AUSTRALIA

What Knowing Asks of Us

A personal reckoning with Australia’s silences, Indigenous history and the limits of inherited innocence.

Photo by Minna Autio on Unsplash

Growing up in Australia, there is much you see about the people here, and the way they are seen by others, that you cannot understand until you reach an age where you begin to ask questions. Or at least I did.

When I was young, I would ride my bike to my grandmother’s house after school while my mother was at work. I would play in the vacant lot next door with the kids who lived on the other side of it.

There was a girl my age who went to my school and her younger brother, only two years younger than me. He and I would play as young boys do, riding our bikes, pretending to be soldiers or policemen or whatever else we could imagine. We would go down to the park at the end of the street, and on holidays we would ride to the jetty and go jetty jumping. All of it made sense. I never thought to question it until I was asked a very odd question by a much older kid while I was on my way to my grandmother’s house after school.

“Why do you hang out with that boong?”

I had never heard the word before and had no idea what it meant. But the way he said it, I knew it was meant to cut. It was said as a challenge, one I did not really understand, so I awkwardly kept riding.

Until that moment, I had never thought of him as belonging to a category separate from me. He was simply the boy who lived beside the vacant lot, the one who raced me down the street, argued over games, dared me to jump from the jetty, and shared the ordinary kingdom of childhood with me.

I went through the regular routine my afternoons had and played my games. When I finally went home with my mother, I did what any curious kid would do and asked her what the word meant. Her discomfort with hearing the word come from me was clear in her expression. She wanted to understand how I had heard it, and when I told her, her expression dropped to one closer to sadness.

She told me it was a cruel word for Indigenous people, one said in hatred. But her reaction told me something the definition itself did not. This was not just a rude word. It belonged to a world adults understood and children eventually inherited.

That explanation only brought more confusion, and later, more questions. Did that kid hate my friend? Why? Had he done something to him? And why would you have a word for all of one kind of person?

Once you become aware of something, you begin to see it everywhere. Unfortunately, I did. I saw it in subtle ways: in glances that lingered too long, as if quietly assessing a threat; in the corner shop owner remarking that none of “those kids” ever wore shoes, probably because they did not own any; in men talking about graffiti on the community centre and assuming the “dark kids” were responsible.

To me, this made no sense. My only real point of reference for Indigenous people had been the children I played with in the vacant lot beside my grandmother’s house. They were not symbols, threats, stereotypes or representatives of anything. They were just kids. My friends. And neither of them seemed to fit the mould these adults had already made for them.

I moved away from that place while I was still young and went to the city to live with my father. For a while, I do not remember seeing many Indigenous people at all, or at least not in a way that registered with me. Then I reached high school, and there I experienced something I only have enough context to partly understand now, though even that understanding feels limited.

My new school had Indigenous students across all year levels. I do not know, even now, what those students were carrying. I cannot claim to understand their lives from the outside. But I can say that, as a boy, I sensed a guardedness I did not yet have the tools to interpret.

There was a difference in their demeanour from the children I had grown up with. They kept mostly to one another, forming a large group, and there was a guardedness about them that I did not know how to read. When they looked at me, I felt as though I had offended them simply by seeing them, as though my gaze itself had to be met with strength.

At the time, I did not understand this. I mistook distance for dislike and caution for aggression. So I moved around them, careful not to engage, unsure of what rule I had broken.

Only later did I begin to wonder whether what I had interpreted as hostility may have been something closer to self-protection. Perhaps they had already learned what I was only beginning to notice: that in this country, being seen is not always the same as being recognised.

My schooling did little to help me understand any of it. In Australian history, we learned the familiar fragments: the First Fleet, Gallipoli, the First World War, and then whatever else fit neatly into the national story.

But nothing stands out in my memory that gave context to what I was seeing around me. Nothing explained the suspicion, the separation, the jokes, the guardedness, or the silence. Nothing gave me the language to understand the country I was living in.

What troubles me now is not only that I did not understand. It is that I was never really given the tools to understand. The country had handed me symbols of itself — soldiers, settlers, beaches, flags, sporting myths, larrikins, battlers — but withheld the parts of its history that might have explained the expressions on the faces of the children standing across the schoolyard from me.

I was about to start Year 11, only a few years from being considered an adult in the eyes of the law, before I received my first real insight into the complexity of what I had been seeing. I was in the city, making my way from a bus to a train to visit my mother for Australia Day, when I walked past a group of protesters wearing black, yellow and red, holding flags in the same recognisable colours of the Aboriginal flag, and chanting: Invasion Day.

Their placards carried the date of Australia Day. That was what caught me. They were not protesting some obscure policy or distant event I could safely separate from myself. They were protesting the very day I was traveling to celebrate.

Around them, people moved through the city as if the chant were simply background noise. Some stopped and raised a fist in solidarity, joining briefly before continuing on. Others stood at a distance, shaking their heads in anger or disgust, as though the protest itself was an offence.

I remember sitting on the train afterwards, turning the words over in my mind. Invasion Day. I understood each word separately, but together they seemed to rearrange something.

Until then, Australia Day had never really seemed like a question. It was simply there: a day off, a flag on a car window, adults drinking in backyards, children swimming, fireworks, heat, and the easy language of being lucky to live here.

It had been presented to me as uncomplicated: a public holiday, a barbecue, a flag, a celebration of being fortunate enough to belong here. But if it was a celebration for some, what was it for those whose history began that day not with belonging, but with dispossession?

