When nations are formed, the process always entails creation on a number of dimensions – creation of sovereignty, of national identity, of a constitution and political institutions and the creation of a new material and cultural home. In the case of the settler nation, erected over the top of pre-existing sovereignties and worlds of meaning, nation formation also involves destruction and violence – physically, against the bodies and material worlds of the original inhabitants, culturally against their worlds of meaning and languages, and politico-legally, against their established institutions and rights.

The underbelly of the process of constructing the Australian nation was the systematic destruction of the worlds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. At the grossest level, this process entailed massacres and cultural genocide, and, in the twentieth century, a systematic policy of removing children from their families. At subtler levels, it entailed an erasure of narratives – narratives about the destruction itself and narratives about the worlds of meaning that had preceded occupation. Only in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century have these histories of oppression and violence emerged on the public stage in Australia. And as the histories of the legacy of injustice emerged in national debate, so too did the question of what type of redress for past violations should and could be achieved.

This chapter explores one dimension of this movement towards justice – the narrative dimension, tracing how narrative justice has been fought for, denied, negotiated and partially achieved in Australia. I commence with a discussion of the place of narrative justice in the overall process of seeking justice in the context of the settler nation. I move then more specifically to the contestations over national history that emerged in the course of contemporary inquiries into indigenous disadvantage, coming finally to the profound debate about national identity that was provoked by the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. I then look in some detail at the process of this Inquiry, drawing particular attention to the critical role that first person testimonies played in creating a captivating counternarrative and the way in which this discursive challenge to official histories itself affected a type of narrative justice.