'I'm a 58-year-old Aboriginal woman. Why do so many people still not know my history?'

I am Bundjalung. I am an Aboriginal Australian and I come from Bundjalung Country on the southern border region of Queensland and in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, on Australia’s east coast.

In the Tweed River valley, a sacred mountain called Wollumbin stands majestically as the first place on mainland Australia to receive the sun’s rays each day. It is my family’s ancestral home. 

My ancestors woke up in that sunshine, drank from crystal-clear streams, hunted game, were guardians of the forests and the mountains, and maintained and preserved sacred sites of Earth magic.

Watch: What Country means to Indigenous people. Story continues after video.

As an urban Aboriginal woman who lives in the present, I yearned to connect with my ancestors from the past, learn their history and tell their stories. I have travelled on a long and exhausting journey, for over a decade, to find a way to bridge these worlds.

Why don’t you know?

I vividly remember how shocked my fellow student Lynda looked, how the mortification in her voice made her sudden question sound more like an interrogation rather than the urgent, truth-seeking inquiry that she intended. She whacked  me on my shoulder and gasped, ‘Did you know this!’ I responded sadly, ‘Yes . . . Why don’t you know?’

I have never forgotten this small exchange, which took place in 2003, directly after one of the lectures on our Indigenous History course for my Bachelor of Education degree. We had just sat through a tough lecture about Aboriginal segregation on Aborigines reserves and missions, and the indenture of young Aboriginal teens into so-called ‘apprenticeships’ as domestic servants and labourers. Lynda and I were part of a small subgroup of mature-aged students who had just begun four years of study to qualify as primary school teachers. I was about to turn forty, and my new university friends were in their mid-to-late thirties when they, for the first time in their lives, were learning about Aboriginal history.

The instant Lynda asked me that question, I was struck by the realisation that at that time there were still generations of white Australians who did not know the history of Aboriginal people in this country. I am 58 years old now, and countless times in my lifetime I have witnessed non-Indigenous people’s shock at revelations about Aboriginal history. When that happens, they almost always say exactly the same thing, ‘We were never taught about that when I was at school.’ Whenever I hear those familiar words, I sigh. It comes from a deeply personal, ancestral place in my heart. It’s like a twinge of pain from an old injury. It is a recurring reminder that, even after all this time, there still lingers something that needs to be properly healed.

Image: Supplied

I’m not the first person to write about this widespread lack of knowledge about Aboriginal history. Historian Henry Reynolds wrote about it two decades ago in his 1999 book called Why Weren’t We Told? A personal search for the truth about our history. ‘Why weren’t we told?’ was a question that people from all over the country frequently asked him after his history lectures. Reynolds confessed that he was ‘ignorant of protective and repressive legislation and the ideology and practice of white racism beyond a highly generalised view that we had treated them rather badly in the past’. His acclaimed book was written from the perspective of a non-Indigenous historian who went on a personal journey towards realising that he, like generations of Australians, grew up with a distorted and idealised version of history, and he urged Australians to continue to search for the truth about our past.

Similarly, this book is an account of a personal journey to search for the truth about our past, and I too have written with the goal of counteracting the widespread lack of knowledge about Aboriginal history. But this book differs in that it is written from the perspective of an Aboriginal historian who has researched her ancestors. I began my research journey with the goal of tracing my four Aboriginal grandparents’ family lines as far back as I could in Australia’s written historical record, which was just after white settlers arrived in northern New South Wales.

My research covers five generations of my family history and examines my ancestors’ experience of the continuing encroachment of white settlement through to the present day.

This research journey culminated with receiving my doctorate from the Australian National University, but the greatest, most heart-warming reward has been the discovery of an unbroken connection to my pre-colonisation ancestors—and time immemorial. I discovered that family history research was a way to bridge these worlds. This book is the story of my personal research journey.

History of Aboriginal history.

Image: Supplied

The reason generations of Australians never learned about.Aboriginal history was that it only started to be given attention as recently as 1981—too late for anyone, like me, who was completing their schooling at that time. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), well-known anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner first used the term The Great Australian Silence’ to highlight how the Aboriginal experience of colonisation and white settlement had been left out of the national narrative. He said that Aboriginal people had been reduced to little more than a ‘melancholy footnote’ in Australia’s history and he concluded that inattention on such a massive scale could not simply be explained as absentmindedness. Stanner believed that it was a structural matter:

A view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. 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.

