The myths endure because they contain a kind of shiny-eyed magic. But they are undeniably fake news. And a necessary part of growing up is busting them. It teaches kids to assess evidence, weigh up suspicious signs, build a case. It’s a good lesson. As the 2016 US election and the grossly irresponsible laxity of Facebook has shown, the world is brimming with fake news. To counter this, we need trusted reporters, editors, and media organisations that care about accuracy, fact checking and accountability for errors. And we need a citizenry armed with skills of sifting evidence, understanding rigor, research and authority. And we need to assess not just events, spin and propaganda in the present, but in the past too. Loading For what we rarely talk about is fake olds – fake history. We are constantly fed lies or distortions about the past - or, most egregiously, omissions. This is why we can think it perfectly normal to spend millions upon millions on war memorials here and in Europe – for very well-documented stories - without blinking, and without wondering if we have yet told the full story of this country, the history of women or migrants, the long roots of domestic violence and abuse for example, or considered that studying the history of Indigenous Australia is crucial, core and transformative, not an add on. We can fact check lies – but who will tell the stories of those who have been ignored, stereotypes and scrubbed out of history? First Nations people have been fed fake news and lies about their history and their present for centuries. As have we all. And the impact of this endures.

Myths like: there is only one Aboriginal culture, voice, or viewpoint. That Aboriginal people are inherently violent, lazy, drunk. That the impact of colonisation has long passed. That the first inhabitants of this land were simply hunter-gatherers. That Australia was just a wilderness before Europeans arrived. The truth is starkly different. In his brilliant book Dark Emu, Indigenous historian Bruce Pascoe documented how Aboriginal peoples lived here for millennia before Cook arrived, establishing a sophisticated, cultivated form of land management, carefully tended irrigation and extensive farming and fish-trapping practices – with villages with wells, dams, permanent buildings made of clay-coated wood and elaborate cemeteries - operating as a cluster of distinct but connected democracies. A land carefully tilled, a land built upon, a land that sustained an economy, a land that was theirs. Loading Pascoe writes: “If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, then it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.” What Pascoe did was interrogate the evidence afresh, sifting carefully through journals of colonists and explorers, including pastoralists, surveyors, protectors, some of whom called the Aboriginal settlements “towns”. This work is crucial because after contact, after introduced smallpox, warfare, the burning of villages by Europeans, which destroyed perishable devices used to store the harvest, there was little left to show of this pre-colonised culture after 1860.

Yet, as Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia found, early explorers and settlers believed they had stumbled on a “gentleman’s estate” of gardens and farms. The fact that the world’s oldest continuing culture inhabited this continent for about 65,000 years should be a source of great national pride; these discoveries should be shouted to the world. Only by challenging myths with evidence will we begin to comprehend the extent of our ignorance and misunderstanding, our lingering prejudice, and how the possibilities of a future with strong Indigenous voices at the forefront of our national debates can only strengthen and invigorate us. It’s a decent New Year’s resolution – to seek the truth about our past as fervently as we seek the truth about the present. Julia Baird hosts The Drum on ABCTV.