ABSTRACT
On 15 February 1965, a ragged line of some thirty students from the University of Sydney found themselves outside the Returned Servicemen’s League club in the tiny dusty town of Walgett, in far north-west New South Wales. Nationally, the process of memorialization is fostered officially, by prime ministers, and unofficially, by the many thousands who march, pray and watch on Anzac Day, and by the thousands of young backpackers who visit the site of Australian graves at Gallipoli each year. The national narratives begin with the convicts, the men and women expelled from their homeland, and forced to live and labour in a hostile distant place, and continue in narratives of subsequent settlement, exploration and pioneering, of white settlers locked in a harsh and bitter struggle to farm the often dry and hostile land. Australian colonial and later national identity was thus in its deepest sense built on the exclusion of indigenous peoples from foundational historical narratives.
