Breaking the Silence

Breaking the Silence recovers the conflicted politics around Aboriginal affairs in the first decades of the twentieth century.

From 1905, when the report of the controversial Roth Royal Commission in Western Australia was made known to the public, to the eve of World War II, the condition and treatment of Aboriginal Australians, as well as their pasts and futures, were leading social questions which generated much discontent and discourse, and underscored the awakening of a national conscience. Yet this consternation was totally disproportionate to political will which contained it and consigned Aborigines on the eve of the second world war.

In canvassing aspects of this politics — Aboriginal defenders and their claims and the responses of governments to them — Alison Holland's research qualifies the mantra of a 'great Australian silence'. She asks why there was such investment in Aboriginal affairs in the first half of the twentieth century, what form it took, what was at stake and what the outcomes were. In answering these questions, the book provides important historical context for the consternation and debates still being had in the Australian polity over Aboriginal affairs and raises some important connections between the beginning of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.