What stayed with me was not only the chant, but the reactions to it. Some people heard it and recognised a truth. Others heard it as an attack. I did not yet know enough to know where I stood, but I knew enough to understand that I had been standing inside a story with missing pages.

There are many things that pull at a young man’s attention, and few of us look too far beyond ourselves in youth. So, in truth, all of this took a back seat in my mind for many years. I carried the questions with me, but I did not consider them in any meaningful way until I began studying nursing.

As part of that degree, I completed a cultural awareness subject. At first, it dealt with the concept in broad terms, but it soon moved into the diversity of Indigenous cultures, the history of colonisation, and the continuing effects of that history. I remember feeling embarrassed by how basic some of my questions were. Not because the questions were foolish, but because I was old enough that I felt I should have known to ask them sooner.

Only then did I begin to understand the scale of the quiet division beneath our sunburnt land.

It did not feel like learning something new so much as being given the missing context for things I had already seen.

Each passage brought more questions. What did terra nullius mean? Who were the Native Police? What was Palm Island? When were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people allowed to vote? What was the Stolen Generation?

The terms were no longer just historical labels. They pointed to legal fictions that declared the land belonged to no one, to police forces used in the machinery of frontier violence, to islands turned into places of control and punishment, to children removed from families, and to rights withheld, delayed, complicated, or denied.

With each answer, another part of the darker side of our shared past came into view, and an understanding began to form. Of course there was anger. Of course there was mistrust. Of course justice felt owed. That much terror, that much blood, cannot simply be washed away. Nor should it be.

I began to think again of the Indigenous kids at my high school. Perhaps they had reached the age where their families had started sharing stories with them. Perhaps they too had once been confused by the words people used, by the looks that lingered too long, by the assumptions made before they had even spoken. Perhaps they had begun asking the same kinds of questions I once asked my mother, only the answers they received were not abstract. They were family history.

What does a child do with that kind of knowledge? What does it do to discover that the line of people who bore you had endured such things, and that the world around you still carried traces of the attitudes that made those things possible?

I was not equipped to answer that then. I am not sure I am equipped to answer it now. But to expect a person to carry such knowledge and have it not colour the world around them would be naïve indeed.

I found myself aware of how little I knew, even after learning so much. That awareness gave me a sense of helplessness I still carry. Perhaps I feel it even more now, because I still do not know what I am meant to do with it.

The first feeling was shock. Then shame. Then anger. But the anger is the feeling that stayed, because it had nowhere simple to go.

I was angry that so much suffering could sit inside the history of this country and still be treated by many as a side issue, an argument, or an inconvenience. Angry that so many people could speak of fairness, mateship and national pride while refusing to look honestly at the people those myths had failed. Angry that what I have inherited — my comfort, my safety, my sense of belonging — exists on land with a history I did not have to understand in order to benefit from it.

That is a hard thing to admit without making it about myself. I do not want shame to become a performance. I do not want anger to become a way of feeling righteous without being useful. But I also do not know how to look at the past honestly and remain untouched by it.

Perhaps what I want, selfishly or not, is to be proud of this country without needing to look away from parts of it. I want to believe we are capable of more than denial. I want to believe that we can mourn what should be mourned, repair what can be repaired, and build a future that does not require silence from those who were harmed.

Not because we are personally guilty for every action of the past. We are not. But because we are responsible for what we choose to do with its consequences.

And that is where the real question comes to the fore: if this is truly how I feel, what do I do with it?

How do I turn thought and feeling into meaningful action? How do I hold myself accountable to more than private sympathy or occasional anger? What would it mean to contribute, even in some small way, to meaningful change?

And perhaps the more honest question is this: Who do I ask? Where do I go to find out what is useful rather than merely comforting? Whose voices should I be listening to, and how do I make sure I am not only looking for answers that leave my life undisturbed?

I am not sure there is an answer that would satisfy me. Perhaps that is because part of me is still looking for something too clean: a deed that would settle the debt, a contribution that would quiet the shame, a way of proving to myself that I stand on the right side of things. But history does not offer that kind of absolution, and if I am honest, seeking absolution may be the wrong aim altogether.

If I believe these words, then they have to ask something of me. They cannot simply sit on the page as evidence that I have thought deeply or felt correctly. If I mean what I say, then I owe it to myself to seek out what responsibility looks like beyond my own discomfort. I owe it to the truth of the thing to keep asking, to listen where I am not the authority, and to accept that not knowing what to do is not the same as being free to do nothing.

Perhaps accountability begins not with fixing the whole wound, but with refusing to pretend it is not there. Perhaps it begins smaller than I want it to, but more demanding than I would like: in what I allow to pass unchallenged, what I choose to learn properly, whose voices I seek out, what I teach my children, how I vote, what stories I repeat, and what silences I no longer accept.

Refusing to pass on the same ignorance. Refusing to laugh at the same jokes, tolerate the same silences, or accept a version of national pride that requires forgetting. Perhaps it begins in the ordinary places where culture is made: in homes, classrooms, workplaces, conversations, votes, stories, and the way we teach our children what this country really is.

About the author

I am an Australian writer interested in memory, responsibility, family, class, and the stories we inherit without always understanding them. My essays often begin with moments from ordinary life and follow them toward the larger questions they reveal.

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