![]() ![]() ![]() I was goaded into writing about the civilisation of the civilisation of Aboriginal people by elders who contested the version of Australian history I had been taught in school and was continuing to be taught by professors, politicians and the media. They were not always removed from the public record, although that happened frequently enough, but removed from the conversation and thought of a supine population, complacent with their arrival in the fairest land of all. Legislators, historians and educators soon ensured all those observations were left out of the public conversation. Many of the explorers were like curious children and wrote about the agricultural villages they rode through. The Australian “explorers”, first witness to country, were agents of the empire whose intent was not only to remove the prior civilisation from the land but also the memory of the invader. When Australia fabricated a fairy story of how it came by the country it was so confident of the people’s complicity in the fraud that it thought it unnecessary to wash the blood off the knife. Bangarra performing Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu at Sydney Opera House. ![]()
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