AustLit

'In 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released Bringing Them Home, documenting historical practices of forced Indigenous child removal in devastating detail. The report was released into a fractious political environment in which historicised understandings of race were being heatedly debated. Responses to the report played out through the media as conservatives sought to reassert a traditional narrative of Australian history. The Howard Coalition government steadfastly refused to implement most recommendations of the report, including a formal national apology. The government’s stance, and its capacity to dominate the news cycle, almost immediately shifted public focus from the contents of the report to its reception. This reframing meant that, when a formal national apology was finally offered by the incoming Rudd Labor government in 2008, it offered closure not to 220 years of racial violence as was claimed, but to a 20-year acrimonious debate dominated by white elites. This process demonstrates the ways that, against the starkest evidence, institutional power can be leveraged to facilitate widespread forgetting of historical violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples. Indigenous children in Australia continue to be removed from their families at heavily disproportionate rates.' (Publication abstract)

'This article examines public understandings of two key strands of Australian history that sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of remembrance: frontier conflict and Anzac. The former, W. E. H. Stanner argued in 1968, was subsumed in a vacuum of silence, lost to popular consciousness in a wilful act of forgetting. Despite a wealth of subsequent scholarship documenting the violence and dispossession that characterised European colonisation, considerable gaps in public awareness about these foundational events remain. Anzac, in contrast, has become a defining narrative of Australian history for large segments of the general population and the political class. Recent scholarship suggests that this prominence has served to mask other, important histories of the continent, including frontier conflict. In this article, we argue that this is neither a necessary nor essential binary, and further, that one can inform the other. The written reflections of 320 tertiary students enrolled in a course about Australian military history provide insights into the ways that frontier conflict is popularly understood and how the fascination with Anzac can be leveraged to raise awareness of the violent historical dimensions of colonisation.'  (Publication abstract)