In this famous quote, Stanner held up a mirror to Australian historians, so that they could see their own culpability in the erasure of Aboriginal people from the written historical record. His criticism inspired young non-Indigenous historians like Henry Reynolds. Nearly twenty years before he wrote his book Why Weren’t We Told?, Henry Reynolds’ first ground-breaking book, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia, paved the way for the burgeoning field of study now known as Aboriginal history. His work profoundly changed the way in which Australians understood relations between Aboriginal people and European settlers. Another distinguished historian who also came to prominence in 1981 was Peter Read. His research revealed the Australian Government’s policy of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, and he coined the phrase ‘The Stolen Generations’. Peter Read was one of my PhD supervisors.

As historians systematically uncovered shocking truths about the nation’s past, some conservatives in Australia became infuriated. In 1993, conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey created the term ‘black armband’ to describe what he and others called an exaggerated, negative view of Australia’s history. This term was adopted by the mainstream media and prominent conservatives, including Prime Minister John Howard. What followed was a series of public arguments between academics and the media that later became known as the ‘history wars’.

Image: Supplied

In 2002, historian Keith Windschuttle published a book called The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847 and in 2009 he followed it up with another book on this topic, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008. Windschuttle accused historians, including Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, of ‘misrepresentation, deceit and outright fabrication’ of frontier violence and race relations in North Queensland and Tasmania.

He also questioned the work of Peter Read and the accepted account that Aboriginal children were removed from their families in large numbers as a result of fundamentally racist government policies.

Archives can be wielded in powerful ways, and I was surprised to learn from historian Victoria Haskins that Keith Windschuttle had only accessed limited historical records. I remember seeing him on television interviews emphatically  declaring, ‘I’ve seen the archives!’, and no one ever questioned which archives he was referring to. Years after this, Haskins noted, ‘Keith Windschuttle’s very flawed work on the Stolen Generations was based on his limited access to the Board’s Ward Registers (which were once open to all and have since come under restrictions)’.

I remember the disdain that was directed at academics and the false perception that experiences of the Stolen Generations were exaggerated. Although Windschuttle’s books produced a range of responses, from condemnation to support for his work, one of the negative outcomes that I remember was that the naysayers of Aboriginal history used his ‘flawed work’ to justify their refusal to accept the deep racism in Australian society and decades of mistreatment of Aboriginal people.

During the ‘history wars’, writers of Aboriginal history were struck by waves of rebuttal, and although the force of the waves diminished over time, there seems to be an ever-present potential for them to rise again. During the time I have been writing this book, I have noticed some mainstream media again denying the importance of Aboriginal history. There appears to be a national exasperation that the subject has surfaced yet again, and I think that comes from a misconception that history is an unchanging, static body of knowledge.

But history is always changing. Narratives of the same historical event can be remarkably different depending on the perspective of the historian, or the people they are writing about. The discovery of ‘new’ archival material can also dramatically change our understanding of the past. This book contains an enormous amount of information sourced from such rare archival discoveries.

A balanced view.

I have always joked that my family members are the ‘Forrest Gumps’ of blackfellas. In every era, there was usually someone immersed in, or witness to, most of the milestones of Aboriginal history since European invasion. This book is written for people who want to know our history from an Aboriginal perspective. I place this multi-generational story of my family history in the context of Australian history. Of course, in my family’s history there is a plethora of stories about racism, oppression, hardship and outrageous injustice, but this book is not only about the negative circumstances and events in Aboriginal history. There are also beautiful, heart-warming examples of non-Indigenous kindness and humanity.

Image: Supplied

My goal has been to provide a truthful, balanced view.

Henry Reynolds said, ‘Truth-telling is the ultimate gesture of respect. It indicates a willingness to listen, to learn and to concede that the stories should be heard of those who have been victims of great wrongs.’

I would like to acknowledge and express my deep gratitude to you, the readers of this book. Our stories need to be heard, and I am thankful for your willingness to listen and learn about the historical experiences of my ancestors and other Aboriginal people in Australia’s history.

Image: Supplied

This is an extract from Reaching Through Time by Shauna Bostock (Allen & Unwin, $34.99) available now.

Feature Image: Supplied