Abstract
This paper examines the importance of oral story-telling in Indigenous Australian culture pre-and-post colonisation, highlighting the role of oral traditions, history and testimony in understanding the past, particularly to Indigenous Australians. KeywordsOral history, story-telling, testimony, Aboriginal history
Highlights
Oral history and testimony has an important role in building our understanding of the past because it is as important a form of narrative as other forms of history, when it comes to looking at Indigenous histories and cultures
To demonstrate the importance of oral history and testimony, this essay will be looking briefly at its importance in world history in general and oral story-telling in Indigenous Australian history before European colonisation, and focussing more closely on its role in Indigenous Australian history after colonisation
‘Oral history recording is an essential part of...cultural heritage work’ because ‘[t]he communities...in all their diversity are a vital source of living history’ (Veale and Schilling, 2004, p. 1), and this union of official multiculturalism and unofficial multiculturalism is why oral history is so important in historical research
Summary
Oral history and testimony has an important role in building our understanding of the past because it is as important a form of narrative as other forms of history, when it comes to looking at Indigenous histories and cultures. This focus will be through the lens of Reynolds’ early colonial history, and the transmission across Australia of the stories of the European’s arrival (1990), the big truths and little truths of history, in relation to the Stolen Generations, and the role of oral history and testimonies in law, in relation to the battle for Land Rights legislation in New South Wales.
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