Aboriginal history needs to be recognized, valued, says Australian scholar.

Historians need to break the “stranglehold” of European-dominated narratives if history is to become more inclusive for Aboriginals, says a leading Australian scholar.

Historian Dr. Ann McGrath of Australian National University is engaged in a wide-ranging project that looks at “place” and its role in shaping indigenous perspectives.

In Australia, like in Canada, traditional historical narratives have focused on dates of contact between aboriginals and European colonizers. This is reflected on the land, where places occupied for millennia are today known by European-centric names imposed on the aboriginal landscape by early explorers and others.

“When you travel through Australia, you’re confronted with the chronology of colonialism,” McGrath told historians assembled in Fredericton for the annual Canadian Historical Association national conference. “We have to escape the stranglehold around the dates of contact. There has been a stranglehold of the Imperial British Narrative — it was the way history textbooks were written, it is the way history has been told. What that did was whitewash a very long Aboriginal presence.”

McGrath, the Director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, is part of a team of academic and government stakeholders in Australia that is working with Aborigines to better understand how a sense of place shaped their history and identity as a people.

It’s a project that comes with controversy, because until relatively recently, some non-aboriginal Australians have been reluctant to acknowledge the ancient history and presence of the Aborigines. For Australians of a certain age, their notion of Australian history begins with European contact. It’s a staunchly British version of history: the story of a wild land that was tamed through the civilizing efforts of white colonizers. Part of this phenomenon can be connected to Aboriginal land claims, and concern from non-Aboriginals that acknowledging the millennia-old Aborigine presence is a de facto endorsement of their claims to land title.

The problem with that narrow vision of Australian history is that it willfully ignores the presence of Aboriginal culture and history that is apparent everywhere on the Australian landscape.

McGrath’s team is taking to the field with Aborigine representatives, and videotaping them in their sacred and traditional places, where they recount tales and oral histories. McGrath says it’s important to maintain a multi-media component, especially a video component, because “gestural language” is an important part of traditional Aborigine ways of communicating.

Among the locations they are visiting are Uluru, home of the iconic Ayers Rock in Australia’s outback, as well as Kakadu National Park in Australia’s northern territory. She plans to enhance the videotaped material with modern technological tools such as GPS and Google mapping, and then make it available on Ipods, Ipads and other devices. She hopes travellers to Australia will be able to journey through Aboriginal landscapes, access the multimedia files via their Ipads and other devices, and learn about Aboriginal culture and history while in the field.

The ultimate goal, she said, is to “deconstruct the pre-eminence of Europeans in the landscape.”