Aboriginal Stories

In Australia, for at least the past twenty-five years, historians identified with the left have been urgently questioning the role non-indigenous researchers can and ought to play in the domain of Aboriginal history. This questioning of contemporary responsibility for a violent settler colonialism has resulted, as one leading Australian historian, Peter Read, notes, in ‘self-doubt and potential paralysis’ for Australian historians and anthropologists working in the area (Belonging, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 5). Amidst this wide-spread professional self-doubt, a recent right-wing attack on some of the key works in Aboriginal historiography – and some of the key historians in the field – became highly publicized and brought with it accusations about the unreliability of the ‘truth’ of revisionist colonial histories. Historians who had been considered at the vanguard of writing Aborigines back into Australian history were accused of getting their ‘facts’ wrong and of overstating the levels of violence involved in the dispossession of indigenous owners. The conservative Australian prime minister, John Howard, famously weighed into these ‘history wars’ stating that a ‘black arm-band view of history’ had been perpetuated and was damaging to Australia's national self-image. These largely destructive public broadsides reduced a number of sophisticated historiographical debates of the past twenty or so years in Australia, about marginalization, inclusion and appropriation, into a search for the historical ‘truth’ about an apparently masculine colonial frontier.

Ancient history · Appropriation · Colonialism · Frontier · Historiography · Indigenous · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Vanguard · Australian History and Society · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Gender Studies · History · Law