Making Aboriginal history

I can’t usefully start this chapter by asking ‘Who writes Aboriginal history?’ because the written word forms but a small part of the historical endeavour. Australians, particularly Aboriginal Australians, now have recourse to much more than a history beginning ‘This is what happened’. Aboriginal history today takes form in dance, art, novel, biography, autobiography, oral history, archival research, family papers, drama, poetry and film. More useful is the question: ‘To what effect?’ In the early post-World War II decades, it was the works of non-Indigenous historians that were read by Indigenous people – and that transformed their perceptions of themselves. By 2013 the Indigenous people had become equal partners in relating and interpreting their own past. Most others followed the Indigenous lead in subject matter, attitude and interpretation. Far more than in, say, military history, the subjects of these historical endeavours, not academic authors, carry their views to the mainstream in a way which seemed impossible in 1970. It is in that year that we start