Abstract

It is almost 50 years since the so-called ending of the ‘Great Australian Silence’ on the history of the brutal colonisation of Indigenous Australians. This history was omitted from school text books and typically from Australian history units at university, despite it being written about by a minority of Australian academics from the 1960s. Approaches to attempting to end the ‘silence’ and educate the population about this past most recently have included making the history compulsory at some universities and in some State school systems. Yet still the silence and lack of acceptance persists. The paper discusses the formative constructed Australian identity and its ongoing role in limiting the penetration and acceptance of this history of colonisation. The paper does this by identifying and discussing a ‘hidden national curriculum’ that operates in schools and the media around the formative national white Australian identity. A premise of the paper is that ignorance of the past is more likely to foster racism rather than understanding and so limit social justice for Indigenous Australians; so it is important the past is known and accepted in order to move forward with understanding. Thus the paper concludes its analysis of the silence and lack of acceptance of the past by suggesting a way forward to foster a sense of mutual national belonging.