'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)
'‘I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted not to go back.’ (15)
'But 50 years later, he did go back. Dean Ashenden begins with tourist signs and their silences, on his way to Warumungu Country where he lived as child. As Ashenden moves northwards, he takes us on a tour of great billboards erected in prominent places of small towns, paying homage to ‘explorers’ and ‘pioneers’. Where were the Aboriginal people?' (Introduction)
'How a journey north from Adelaide led to Telling Tennant’s Story, the 2022 Political Book of the Year'
'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)
'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)
'How a journey north from Adelaide led to Telling Tennant’s Story, the 2022 Political Book of the Year'
'‘I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted not to go back.’ (15)
'But 50 years later, he did go back. Dean Ashenden begins with tourist signs and their silences, on his way to Warumungu Country where he lived as child. As Ashenden moves northwards, he takes us on a tour of great billboards erected in prominent places of small towns, paying homage to ‘explorers’ and ‘pioneers’. Where were the Aboriginal people?' (Introduction)
