Welcome to a seminar with Matthew R Keynes
Dr. Matthew R. Keynes
McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne
This is a hybrid seminar, all interested are welcome to participate via Zoom or in person. If you want to join digitally, sign up below and a meeting link will be sent out the day before the seminar.
This seminar is part of the seminar series Várdduo 25 years. Find out more about Várdduo's 25th anniversary celebrations here.
Education in a ‘twilight of knowing’
The Australian public drifts ‘in a twilight of knowing and not knowing’, said acclaimed historian Anna Haebich in 2000. In Broken Circles, Haebich showed that despite anguished outpourings of concern–‘I’m sorry, I just didn’t know!’–following the 1997 publication of the Bringing Them Home report, evidence of Indigenous child removals had been circulating publicly from the earliest colonial times. How is it that these, and other moments of public consciousness are prone to ‘slip from national memory’ and subside back ‘into the twilight zone’? What do these cycles of not-knowing reveal about Australia's national and moral understanding?
This paper considers the role of education in the ‘twilight of knowing’. The claim of ‘not knowing’ about Australia’s Indigenous and colonial history because it was not taught in school, is an experience articulated across generations, and reveals large and layered gaps in public understanding. Imperatives to address these educational deficiencies are diverse and long-standing, but their legacies vexed. In this presentation, Keynes will examine the relationship between knowledge and education in the shaping of Australia’s national and moral understanding of the past. In doing so, Keynes will draw out some key ethical dilemmas, including for societies, like Sweden, that are coming to terms with histories that have been similarly obscured from national understandings of the past.
Matthew R. Keynes is a non-Indigenous historian, living and working on Wurundjeri Country, Melbourne Australia. Matthew is currently leading an international project on truth commissions, exploring how educators in Australia and the northern Nordic states are engaging with truth-telling about colonial legacies.
His publications include the monograph Education and Historical Justice: Redress, Reparations and Reconciliation in the Classroom (Bloomsbury 2025, co-written with James Miles) and the edited volume Historical Justice and History Education (Palgrave 2021, co-edited with Daniel Lindmark, Henrik Åström-Elmersjö and Björn Norlin) as well as articles and chapters in a range of significant outlets.
