Red dots spatter wall of 'great Australian silence' over black/white frontier violence | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Fri, 07/07/2017 - 4:00am

A truth and justice commission that digs honestly and methodically into the murders of Indigenous people will take more than money. It’ll take guts

After the rejection at Uluru of politically mainstream “constitutional recognition”, a pivotal next step in conciliation between First Peoples and non-Indigenous Australia rests with “truth and justice”.

Critical to that process will be the serious continent-wide reckoning of the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people killed in the frontier violence that raged south to north, east to west, from invasion in 1788 until well into the 20th century.

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 practised on a national scale.