SOURCE: Healy, Chris. “‘We Know Your Mob Now’: Histories and Their Cultures.” Meanjin 49, no. 3 (spring 1990): 512-23.

In the following essay, Healy evaluates the merits of an Aboriginal understanding of history as opposed to the standard, western conception of the past.

Which of our traditions we want to carry on and which we do not is decided in the public process of transmitting a culture. The less we are able to rely on a triumphal national history, on the seamless normality of what has come to prevail, and the more clearly we are conscious of the ambivalence of every tradition, the more intense are the disputes about this process of cultural transmission.¹

For a long time Aboriginal history was an impossibility. History was both the product and the self-contemplation of European civilization. Aborigines were allowed to have myths, for myth is one of the great markers of the primitive...