict that led historians to overlook it for so long?
A contemporary sketch of the Waterloo massacre that took place on January 26, 1838, one of the many points of conflict between Europeans and Aborigines on the frontier. (Source: Creative Spirits)
As discussed in the previous blog entry on the pioneer myth, the various civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s had a significant hand in bringing Aboriginal affairs to the forefront. Before this period in time, however, Aboriginal history and frontier relations were seldom discussed in history books. Stories of conflict and violence between Europeans and Aborigines were deemed unfit for public attention, which the distinguished Australian anthropologist William Stanner dubbed the 'great Australian silence' in the 1968 Boyer Lectures: 'We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind when we most want to do so.'
How can we account for this 'great Australian silence'? There are several aspects about the nature of frontier conflict and relations that led historians to ignore the matter for such a long time. One of the most important roots of this phenomenon is the vastly different methodological approach Aboriginal people take in the creation and recording of their history. Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster discuss this in the introduction to Frontier Conflict, in which they state that Aboriginal people produce histories in a vast array of forms, such as 'autobiographies, life stories, oral histories, documentary and feature films, plays, novels, short stories and poetry, songs and paintings,' all of which are based on memory. The fact that these different forms only began to be taken seriously as viable approaches to history-making in the 1960s and 1970s had meant that Aboriginal perspectives on frontier conflict were previously disregarded or excluded all together by historians. Even to this day, as Attwood claims in Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, historians continue to experience great difficulty working productively with sources based on memorial discourse.
A further aspect to this 'great Australian silence' is that Australian history has traditionally been seen as a history of white settlement. Attwood claims that settler history-making has reigned over and muted the 'other side of the story.' Settler stories, like the pioneer myth, were such a key component in the shaping of Australian national identity that it was considered counterproductive for frontier conflict to be incorporated into the national narrative.
In sum, there were several forces at play that led historians to overlook frontier relations in the past. For one thing, the making of Aboriginal history had been undermined by historians due to the ethnocentric belief that written history was the only valid form of history-making. For another, this silencing is also a byproduct of Australia's prior obsession with heroic settler narratives, which excluded the Aborigines entirely. Above all, however, early historians never considered the Aboriginal people as suitable subjects for historical research, which Attwood makes clear: ‘As an ancient people, they belonged to the discipline of anthropology, not history.’ All of these factors contributed to the ‘great Australian silence’ that Stanner regrettably described.
