The Great Forgetting
Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1996. Bevan Hayward (Pooraraar). First Edition. Softcover : pp. [vi] xi [xii] [1] 160 [4 blank] : 39 illustrations by Bevan Hayward (Pooaraar) : pale blue pictorial covers.
Scatter of foxing to block top edge; tail of spine gently pushed. Near fine. Item #4436
In 2016, twenty years after his collaboration with Pooaraar was first pubished, and not long after it had gone out of print, Geoff Page reflected in an essay published by Meanjin on what had changed in those intervening years. He concluded that the Great Forgetting was over, but a Great Unwillingess remained:
"I think it is fair to say that, in the past 20 years, recognition of what really happened on the pastoral frontier in the nineteenth century has been achieved (there are few dissenting voices these days) but a willing-ness to face the implications of such recognition is harder to obtain. This is not a matter of historical ‘guilt’ and/or holding Anglo-Celtic Australians responsible for the misdeeds of their forebears, but it is a recognition that ‘settler’ Australia has always been, and is still, based on Indigenous dispossession."
Price: $70.00