What is Excluded from History?
Untold Chapters Of Our Past
S. J. Walker
“THOSE WHO FORGET HISTORY are doomed to repeat it.”
It is one of the first things we are told when we commence studies of high school history. It is the chief reason we are taught it in the first place.
But I wonder – how can we avoid repeating history if we never learn crucial chunks of it? We are fortunate enough to go to a School that provides a holistic and expansive history course that does not exclude or neglect events that signify our mistakes and the victims of our triumph. However, as fortunate as we are, we are also the minority.
Noel Pearson’s eulogy for Gough Whitlam reminds us of the importance of remembering the achievements and failures of those before us, of the need to know what has affected the world around us, in large and subtle ways.
Focusing on the Western World – while it directly affects us – limits our view of the rest of the world. Yes, we need to know about the World Wars so they are not repeated. We most definitely need to know about Apartheid in South Africa, and the basis for the Arab-Israeli Conflict. For that, we learn.
However, the world does not remember the things they were not taught. Smaller wars and massacres and gross violations of humanity. They do not remember the killing fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot; the tyranny of Spain’s Franco against his own people; the origins of the turmoil in Myanmar that led to the attempted genocide of minority Rohinga Muslims only recently; the wonders of the Middle Eastern world before it was ravaged by gunfire and IEDs. For that, we suffer.
History is an interesting thing; we don’t truly notice it until well after the fact. We focus on minute pockets of it in School, books, and public memorials. We keep the light of memory alive in only the most convenient of circumstances, until we are forced to confront it on our doorstep. The Allies never let Germany forget their trespasses in two world wars. The scientific community remembers the great inventors and trailblazers through history. We remember in art and literature the great civilisations of Greece, Rome, Egypt and Ancient China. From these, we learn.
“History is written by the victors,” is one of the truest sayings pertaining to the recording of world events. Unfortunate, but ringing clear, it becomes apparent that it also refers to what the “victorious” forces were involved in.
But what about the great Assyrian Empire that was a beacon for technology and culture? What about the Spanish colonisation and genocides in South America? What about the cultures of our own Indigenous Australians, and the horrors they endured and continue to endure at the hands of white Australian governments in our backyard? For these, we suffer.
Most non-Indigenous Australians never truly learn the full scope of our country’s history. That story, too, was written by the victors. We do not learn of the massacres, the dispossession, the pain of our First Australians. We do not learn of the time before Captain Cook and his European peers claimed this country as their own. We do not learn of the amazing Indigenous cultures that are bound into the soil of this great land. And for this, we suffer.