Truth-Telling in Trouble?: The Bringing Them Home Report, the Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, and the Promise of ‘Shared History’

Abstract

In Australia, and elsewhere, the concept of ‘truth-telling’, that is, hearing the ‘truth’ about difficult and divisive pasts from the victims, is promoted as a way to transcend them and to develop a ‘shared’ historical understanding from which the nation can move forward. The 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, directed towards forging a better relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, included truth-telling as one of its three recommended reforms. In July 2025, the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which claimed to be the state of Victoria's, and Australia's, first truth-telling inquiry, handed down its final report, Truth be Told. Drawing First Peoples' experiences into an official record, it hoped to foster 'a shared understanding' among Victorians about their past. Such has been the emphasis on hearing the truth of Aboriginal perspectives that the expression ‘truth-listening’ has entered the lexicon. Despite its popularity, the notion of truth-telling has several difficult realities to face. Not least among them is the fact that there are competing beliefs about what constitutes ‘historical truth’ and there are competing perspectives about the past. In the heated controversy following the release of Bringing Them Home, the 1997 report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, these difficulties were laid bare. This article considers some of the trouble with truth-telling via a discussion of one site in which this controversy flared, an oral history project born out of Bringing Them Home's recommendations.