The construction of silence In his 1980 Boyer Lectures entitled The Spectre of Truganini, Bernard Smith suggested Australian culture is haunted by the dispossession and violence done to Aborigines. It is ‘a nightmare to be thrust out of mind’, he wrote. ‘Yet like the traumatic experiences of childhood it continues to haunt our dreams.’ Bernard Smith and W.E.H. Stanner (in his earlier series of Boyer Lectures) urged their fellow Australians to interrogate ‘the Great Australian Silence’ about Aborigines, not only to reveal suppressed facts about the frontier but also as part of an essential exploration of the white Australian psyche. For the Great Australian Silence was often ‘white noise’: it sometimes consisted of an obscuring and overlaying din of history-making. But the denial was often unconscious, or only half-conscious, for it was embedded in metaphor and language and in habits of commemoration. Silences are not just absences, though they can be manifested in that way. Silences are often discernible and palpable; they shape conversation and writing; they are enacted and constructed. We need to pay them as much attention as we pay official white noise. And analysing the uneasy language of conflict helps us discern the emotional and political slippage—the distinctive dissonance—at the heart of the Australian frontier experience.6

The euphemisms of the frontier, laconic and sharp, entered the Australian language. Aborigines were ‘civilised’ or ‘dispersed’ or ‘pacified’; white settlers went on a ‘spree’ and boasted of the ‘black crows’ they had shot. The land itself received new names—such as Murdering Creek and the Convincing Ground—that mapped the unofficial violence. The word-play was conscious and mischievous. ‘A quiet tongue’ was said to be a qualification for a frontier policeman, and the infamous W.H.Willshire boasted that it was his carbines that ‘were talking English’. These forms of language and description slip in and out of recognising the violence of the frontier. They reveal that many colonists accepted murder in their midst; but they reveal, too, their awareness that it could not be openly discussed. There were good reasons to be silent, especially after Myall Creek. Describing the organised shooting of Aborigines in Gippsland in the 1840s, F.J. Meyrick noted: ‘these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging.’ Even those who were appalled by what was happening found themselves forced into impotence and silence. Meyrick commented in 1846: ‘If I could remedy these things I would speak loudly though it cost me all I am worth in the world, but as I cannot I will keep aloof and know nothing and say nothing.’7

As an example of the construction of silence, let me introduce you briefly to Alfred Kenyon, the leading writer of Victorian pastoral history in the first half of the 20th century. The ‘greatest romance’ in Australian history, reflected Kenyon, ‘is the rise of the sheep breeder or pastoralist ... [T]he finest example of man’s mastery over the opposing forces of nature, of his justification of his position at the head of the organic world, is ... the breeding of fine wool’. Through an account of the pastoralist, Kenyon told the story of what he called ‘the peopling of the continental spaces’ or ‘the filling up of Victoria’s vacant corners’. He and R.V. Billis produced a much used map of squatting runs in Victoria which represented pastoral holdings as discrete, bounded territories (rather like Aboriginal tribal areas) that pieced together into a jigsaw claiming the whole of the state. Kenyon disparaged the possibility of Aboriginal antiquity and yet was a keen collector of Aboriginal artefacts. He removed thousands of stone tools from the landscape of south-eastern Australia, and in their place he erected stone cairns marking the paths of European explorers.

Australia’s occupation by Europeans was simple, he claimed, because of ‘the absence of any coloured race worthy of consideration’. He described it as ‘[a]n occupation where the dispossessors and the possessors lay down in amity side by side like the lion and the lamb, with the usual result to the lamb’.8
Kenyon went out of his way to excuse the squatter of any violence towards Aborigines. ‘The old-time mission station has more to answer for than the squatter’s station’, he explained. His was a class history, of wealth versus labour. Any frontier violence, said Kenyon, hedging his bets, was perpetrated by the lower classes and was unsanctioned and regrettable. He repeatedly scoffed at the tales of massacres and poisoned flour, while admitting that the rumours were widespread. In fact his continual slapping down of these stories reveals that a strong current of oral testimony of frontier violence did exist, and that Kenyon and others sought to control and suppress it. Kenyon was not inhabiting a silence, he was creating it. He was confronting a cacophony of undisciplined voices. Noise there was, and he sought to overwhelm it. Kenyon’s carefully constructed ‘white noise’ was in response to an unruly babble of whispers.9

Indigenous Australians have been very hard done by, by White settlers.  They have had their land stolen, their tribes destroyed, their culture damaged, their children stolen and their belief systems ignored or overturned.  You want to continue that happening.  Tsk, tsk. 

Keep attacking people for telling the truth, Graps.  Run along, your racism is showing.  Tsk, tsk.   

Keep attacking people for telling the truth, Graps.  Run along, your racism is showing.  Tsk, tsk.