The Breaking of the ‘Great Australian Silence’: How and Why the Writing of Indigenous Australian History has Changed over the Last 40 Years

Australian history has not always recognised the traditional Indigenous occupants of the country. For various reasons, including prevailing ideas about race, Indigenous peoples were excluded from Australian history. Anthropologist WEH Stanner's 1968 Boyer Lectures called historians to ensure this pervasive forgetfulness of the Indigenous population ceased, a process already under way when the lectures were delivered. The lectures had their intended effect of further encouraging the historical revision that subsequently altered the foundations of Australian history by creating a new field: Indigenous Australian history. These changes in historiography occurred gradually, and included many historians. The prevailing social and cultural forces of the time were also instrumental in aiding this revision, and included the 1967 referendum and subsequent land rights movement, societal tensions over the bicentenary celebrations in 1988, the High Court decisions of Mabo and Wik, as well as the political leadership of the time with which this field became intertwined. Ultimately Indigenous Australians moved from being a 'melancholy footnote' in Australian history, to occupying a central place in the historiography.