Page "History of Australia" Paragraph 20

From the 1960s, Australian writers began to re-assess European assumptions about Aboriginal Australia – with works including Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact ( 1966 ) and Geoffrey Blainey's landmark history Triumph of the Nomads ( 1975 ).

In 1968, anthropologist W. E. H.

Stanner described the lack of historical accounts of relations between Europeans and Aborigines as " the great Australian silence.

" Historian Henry Reynolds argues that there was a " historical neglect " of the Aborigines by historians until the late 1960s.

Early commentaries often tended to describe Aborigines as doomed to extinction following the arrival of Europeans.

William Westgarth ’ s 1864 book on the colony of Victoria observed ; " the case of the Aborigines of Victoria confirms … it would seem almost an immutable law of nature that such inferior dark races should disappear.

" However, by the early 1970s historians like Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds and Raymond Evans were trying to document and estimate the conflict and human toll on the frontier.