Stanner and the silence. (Letters).(representation of Aborigines in Australian histories and commentaries)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: S.G. Foster's feeble polemic, "Contra Windschuttle" (March 2003), makes much of Windschuttle's "basic misunderstanding" Of what the anthropologist W.E. Stanner and, after him, the historian Henry Reynolds meant by the "great Australian silence".

Stanner coined the term for his 1968 Boyer Lectures on the ABC, using it to label "a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale". According to Foster, Stanner surveyed "a mixed lot of histories and commentaries" published between 1939 and 1955 and concluded that the Aborigines had largely been written out of Australia's past. In fact Stanner did not need to make any such survey, because he had reached that conclusion even before 1939. His essay "The Aborigines" in Some Australians Take Stock (1939) makes that clear from his opening lines:

 
   A tragedy underlies the rise of 
   Australia from convict colony 
   to Dominion Status. Often 
   shamefully, and always 
   miserably, the black tribes have 
   died out wherever the whites 
   have overran the continent. ...