Journals, Knowledge, and Silenced Voices: Indigenous Perspectives in Victoria,
Journals have been central to human history, shaping education, collective memory, and the way societies understand themselves. In Victoria and across Australia, journals written by explorers, settlers, and officials provide invaluable but partial records of colonisation. These writings influenced how Indigenous peoples were represented, often silencing Aboriginal voices while reinforcing colonial authority. This article examines the role of journals in shaping educational narratives and global perspectives, highlighting both their value and their limitations. It also explores the absence of Indigenous testimony in many records, the consequences for human rights, and the growing movement to recover, reinterpret, and tell these stories from Aboriginal and other Indigenous perspectives worldwide.
The rise of journals as knowledge tools
Journals—diaries, logbooks, and field notes—have long served as tools for education and knowledge-building. From the fifteenth century age of exploration to nineteenth-century scientific expeditions, journals were used to record observations, events, and reflections. These texts shaped how knowledge was transmitted in schools, universities, and governments (Pratt 1992).
In colonial contexts, journals became a key method of documenting new territories, cataloguing plants and animals, and describing encounters with Indigenous peoples. For colonial authorities, they provided intelligence, justification for expansion, and material for maps, scientific papers, and policy decisions.
Journals in Victoria and Australia
In Victoria, some of the earliest written records are the journals of explorers such as Hamilton Hume and William Hovell (1824–25), Major Thomas Mitchell (1836), and John Batman (1835). These journals recorded landscapes, resources, and encounters with Aboriginal people.
While invaluable historical sources, these journals often reflected a Eurocentric worldview. Aboriginal peoples were described in ways that justified dispossession: as “obstacles,” “natives,” or “dying races.” Their complex laws, languages, and cultural systems were rarely acknowledged (Boyce 2011; Broome 2005).
Later, colonial officials such as George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District, kept journals that documented frontier conflict and mission life. Robinson’s journals provide important insight into Aboriginal resistance, massacres, and survival—but they are still framed through the lens of a British protector, not through Wadawurrung or Woiwurrung voices (Clark 1998).
Shaping education and social understanding
Colonial journals profoundly influenced how history was taught in schools and understood socially:
Education: For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Australian schoolchildren learned history from settler journals and memoirs, which emphasised discovery and pioneering rather than Aboriginal dispossession.
Social understanding: Journals shaped public narratives of progress, portraying colonisation as inevitable and Indigenous peoples as vanishing. This created collective myths of terra nullius and erased Aboriginal sovereignty from mainstream memory (Reynolds 1981).
Scientific education: Naturalists’ journals documented species and landscapes, forming the foundation of Australian environmental science—but often ignored Indigenous ecological knowledge.
Silenced voices and human rights
While settlers, explorers, and missionaries recorded their perspectives, the voices of Aboriginal peoples were rarely written down. Oral storytelling, ceremony, and song were primary methods of knowledge transmission for Aboriginal communities. Colonisation disrupted these systems and denied them the same educational legitimacy as written journals.
This exclusion had human rights consequences:
Voices not heard: The experiences of women, children, and Elders on missions and reserves were rarely recorded.
Stories not told: Accounts of massacres, forced removals, and cultural survival were suppressed in official records.
Legal invisibility: Journals were often used as evidence in courts and land disputes, privileging written colonial accounts over oral Aboriginal testimony.
Globally, similar patterns occurred:
In North America, the journals of settlers like the Pilgrims or Lewis and Clark overshadowed Native perspectives.
In Africa, explorer journals shaped European understanding of the continent while erasing local histories.
In New Zealand, Māori oral histories were sidelined by colonial administrators’ records of land purchases and wars.
Worldwide Indigenous perspectives and journals
Indigenous peoples worldwide had (and continue to have) their own systems of recording knowledge—through art, song, and oral tradition. However, these were dismissed by colonial powers as non-scientific. The dominance of European journals thus shaped global knowledge in ways that reinforced empire.
Today, Indigenous scholars and communities are reinterpreting journals to restore missing voices:
In Victoria, Aboriginal groups use settler journals to trace massacres and relocations, reading them “against the grain” (Clark 1995).
In Canada, First Nations scholars re-examine fur traders’ journals alongside oral histories.
In New Zealand, Māori historians integrate whakapapa (genealogy) with colonial records to balance perspectives.
Reclaiming and reshaping narratives
In recent decades, journals once used to justify colonisation have been reclaimed as tools for truth-telling. Academic projects and community-led archives now place Aboriginal oral histories alongside explorers’ journals, exposing the silences and omissions.
In Victoria, initiatives linked to the First Peoples’ Assembly and local Registered Aboriginal Parties have supported the recovery of oral traditions and family stories. Internationally, similar efforts in Canada (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and South Africa (post-apartheid oral history projects) show how confronting the imbalance of recorded voices can reshape education and collective understanding.
Conclusion
Journals have been central to shaping global education and collective understanding. In Victoria, Australia, and worldwide, they recorded colonisation from a European perspective, framing Aboriginal peoples as objects of observation rather than subjects of history. This imbalance silenced Indigenous voices and contributed to human rights violations by erasing their perspectives. Today, however, journals are being reinterpreted alongside oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge systems, creating new narratives that challenge colonial silences. Through this process, journals become not only records of the past but also instruments of justice, education, and reconciliation.
References
Barwick, D. (1998) Rebellion at Coranderrk. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Boyce, J. (2011) 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. Melbourne: Black Inc.
Broome, R. (2005) Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Clark, I. (1995) Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria 1803–1859. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Clark, I. (1998) The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate. Melbourne: Heritage Matters.
Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
Reynolds, H. (1981) The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Melbourne: Penguin.
Written, Researched and Directed by James Vegter 16/09/2025
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