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While The Voice of Silence established that historical fiction can meaningfully humanise the emotional dimensions of colonisation, white-written narratives such as Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) remain epistemologically constrained by the very Western frameworks they seek to critique. To merely include Aboriginal perspectives within those inherited structures is insufficient. To truly move beyond Stanner’s “Great Australian Silence” demands a more fundamental methodological reimagining. The question, therefore, is not simply whether historical fiction can supplement empiricist historiography, but whether Indigenous-authored fiction can displace its foundational assumptions entirely, substituting Enlightenment-derived archival logics with the oral, place-based, and cosmological knowledge systems that Western historiography has long rendered illegible. Ultimately, Indigenous historical fiction emerges as a potent site of intervention, its empirical freedoms enabling an imaginative reconstitution of occluded histories while staging a radical epistemic inclusion of Indigenous knowledge systems to create a decolonised historiography.
In contrast to Dark and Grenville, Noongar author Kim Scott illuminates historical fiction as a mode capable of fostering profound cultural depth, transcending empirical restraints to offer what Scott himself describes as a means of compensating “for what’s not available in the historical material”, recovering, in its place, a culturally grounded imagining of the past. Rather than seeking to explore ‘silence’ within a Western framework, Scott’s work That Deadman Dance (2010) drew from the local Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project to create what Devlin-Glass terms a “new form based on Indigenous knowledge”. This methodological intertwining of Indigenous cosmology constitutes a decolonising historiographical act, amplifying voices amongst a landscape of silence. Whilst the narrative is constructed upon evidenced colonial past, drawing upon the anthropological and historical research of Neville Green’s Nyungar The People: Aboriginal Customs in the southwest of Australia, Tiffany Shellam’s Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at King George Sound, and Martin Gibb’s The Historical Archaeology of Shore Based Whaling in WA 1836-1879, Scott reframes these materials through customs of Noongar oral traditions which enable him to ‘think differently’ than otherwise ‘allowed by the sort of documents available in the archives’. This fusion of sources, as Rohan Wilson observes, creates a new “kind of Noongar historiography” that transcends the constraints of empirical perspective. As Scott states, the novel is “fiction situated within a framework of historical fact”, allowing it to move beyond the confines of historical research, transcending the reductive fixity of conventional historical narration. Ultimately, Scott’s reclamation of narrative sovereignty redefines the historiographical validity of fiction, transcending the ‘silence’ through the revitalisation of storied traditions and restorative assertions of Indigenous epistemologies.
Rooted within Noongar genealogical memory and oral research near his hometown of Albany, That Deadman Dance facilitates a historical understanding of Aboriginal “place” that eludes conventional archival sources, as the radical ontological shift wrought by European colonisation and Christian missionisation ultimately fractured the traditional epistemic continuity of Noongar culture. As history emerges not from a descendant of intruders but from a “child of the true possessors”, Scott’s position as a Noongar man challenges the historical presumptions of the dichotomy between Indigeneity and diaspora, as such, ultimately enriching historical discourse by embedding a culturally informed epistemology that recontextualises Indigenous identity. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ assertion that cultural heritage and collective memory are inextricably linked with identity, Scott mobilises the layering of settler and Aboriginal, past and present, and human and non-human consciousnesses to reflect Noongar ontologies and fill the cultural ‘silences’ of reciprocal understandings of country. Scott’s deep engagement with Noongar cosmology and cultural identity thus offers a nuanced perspective in filling the silence, resonating with Ruth Reynolds’ contention that history, as modelled by Herodotus, is ultimately better suited to a world that acknowledges multiple perspectives grounded in diverse cultural traditions than a single historical account striving for empiricist objectivity. However, while Scott’s reliance on oral tradition and narrative testimony meaningfully restores suppressed Indigenous histories, such methods nevertheless sit uneasily with the conventions of empiricist historiography. Thus, Scott is not merely filling the ‘silence’ of historical narrative, but a cultural ‘silence’ erased by European indoctrination, resisting the need for an empirical reconciliation of sources.
It is ultimately within Indigenous historical fiction that the epistemological contours of ‘silence’ are radically reconfigured, embedding Indigenous knowledge systems into the fabric of historical narratives in ways that white-authored fiction cannot. Where Dark and Grenville demonstrated that empathetic reimagination can expose the representational limits of empiricist historiography, Scott’s That Deadman Dance moves further still, not merely contesting the ‘silence’ from within Western frameworks, but displacing those frameworks entirely through the revitalisation of Noongar language, oral tradition, and cosmological knowledge. Historical fiction, at its most radical, can therefore display a decolonised historiography that refuses reconciliation or subscription to Western epistemic conventions, reclaiming instead a narrative sovereignty that empiricist history has long rendered illegible. Thus, in addressing Australia’s national ‘cult of forgetfulness’, historical fiction, and Indigenous-authored historical fiction in particular, offers society more than a recovery of occluded pasts. It offers a fundamental reimagining of what history itself can be: not a single, archive-driven account striving for Enlightenment objectivity, but a pluralistic, culturally grounded, and ethically accountable practice capable of honouring the full depth of Indigenous experience.
