What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the history of Australia
Teaching History feature
![Decorative flag used in Sydney in 1901 as part of Australian Federation celebrations](https://history.org.uk/library/2310/0000/0057/Decorative_flag_used_in_Sydney_in_1901_as_part_of_Australian_Federation_celebrations_640.jpg)
In 1968, in his Boyer Lectures, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting:
It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale.
Stanner’s lectures have since become a defining moment of the discipline, partly because of the image he captured: for a practice based on documentation, archiving and storytelling, silence is a compelling idea...
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