The Country That Lost Its Memory

Australia has amnesia. When Veronica Gorrie won two book awards she did what all literature prize-winners do here—she abused the country, kept the money, and misremembered the past: “I find it ironic that the Victorian State Government are awarding me, considering they were the ones that committed past atrocities on my ancestors … I forgive you.” Nobody reminded her that no Victorian state government ever committed atrocities on Aborigines or any of her other forebears, and that no government massacres of Aborigines occurred in the history of the Colony of Victoria. The period of violence between her Aboriginal ancestors and her white ancestors, often beginning with the killing and mutilation of the latter by the former, occurred during the period when the territory of conflict was loosely administered from Sydney between 1836 and 1851 as the Port Phillip District. It was also a period when her Aboriginal ancestors were still killing other Aborigines as they had always…