One of Australia’s finest essayists, the first to cut through ‘the great Australian silence’ to convey the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture to settler Australians‘The most literate and persuasive of all contributions on Australia’s Indigenous people’ —Marcia LangtonW.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures he exposed a ‘cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’, regarding the fate of First Nations people, f...

Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner is perhaps most well known for coining the phrase the 'great Australian silence', addressing the culture of denial or 'conscious forgetting' regarding the history Australia since European arrival.This reprint of On Aboriginal Religion pays tribute to the ongoing relevance of Stanner?s work. His research into Aboriginal religion was first published as a series of articles in the journal Oceania between 1959 and 1963. In 1963 the articles were p...

WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he remains a highly significant figure in Aboriginal affairs and Australian anthropology. He contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aboriginal religion. His 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, continue to be among the most widely quoted works in the field of Aboriginal studies. He also produced some exceptionally evocative biographical portraits of A...