Buy Dark Emu. Read it. And Pascoe's 2007 book 'Convincing Ground'. Read that too. Also Read 'Lying For the Admiralty' by Margaret Cameron-Ash, Bill Gammage's 'The Biggest Estate on Earth' and 'Why Weren’t We Told?' by Henry Reynolds.
Read James Demark’s 1893 book 'Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago'. Read James Bonwick and John West’s 'History of Tasmania' first published in 1852. Read 'Conspiracy of Silence' by Timothy Bottoms. Read 'Grit' by @DavidHuntGirt and 'Warrior' by Libby Collins.
Read or watch Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech in 1993. Read Bill Stanner's 1968 Boyer Lecture 'titled 'After The Dreaming'. Read 'Lies, Damned Lies' by @clairegcoleman, and read all of Oodgeroo Noonuccal works. Watch First Footprints and First Australians.
Read 'Hidden in Plain View' by Paul Irish. Read the #UluruStatement - a statement issued to the Australian people not issued to politicians. Read them all. There are so many brilliants works by Indigenous and non Indigenous authors and historians.
Our nation's history is more than the selective creation and curation by colonial historians. As Bill Stanner argued in 1968, "Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, has been built on a state of forgetting, which can't be explained by absent-mindedness."
Stanner said: "It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape."
"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." Read about the time Sir Henry Parkes (considered the Father of Federation) said in 1888, when...
...he was asked which activities would be included for Aboriginal people in the celebrations marking a centenary of British colonisation of Australia: “And remind them that we have robbed them?” he replied.
As Richard Flanagan wrote a few years ago: "Telling our story is not politics. Seeking to deny our story is power asserting itself over the past. When our past remains stifled and gagged, it renders us unable to honour it in its full complex majesty, tragedy and wonder."
Sorry Typo: it's 'Girt' by @DavidHuntGirt. Read that. And 'True Girt' too.
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