Facing our history

This website, So That We Remember, seeks to express in both visual art and in words the realities that have shaped Australia from 1788 to the present day.

Art has the capacity to touch primal responses within us. Glenn Loughrey is a Wiradjuri man and a noted artist in this land. His contribution is vital to this project. The background colours he has chosen are akin to the earthly colours of this land. And this land is Country that has never been ceded by its Indigenous owners and inhabitants.

But, as Professor Sarah Maddison, reminds us “both black and white identities in Australia have been constructed through the language of colonialism”. She acknowledges that “Indigenous peoples have a unique relationship” to this land. And she writes “I use the term ‘settler’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ in relation to any individual or group of people who came to australia at any time after the first invasion in 1788...Settlerness is often bound up with whiteness, and settler privilege and white privilege tend to be deeply connected”. [The Colonial Fantasy pp. xi, xiii]

This website contains excerpts from the writings of contemporary Australian historians, as well as Glenn Loughrey’s artwork.

It aims to expand awareness of the cost to Indigenous’ lives and communities of the process of colonial forced dispossession. There certainly was Indigenous resistance to this grinding process of dispossession.

Professor Mark McKenna has noted that we have no significant public memorials to commemorate the Indigenous people who died in the Homeland Wars in Australia. He notes “that we have all these...memorials to fighting the wars in the northern hemisphere but...very few...about the indigenous people fighting for their own homeland”.

He sees this symptomatic remembering or forgetting as “a failure of our historical imagination”. And “as historians [have now shown] there was no history of Australia that was not Indigenous [history]. From the moment of first contact, settler history became part of [already existing] Indigenous history”. [From The Edge – Australia’s Lost Histories pp. xv, xviii]

The collection of excerpts posted on So That We Remember are arranged as daily entries. They cover every day of the year. A good number of times the date of the event is lined up on day of the entry.

They are designed to be a resource of information not only for the general reader but for use in educational settings. As regards use in school classrooms, a page hand out for each day is a handy resource for students to access. Reference to the website can also be added to syllabus resources. 

As well there is available on request a 10-page Index listing 540 topics that the excerpts cover. These include such important issues as:

Children, Women & Girls, Dispossession, Colonisation, Massacres, Resistance, Treaty, Public Opinion, Country – attachment to, Humanitarians, Extermination

 The creators of the Uluru Statement From The Heart graciously invited Australians to engage in “truth-telling”. Given the tenor of public discussion in the October, 2023, Referendum on the Voice, there is obviously a great need for Australians generally to become more aware of Australian history, especially Indigenous history. That will entail both “truth-telling” and the capacity of Australians to accept truth.

There is still a long way to go for Australia to have a deep, ongoing and mature nationwide conversation about the consequences of the past to the present, especially for this land’s Indigenous people. There is a quote: - There are no exits from history. In particular, there are no exits from the violent underbelly of Australia’s history.

Rather than the past exiting practices of silence, or of suppression, or of censorship – Australians need to enter more deeply into acknowledgment of this country’s Indigenous history. This website So That We Remember offers a path into that deeper journeying.

~ Ray Barraclough, 2024