In 1968, the eminent anthropologist gave a Boyer Lecture entitled After the Dreaming, which was considered a watershed moment for Australian history.
Stanner (1905–1981) argued that, when it came to this nation’s Indigenous history, Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn’t be explained by absent-mindedness.
“It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape," he said.
"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."
He coined this cult of forgetfulness or absent-mindedness as ‘The Great Australian Silence'.
Move forward some 57 years when earlier this week, Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley delivered a speech at St Matthew's Australia Day mass in Albury.
Her speech to the congregation emphasised the importance of marking Australia Day on the 26th of January.
Notably, the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 with Elon Musk's efforts to build a colony on Mars.
“Men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment,” she said.
Then outlining ‘our national story’ in her speech, Ley waxed lyrical, mentioning convict labour, migrants, the displaced, barbecues, waves, the laughter of children, the Endeavour, Captain Cook, beer mugs, gold miners, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Villers-Bretonneux and Test cricketer Travis Head.
Even Simpson and his donkey on the shores of Gallipoli and the Ukraine got a mention to illustrate ‘our story’.
In all, some 1114 words about our nation’s story.
However, of most interest, is the one prominent word that was not mentioned once in her speech. It’s the word: ‘Indigenous’.
Neither 'Aboriginal’ nor ‘First Nations.’ were mentioned either.
Seems that our nation's story – the story of 'us' – during that Sunday Australian Day morning mass doesn’t warrant including First Nations history or people.
According to the , our national day – January 26 – is a day we can ‘reflect on our complete and complex history’ and also ‘respect and celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ survival, resilience and over 65,000 years of continuous culture’.
Ley’s ‘national story’ about our national day fails to mention that this continent’s history or story stretched thousands of generations before 1788 or the 1770 arrival of Captain Cook, or William Dampier, Dirk Hartog, Abel Tasman, Willem de Vlaminck, Willem Janszoon, or Luís Vaz de Torres.
No mention of the fact that when the First Fleet arrived on these shores these lands were owned and occupied by Indigenous peoples - a fact proven by the High Court of Australia in 1992 in , which recognised the fact that Indigenous peoples had lived in Australia for thousands of years and enjoyed rights to their land according to their own laws and customs.
Senate acknowledgement
Even the Australian Senate has acknowledged this.
In 1975, the Senate unanimously adopted a motion drafted by Liberal Senator Neville Bonner urging the Australian Government 'to admit prior ownership' by the Indigenous people.’
Surely Koiki Mabo’s 10-year legal fight – a ‘David versus Goliath’ battle – is a glowing example of the Australian ‘underdog’ ethos.
It seems for Ley, even Mabo’s First Fleet like spirit of never giving up is not part of the Australian story.
READ MORE
Mabo Anniversary
Ironically, the first people to actually be called ‘Australian’ were Aboriginal people from around Port Lincoln in South Australia and Caledon Bay in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.
It was the English navigator Matthew Flinders who used the term in March 1802 and again in November 1802 to describe the Aboriginal people he saw.
"Such seemed to have been the conduct of these Australians; and I am persuaded that their appearance on the morning when the tents were struck was a prelude to their coming down, and that had we remained a few days longer, a friendly communication would have ensued," Flinders wrote in March 1802.
Flinders (1774–1814) is credited in bestowing the name ‘Australia’ on this continent he had just circumnavigated.
But Flinders is not the first person from this continent to circumnavigate it. That honour belongs to Bungaree - an Aboriginal leader from Broken Bay, north of Sydney, who sailed with Flinders on the Investigator.
Bungaree was a vital part of Flinders’ journey, acting as guide, interpreter and go between to the many Aboriginal nations they encountered. In fact, after Flinders headed back home, Bungaree would go on to complete another half circum-navigation around the continent with Phillip Parker King in 1818.
As Flinders was British, is not Bungaree the first ‘Australian’ to circumnavigate Australia? Isn’t that something to celebrate on Australia Day?
In Ley’s speech she also rejects that these previously owned and occupied lands were invaded.
“All those years ago those ships did not arrive, as some would have you believe, as invaders,” she said.
But in fact, the first person to use the term ‘Invasion’ was Captain Cook, referring to all his party's landings across the Pacific.
“We enter their ports without their daring to make opposition,” Cook wrote.
“We attempt to land in a peaceable manner, if this succeeds it's well, if not we land nevertheless and maintain the footing we thus got by the superiority of our firearms, in what other light can they then at first look upon us but as invaders of their country; time and some acquaintance with us can only convince them of their mistake.”
Ley told the congregation: “These moments are the threads of our national story, and they are all tethered whether people like it or not to the 26th of January 1788.”
Also tethered to January 26 is a group called the ‘Australian Natives Association', who during the latter part of the 19th century became a strong lobby group for Federation and for celebrating a national holiday that day.
The ‘Australian Natives Association' was founded by and for the benefit of white native-born Australians, and membership was restricted to that group.
In March 1930, the ANA annual conference resolved to name January 26 as ‘Australia Day’ and persuaded all states to rename the day by 1935.
"What the people celebrate on Australia Day is not the coming into being of the Australian Commonwealth, for that befell on New Year’s Day; and not May 9, when the first Parliament of the Commonwealth commenced its sittings; but January 26, the day in 1788 when the first permanent white settlers, being Captain Arthur Phillip’s officials, marines and transported convicts from England, landed on the shores of Sydney Cove," the ANA noted.
Bizarrely the ANA wanted people to use Aboriginal place names and to compensate Aboriginal people for their treatment by white Australians.
But the ANA also pushed strongly for the White Australia policy because it believed that Australia would have a better future if it was made up of only white migrants.
Ley knows her language matters. Her silence also matters.
As Stanner himself articulated in the Boyer Lecture: “We have been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.”
