Reconciliation and the great Australian silence

In 1968, W.E.H. Stanner delivered a lecture, The Great Australian Silence in which he argued there was a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale' (Stanner 1968) concerning many areas of Indigenous and non-Indigenous history in Australia, such as invasion and massacres. In 1991, the Australian parliament unanimously implemented a reconciliation process which aimed to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by the centenary of federation in 2001. A key goal of this process was to educate the wider Australian community about reconciliation and Indigenous issues, including Indigenous and non-Indigenous history. In this paper, I examine the efforts made during the reconciliation decade to address 'The Great Australian Silence'. I analyse the publications developed during the process that were designed to educate the wider community about Indigenous and non-Indigenous history. I argue that these publications were restricted in detailing Indigenous and non-Indigenous history due to the nationalist framework of the reconciliation process