Reflecting on Contesting and Presenting History With a Focus on the Impacts in the Present
For many Australians, historical accounts of massacres are fringe events from a distant past and are irrelevant to the way our communities operate and the health, economic, and social outcomes for Indigenous people today. Arguably, the persistence of these views is because the scale of massacres has...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia
2025-05-01
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| Series: | Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.59158/001c.137965 |
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| Summary: | For many Australians, historical accounts of massacres are fringe events from a distant past and are irrelevant to the way our communities operate and the health, economic, and social outcomes for Indigenous people today. Arguably, the persistence of these views is because the scale of massacres has only recently become apparent with the release of nationally verified massacre records (see Ryan et al., 2025, who produced the map used as a background image for this article). There has been no study that has attempted to link these events to current-day outcomes. The Historical Frontier Violence Project, an Australian Research Council Discovery grant, brings together quantitative and qualitative expertise from economics, leadership, engineering, geography, history, and psychology in a first attempt to build data to identify the historical factors that incited frontier violence, quantify the legacy on communities today, and conduct fieldwork to understand how historical trauma is transmitted across generations. In this reflection paper three of the researchers–an economist, a leadership scholar, and an internationally renowned researcher in intergenerational trauma–come together to consider our collective reflections on the project at the halfway point. The writing represents our first attempt to dialogue across disciplines as we make sense of early findings of truth-telling and consideration of whether healing is possible. The writing weaves in and out of first person, second person, and third person voices as we present ideas, communicate community voices, and speak our experiential knowledge. |
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| ISSN: | 2201-7089 |