But, horror, the Tele warns – “students are being told to refer to Australia as having been ‘invaded’ instead of settled in a highly controversial rewriting of official Australian history”.
They even use conservative historian Keith Windschuttle and (wait for it) the Institute of Public Affairs to help make their non-case
It is beyond time for Britain to apologise to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The journals and letters of the British – from the first explorers and colonial governors to the soldiers and so-called “settlers” – who arrived from 1770 to massacre tens upon tens of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and steal their land, make unambiguously clear what happened.
Generations of Australian public intellectuals have wrestled with this shameful past. We’ve had the so-called “history wars” polarised between the alleged “black armband” of historical truth-telling and the “white blindfold” of adherence to some absurd notion of benign British settlement. There has been nothing resembling a national reckoning.
Former prime minister Paul Keating came closest to kick starting one with his 1992 Redfern speech:
... the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians,” he said.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
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