Historian Lyndall Ryan's contribution to the end of the great Australian silence

In mid-1838, along the foothills to the memorial site, 30 or so Wirrayaraay men, women and children of the Gamilaraay nation were indiscriminately slaughtered, and their bodies subsequently burned, in what historian Lyndall Ryan described as an "opportunity massacre".

The Myall Creek massacre was but one of hundreds of massacres of Indigenous Australians dating from early colonisation to the middle of last century, leaving as many as 60,000 killed overall. The notoriety of Myall Creek, therefore, centres not so much on what transpired that day, which - for all its forensic violence and brutality - was no aberration, but what followed, with seven of the white perpetrators of the rampage tried for murder and subsequently hanged.

As it happens, it was the long arm of time which afforded Myall Creek its infamy, with the killing eventually unmasked as the only known massacre of Indigenous people in Australia to be committed without wholesale impunity. No other massacre unleashed on Indigenous Australians during the frontier wars resulted in criminal prosecutions, much less findings of guilt.

Until the late 1960s, at the earliest, the dark history of Indigenous dispossession remained at the very fringes of the nation's public consciousness - something Buninyong historian, retired psychologist and well-known local academic Glenice Wood Lake attributes to the inevitable cultural conditioning of collective historical memory.

Like generations before her, Wood Lake, 78, who grew up in Ballarat and Warracknabeal in regional Victoria, remembers a childhood cloaked in a sanitised version of the past and the ongoing pretence of terra nullius.

"Aboriginals, even immigrants in fact, were never spoken about - not at school, not at home," she told me. "Do I remember one Aboriginal person from then? No, not one."

Her experience, with precision, corresponds with what anthropologist W.E.H Stanner famously termed - in the 1968 Boyer Lectures - "the Great Australian Silence" - a silence which assumed the parameters of a conscious forgetting "practiced on a national scale". What had been deliberately forgotten and omitted from the conventional national story of Australia, Stanner said, was the unbridled violence of the frontier wars and the long dispossession of Indigenous people.

In Wood Lake's view, the reticence of Australians then, and, to some extent, now, to accept the truth of Indigenous dispossession owed in part to fear.

"I think there's a real fear of a sense of loss if we acknowledge the past - that we will somehow lose something and the Aboriginal people will take something back," she said.

"But, of course, there's racism, too, which is absolutely endemic."

IN OTHER NEWS:

In a bid to overcome the subconscious lure of racism and fear - which, Wood Lake believes, are the product of a worldview unacquainted with the truths of Australian history - she has recently penned a delightful children's book, replete with beautiful illustrations, on Mount Buninyong in western Victoria, where she lived for the last 30 or so years.

The book, I Love the Mount, for which she's received some guidance from the Ballarat and District Aboriginal Corporation, tells the tale of a grandmother with her grandchild on a quest to explore every inch of the bewitching wilderness of the mountain.

Using the natural curiosity of children, each page introduces the reader to the Indigenous words for things like "mountain" and "water", and, in the process, gently imparts the longevity of a sophisticated culture which predates European colonisation by some 50,000 years.

"When I started this little book, I wanted to weave the beginnings of Aboriginal culture through the history of the mountain because I don't think kids in our schools - certainly not in my time - are taught anything about Aboriginal people from colonial times or even the reserves," Wood Lake said.

"For my part, as I grew up, I became aware that somehow, somewhere there was a conflict, and a bit of violence [on the frontiers] - but it was still so very peripheral," she added, noting that it wasn't until she studied history as a mature age student in her mid-20s that she gained a closer familiarity with the truths of the past.

"Whereas, for Indigenous people, there was nothing peripheral about the truth at all - for them, it was almost a complete annihilation of their people and culture.

"So, this is a story of love for the mountain and its animals, birds and plants but also a story that pays respect to the earliest inhabitants of the mountain."

Wood Lake's hope, she said, is that the book plays a role, albeit a small one, in the objectives of Indigenous truth-telling, which are focused on reckoning wider society with its collective past through unvarnished, historical accuracy.

To that extent, the book builds on the project of reconstructing Australia's historical memory from the ground up, placing faith in younger generations to shrug of the unedifying shackles of deep denial that have long haunted the nation.

Reflecting on the transformation of her own views over the course of her life, Wood Lake said she had observed, as well as personally experienced, the power of learning history to mould and revise individual perspectives and breakdown cultural stereotypes, however strong.

"Meeting people of different cultures and having that desire to open your mind against long-held ideas [marks] the beginning of new perspectives," she said, "because it's from there, through the introduction of different views, that you can find the truth."

Thirty years ago, in December 1992, Prime Minister Paul Keating spoke candidly in his Redfern address about the crimes committed against First Nations people since colonisation.

"We took the traditional lands and smashed the original way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers", he said.

The speech, marking almost 25 years since Stanner held a mirror to the cultural decay produced by the wilful forgetting, was the first occasion in which the truth of Indigenous dispossession had been acknowledged by government. For that reason, it was, at the time, widely believed to a be something of a watershed moment in the sands of Australian cultural identity - a movement to a space in which recognition of the past would become the natural order of things.

But the belief proved premature, as revealed by both the plainly racist angst surrounding native title in the mid-1990s and, a little later, the history wars, which erupted in the wake of the Bringing Them Home report, revealing, seemingly once and for all, the deep attachment of conservative Australians to national forgetting.

As reflected in the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Yoorrook Justice Commission, however, Indigenous truth-telling has, in recent times, regained the currency it lost in the wake of the history wars.

That said, there's no reason to suppose such developments will necessarily spell the end to the history wars. In 2005, the memorial to the Myall Creek massacre was vandalised, with the words "murder" and "women and children" chiselled out of the metal plaque.

And, just last October, the memorial was again subject to vandalism.

The task of reconciling the overwhelming majority of Australians to the story of their nation will be difficult, which is why ancillary contributions to truth-telling, like Wood Lake's, remain so invaluable. As historian Henry Reynolds suggests, truth-telling is "the ultimate gesture of respect".