AustLit

'One of the main problems for Aboriginal history, as I see it, is to authenticate the appropriate discourse for its transmission, and this issue has been hotly debated. At one point the 'authentic' accounts of Aboriginal history were firmly locked in academic standard English. But going back to 1981 we find an Aboriginal working party for the Bicentennial History Project challenging the assumptions of historians that history and the language in which history is presented are somehow independent of each other: 'When the cues, the repetitions, the language, the distinctively Aboriginal evocations of our experience are removed from the recitals of our people, the truth is lost to us. (Langton, 1981)) (60)