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'Tennant Creek and Australia’s Unresolved Past
'The tale of a town, and of a nation
'Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact.
'Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups in a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation.
'In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy.
'In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia’s story can best be told.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
-
The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Inside Story , November 2022;
— Review of Telling Tennant's Story : The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence 2022 single work autobiography'How a journey north from Adelaide led to Telling Tennant’s Story, the 2022 Political Book of the Year'
-
A Din of Competing Noise : Confronting History at Tennant Creek
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 16-17)
— Review of Telling Tennant's Story : The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence 2022 single work autobiography'In Telling Tennant’s Story, Dean Ashenden gives a lucid, succinct, eminently readable account of the reasons why Australia as a nation continues to struggle with how to acknowledge and move beyond its past. Travelling north to visit Tennant Creek for the first time since leaving it as a boy in 1955, Ashenden is provoked to question the absence of shared histories on the monuments and tourist information boards along the route. Mostly, the signs record pioneer history, from which the Indigenous people are absent. When the Indigenous story is invoked, it records traditional practices and does not mention white people. ‘How did they get from then to now?’ he muses. ‘Just don’t mention the war.’' (Introduction)
-
A Din of Competing Noise : Confronting History at Tennant Creek
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 16-17)
— Review of Telling Tennant's Story : The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence 2022 single work autobiography'In Telling Tennant’s Story, Dean Ashenden gives a lucid, succinct, eminently readable account of the reasons why Australia as a nation continues to struggle with how to acknowledge and move beyond its past. Travelling north to visit Tennant Creek for the first time since leaving it as a boy in 1955, Ashenden is provoked to question the absence of shared histories on the monuments and tourist information boards along the route. Mostly, the signs record pioneer history, from which the Indigenous people are absent. When the Indigenous story is invoked, it records traditional practices and does not mention white people. ‘How did they get from then to now?’ he muses. ‘Just don’t mention the war.’' (Introduction)
-
The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Inside Story , November 2022;
— Review of Telling Tennant's Story : The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence 2022 single work autobiography'How a journey north from Adelaide led to Telling Tennant’s Story, the 2022 Political Book of the Year'
Awards
- 2022 winner Australian Political Book of the Year Award
- 2022 longlisted Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature
- Tennant Creek, Mataranka - Tennant Creek area, Central Northern Territory, Northern Territory,