OK, but isn’t asserting the obvious denial itself? Bain Attwood, ‘Denial in a Settler Society: the Australian Case’, History Workshop Journal, 2017 | settler colonial studies blog

OK, but isn’t asserting the obvious denial itself? Bain Attwood, ‘Denial in a Settler Society: the Australian Case’, History Workshop Journal, 2017

19Jul17

Abstract: In this article I assume that denial is particularly marked in settler societies since their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples and they have never experienced any event like those that have forced other nations to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. Examining the case of Australia I argue that there are intriguing connections between historical denial and contemporary denial and suggest that the former has been especially marked in this case because of the nature of the latter. I contend that the nature of remembering and forgetting depended a great deal on the nature of the cultures of memory, historical discourses, and the disciplines or genres that story-tellers chose to relate their stories about the past, paying particular attention to the peculiar manner in which these conceived of the relationship between the past and the present in such a way as to render Aboriginal people as though they were out of time and so out of place in Australia. Finally, I trace a revolutionary change in the nation’s culture of memory in recent decades, which has seen Aboriginal people and culture assume a central place in the nation’s history-making.

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