Australian Historiography and Indigenous Rights: From Silence to History Wars

The trajectory of post-war historical scholarship in Australia initially lagged behind New Zealand. Until the mid-1960s, academic historians largely neglected the encounter between Aboriginal people and settlers. Anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner famously condemned this neglect as "the great Australian silence." This silence ended as a political movement for Aboriginal rights gained momentum, including calls for land rights, freedom rides, and the landmark 1967 referendum. This climate spurred new historical inquiry into the indigenous past.

A major research project sponsored by the Social Science Research Council of Australia, led by historian Charles Rowley, framed the issue through "race relations." Rowley’s work influenced a younger generation of politically engaged historians like Henry Reynolds, Raymond Evans, and Lyndall Ryan. They fundamentally revised the earlier narrative of peaceful settlement, characterizing British colonization as an "invasion," frontier conflict as a "war," and Aboriginal response as "resistance." Their accounts emphasized violence driven by capitalism and racism, tallied Aboriginal deaths in the tens of thousands, and detailed subsequent discriminatory legislation and confinement to government reserves.

By the late 1970s, this framework was seen as Eurocentric and overly generalized. A new field, "Aboriginal history," emerged, championed by scholars involved in the journal Aboriginal History, such as anthropologist Diane Barwick and historian Niel Gunson. This approach sought greater Indigenous perspective. In the early 1980s, Henry Reynolds produced a pioneering work analyzing how Aboriginal people perceived and acted towards Europeans, emphasizing continuity and change and drawing on anthropological insights, though still reliant on settler sources.

Research in the 1980s expanded under this new paradigm. Studies by scholars like Bob Reece and Marie Fels challenged the sole focus on conflict, highlighting frontier accommodation and inter-relationships. Work by Andrew Markus, Anna Haebich, and Peter Read, often using oral history, revised understandings of the post-frontier period, detailing life on reserves, the devastating impacts of assimilation policies, and the creation of "the stolen generations." Concurrently, studies of political organizations highlighted transnational influences and tensions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners.

The rise of Aboriginal history was propelled by growing Aboriginal engagement. An Aboriginal history movement in the 1980s-90s produced personal and family histories, like Sally Morgan'sMy Place. Questions of authorship and authority became central, with Aboriginal spokespersons asserting custodianship of the Aboriginal past. This challenged academic historians’ methods and truth claims, leading some to collaborative oral history projects and others to analyze Aboriginal narratives as accounts of the past rather than purely from the past.

From the late 1980s, influenced by postmodernism and postcolonialism, focus shifted to the representation of Aboriginal people in settler discourse. This work examined explorers' naming practices, the role of anthropologists, the ideologies of assimilation, and settler memory and forgetting. Henry Reynolds again had major public impact, arguing that British colonization illegally ignored Aboriginal title under the fiction of terra nullius, seeking a new moral foundation for the nation akin to Treaty debates in New Zealand.

This settler-focused scholarship expanded as scholars from philosophy and literary studies entered the field. Indigenous history also became central to new national histories, like the feminist work Creating a Nation (1994), and entered the domain of public history. However, these developments occurred alongside the "history wars" of the 1990s, a fierce public and political debate where radical conservatives attacked the findings of "Aboriginal history" and policies of Aboriginal self-determination. Although this assault has receded, its legacy shaped a contentious public understanding of Australia’s colonial past.