How do people know or, more poignantly, make sense of events that precede their own lives? How are experiences passed down through the generations – and how does knowledge of our forebears’ experiences affect our understanding of both broader historical events and the world in which we currently live? What can be gained by distinguishing between different ways the past is known, for example, the past known through memory (by recalling an event, place or person that has been actually experienced) and the past known through abstract means (such as through lectures, books, information boards)? These are some of the rather vague and general questions I have grappled with while trying to understand how societies live with historical injustices or, more particularly, how non- Aboriginal Australians know, make sense of and relate to the historical injustice of Aboriginal dispossession.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence I was completely ignorant about the Aboriginal people who belonged to the land my forebears occupied in the 1870s and on which I grew up. It was not until I was at university in the early 1990s that I began to learn how Europeans came to be in this country. This newly acquired knowledge shook me and made me question everything I thought I knew about the world in which I lived. I was shocked and sickened: at the injustice and manner of the original owners’ dispossession; that our whole society, our whole legal and parliamentary system, was based on such a fundamental, massive immoral act which no one seemed to speak about; that I had remained completely unaware of this for the first 20 years of my life and had never had any cause to question or think about European presence here; that when I told others what I had recently learned, no one seemed particularly interested.

The general lack of discussion and concern about how Europeans came to be here which prevailed in Australia throughout much of the twentieth century has, in certain ways, been superseded. Now, in the twenty- first century there is greater awareness and acknowledgement of the violence of European occupation and the multifaceted injustices Aboriginal people suffered and continue to suffer as a result of colonialism.