WARNING: This story contains elements that some readers may find distressing.
'The Great Australian Silence': it's a phrase that changed the trajectory of the nation, but who said it?
In 1968, anthropologist Bill Stanner went on ABC Radio's Boyer Lecture.
Stanner called out the "cult of forgetfulness" practised by Australia, where colonial violence inflicted on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was not only ignored, but silenced.
"What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned into a habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale," he said.
"It's a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape."
Stanner summed up his ideas, radical at the time, with the now-famous phrase.
Calling out atrocities
Stanner spent much of his life in the 1930s working in Indigenous communities and became one of the very first anthropologists to write about Aboriginal people and culture from a strength perspective.
He also called out the atrocities and devastation of colonisation.
"His major love was certainly working with Aboriginal people in communities and he had an incredible insight," said University of Newcastle's Wollotuka Institute of Aboriginal Studies Director and Worimi man Professor John Maynard.
"There were a lot of anthropologists running around in Aboriginal communities, but Stanner's insight was vastly different to many. At that particular point in time, a lot of the stuff he was writing, particularly in the 60s, was about the failed policies of segregation, assimilation [and] integration."
Stanner wrote that these policies had "failed miserably".
"The reality was that Aboriginal people were better placed to direct their own affairs, and guard guide their own future and where we went in this country, and that was a groundbreaking analysis for that particular time period," said Prof Maynard.
Professor John Maynard has been inspired by Stanner's work. Credit: History Bites/NITV
Now, as an academic of Indigenous Studies, he believes the past is still waiting to be acknowledged.
"Australia has still not dealt with its past at all. And in regards to massacres, poisonings, we know that Aboriginal people were, in some sense, nearly obliterated from this continent," he said.
"That reality has been written out - not wanting to look at the horrors of what happened in this country is, you know, a massive failing on behalf of this country."
The Massacre Map
And whilst much of the country looked away, one woman and her team at the University of Newcastle have been writing it all down.
Professor Lyndall Ryan has collated information about the massacres of Aboriginal people across the country between the European invasion in 1788 to the 1930s.
The information is marked on an interactive map, called the Colonial Frontier Massacre Map, with a yellow circle signalling a place where a massacre has occurred.
Professor Lyndall Ryan with the massacre map she and her team at Newcastle University have created. Source: Supplied
Gathering information about each was a momentous task, with records not only coming from newspapers and colonial diaries, but also oral histories from Aboriginal survivors and their descendants.
"There's a great code of silence about massacre. The people, the perpetrators, are not going to tell you they did it," she said.
"It's an illegal act, it is the mass killing of people," she said.
The legacy of the Great Silence
Professor Ryan was greatly inspired by Stanner.
She believes that his "Great Australian Silence" meant more than just the complete absence of recognition around violent colonial killings, but also the policies that were forced onto Aboriginal peoples from 1930 onwards.
"The great Australian silence continued in the sense that the condition of Aboriginal people didn't dramatically change, they were still herded on reserves and missions, and they didn't have much of a future," she said.
"They were not getting access to education, or to good medical help, and are often not being fed very well either. And [Stanner] was very concerned about that.
Much as Stanner was concerned that living conditions for First Nations people in 1968 had not improved since the 1930s, Professor Ryan says her work is an attempt to disrupt the silence that continues to this day.
"Very few people knew what was happening, or if they did, they said nothing about it. So this massacre map is really filling ... that great silence that Stanner talked about way back in 1968," she said.
"Aboriginal people know exactly what was going on, and their stories are very truthful. We have to learn to listen very carefully.
"This is a big silence that needs to be overcome. And so there's a lot of work."
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