ABSTRACT
Australia is suffering from a form of cultural amnesia where they are willing to sacrifice Australian Aboriginal pedagogy as the oldest living culture in the world to assimilationist policies driven towards participation and access programmes disguised as Aboriginal advancement. Australian Aboriginal culture is important simply because of its presentation of surviving and having endured not only the horrors of colonisation but the tens of thousands of years of productivity and continual culture achieved before white European invasion. As Europeans colonised the world the effects of world wide diseases had devastating effects on Indigenous peoples. Australia's contemporary place in the world is so well influenced by its long-term attachment to its colonial past that it drives the present. Leading Australian historian Henry Reynolds was so greatly influenced by William Stanner's plea for truth and justice, he committed his life to addressing the great Australian silence.
