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Impacts of history today

This information was prepared by Tim Muirhead, CSD Network. Tim is a Perth-Based facilitator and trainer who works extensively in the area of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations.

The events of the past are very important to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today for two main reasons.

Lived history

Firstly – it wasn't that long ago. There are many people alive today who:

There are even a few very old people today who witnessed killings and poisonings as young children.

This affected those people deeply.

Inter-generational trauma

Secondly, though, when people experience trauma, the wounds can also affect their children, and their grand-children, and their great grand-children.  When someone is traumatised by a difficult event, their life is often turned upside down by emotional 'wounds'. And if they are unable to heal those wounds themselves, they can pass  them on to their children.

A non-Indigenous example of inter-generational trauma

For example, many Vietnam Veterans were traumatised by their experiences in the Vietnam War and found it difficult to heal from those wounds because their experience was not widely honoured until years later.  For some of these men  these wounds played out in the form of addiction, alcoholism, violence, suicide, or simply an inability to truly connect with others. Some of their children then, were raised in a traumatic environment - deeply affected by their father’s or mother’s wounds. Those children, then, developed their own wounds which also get played out in addiction, suicide, etc, and so it gets passed down the generations.

One of the big differences between Vietnam Veterans and those from previous wars was that, on their return, their nation as a whole did not acknowledge what they had been through. Because of this, individuals, families and governments have had to explore how to ensure that these wounds are healed, so that the inter-generational impacts of that war of 40 years ago are minimised.

Many generations of Indigenous peoples around the nation have been affected by traumatic events in the last 100 - 200 years. These experiences have included war in the earlier years as they tried to defend their country, or continue to live on it;  widespread death from disease; slavery; forced removal from land; imprisonment (often for offences they didn't know they'd committed); being taken from their parents and families at a young age and held in institutions (where abuse of children was often rife); having their children taken from them and many other traumatic experiences.

History records that even where Indigenous peoples shared traumatic experiences with other Australians, they often didn’t have the same support extended to them. For example Indigenous veterans from the first and second world wars were not provided the same entitlements as their fellow diggers such as war pensions, cheap housing loans.

And, like Vietnam Veterans, the fact that the wider community did not know or acknowledge what they had been through has made the healing process very difficult. In many families, inter-generational trauma has been the result.

Please click on the arrow to watch the movie clip "Brown Skin Babay by Bobby Randall"

Further information on intergenerational trauma and the stolen generation can be found at:

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