Having been born at the tail end of the baby boom, it was inevitable I would grow up heavily indoctrinated in the white-armband view of Australian history.
I, and an entire generation, were force-fed an ideology that borrowed heavily from the American concept of "manifest destiny" and dismissed the 60,000 years before 1770 as a footnote. It is no wonder so many Anglo Australians of my vintage are triggered when the frontier wars are brought up or some brave soul argues for their recognition in the Australian War Memorial.
The instinctive response is to dismiss this as a blood libel on the courageous explorers, colonists, squatters and early settlers who forged a nation out of a wilderness sparsely populated by people dismissed by Pauline Hanson as the "most primitive" on earth.
