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Having been born at the tail end of the baby boom, it was inevitable I would grow up heavily indoctrinated in the white-armband view of Australian history.

I, and an entire generation, were force-fed an ideology that borrowed heavily from the American concept of "manifest destiny" and dismissed the 60,000 years before 1770 as a footnote. It is no wonder so many Anglo Australians of my vintage are triggered when the frontier wars are brought up or some brave soul argues for their recognition in the Australian War Memorial.

The instinctive response is to dismiss this as a blood libel on the courageous explorers, colonists, squatters and early settlers who forged a nation out of a wilderness sparsely populated by people dismissed by Pauline Hanson as the "most primitive" on earth.

Today I find it sadly comic that I and my peers accepted without question that Captain Cook had "discovered" a land that was home to the oldest surviving culture on the planet.

The well-documented massacre at Myall Creek, with its tragic epilogue involving the rape, torture and murder of a young Wirrayaraay woman, Ipeta, was either unimportant, best forgotten, or not fit for young ears.

A demographic study released this month revised the pre-1788 population baseline to more than 2.2 million Indigenous Australians; far more than the previously accepted figure of "no more than 795,000 and probably less than half that".

According to Professor Corey Bradshaw and Professor Lynette Russell, there were 2.06 million "excess deaths" between 1788 and 1861. They were the result of European diseases, starvation after being driven off traditional lands, and frontier violence.

Historians are revising the death toll from settler violence upwards by almost an order of magnitude. The old estimate that about 20,000 Indigenous people and between 2000 and 5000 colonists were killed has gone out the window. It is now believed the actual Indigenous death toll was more than 100,000.

While such findings are hotly contested, especially by those with a vested interest in the demonisation of today's Indigenous community as the author of its own misfortunes, they are based on research by respected academics and........

© Canberra Times