https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/australia-indigenous-uluru-aborigines.html
The demand for recognition and a distinct Indigenous voice emerges, in part, from the historical denial of both. Eighteenth-century British colonizers created the myth of the “terra nullius,” the empty land, to deny the presence of people who had inhabited it for some 65,000 years. When Indigenous groups fought to protect their lands, colonists responded with the utmost savagery. Those who survived the massacres were turned into nonpersons; until 1967, the Constitution barred the counting of “aboriginal natives” for the census, erasing them from the public record.
This history was for a long time suppressed in Australian memory. Not till the 1980s did scholars such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan begin to address it. This led to the so-called history wars of the 1990s and 2000s. Conservative historians like Keith Windschuttle dismissed the critical, revisionist accounts of what became known as the “black armband” view of history and attempted to maintain the old story of Australia.
