For over 65,000 years, Aboriginal Australians maintained one of the world’s oldest continuous living cultures, with complex systems of law, art, environmental management—the main knowledge system, the Dreaming, probided a fundamental framework for understanding the world and guiding Indigenous life, both socially and culturally.
However, with the arrival of the infamous First Fleet in 1788, and with it a long history of European colonisation, this tradition was interrupted by widespread dispossession, violence, disease, and forced assimilation. Policies like the “Stolen Generations”—the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families up until the 1970s—severely disrupted cultural knowledge and identity, relegating traditional Aboriginal culture and epistemologies to a role below European systems introduced through violence.
Although Australia has undergone significant legal and political reform, especially since the 1960s, the effects of colonialism continue to be reflected in contemporary social, political and cultural inequalities evident in Australian society.
Following the massive wave of decolonisation following the end of World War 2, colonisation has become mostly a topic of the past. Nowadays, when Australians think of the idea of colonisation, they often think of it as a less than savoury part of their country’s past, albeit one that is long gone and hardly relevant in today’s world. However, the research that I have done largely challenges this perspective. It shows that while direct forms of vioence such as massacres and forced displacement have largely ended, their effects still persist through structures and institutions that were established in the process of colonisation. Contemporary inequalities demonstrate that the effects of colonial history still linger in Australia today.
The research also highlights one element of colonialism which has been largely ignored: the epistemological element. Aboriginal knowledge systems like the Dreaming and Songlines have often been dismissed in favour of dominant Western framewroks, while Indigenous perspectives are to this day marginalised within political and social institutions. Understanding the form of structural and epistemological violence which colonialism can take is important because reconciliation requires more than just symbolic recogniition; rather, it requires meaningful participation and Indigenous self-determination.
Direct violence:
visible, immediate harm inflicted on people, such as physical abuse, massacres, or violent displacement.
Indirect violence:
harm produced through institutional or social systems rather than easily recognisable violence: discriminatory laws, unequal access to healthcare and education, or other policies that create a long term disadvantage.
Epistemological violence:
the suppression or dismissal of a group’s knowledge and ways of understanding the world, erasing languages and rejecting traditional knowledge.