I’ve been asked to reflect on how much (if at all) relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia have changed since the publication, 20 years ago, of The Great Forgetting, a collaborative book by the late Aboriginal artist Bevan Hayward (Pooraraar) (pronounced ‘Poira’) (1938–2004) and me. It was published by Aboriginal Studies Press and has just recently gone out of print.

As I said in that book’s Author’s Note, my interest in Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal relations began, belatedly, ‘with the lead-up to the Bicentenary in 1988, the associated media bombast serving only to make me and many others certain that a key element in Australian history was being left out’. I had studied Australian history at the University of New England under the notable Russel Ward (author of The Australian Legend). I’d taught Australian history intermittently in high school since the mid 1960s and had at least some familiarity with the work of Manning Clark (1915–1991) but nowhere by the early 1980s did I have a sense of The Other Side of the Frontier as portrayed by Henry Reynolds in his first book of that name—and in his many subequent volumes.