In 1968 the renowned anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner delivered the annual ABC Boyer Lectures. He titled the second lecture in his series – widely regarded as groundbreaking – ‘The Great Australian Silence’. Stanner went on to explain that excluding specialist literature – that ‘large array of technical papers and books expressly concerned with the aborigines’ – he had surveyed ‘a mixed lot of histories and commentaries dealing with Australian affairs in a more general way’. Even though this ‘mixed lot’ was surprisingly few, to Stanner they ‘seemed […] the sort of books that probably expressed well enough, and may even have helped to form, the outlook of socially conscious people’ between 1939 and 1955. Explications of Aboriginal–settler relations were absent from these arguably informative texts.

So it was on the basis of a particular sort of literature, principally generalist Australian historiography published in the decades of the mid-twentieth century, that Stanner penned his most widely known and cited paragraph:

Stanner's eloquence and his extrapolation from the example of a specific and partial survey to a statement on the national consciousness is primarily responsible for engendering the still prevalent belief that Aborigines were excluded from all literature throughout the mid-twentieth century and beyond, not just in the general histories Stanner perused.

Looking beyond these general histories, there was a great deal of discussion about Aborigines in disparate media, literature and official government reports.