Indigenous Histories and Indigenous Futures

In 2001, the UTS Review published the papers from an historical experiment prompted by Dipesh Chakrabarty on the theme of Subaltern/Indigenous/Multi­cultural.1 The experiment consisted of a timely intervention, since the “history wars” were about to explode on the Australian scene, with the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist polemic, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, in 2002. Amplified through the Murdoch press, in particular the national broadsheet The Australian, the reactionary argument was that the significance of Aborigi­nal history to Australia’s past was overstated. Historians had only been working on Aboriginal history for thirty years, but their accounts of the founding acts of colonial violence, and projection of time far beyond the shallow period since colo­nization (starting in 1788 in Sydney) was revolutionizing the traditional histori­cal settler narratives by literally prioritizing Aboriginal history and reopening the unresolved question of sovereignty.