Colonial Mentalities and Family Histories: Documenting Intergenerational Impacts

Dear Colleagues,

This issue of Genealogy is concerned with colonizing mentalities and family histories across the world. First Nations and non-First Nations contributors are welcome. The issue is particularly interested in the framing of work by scholars of colonizing mentalities and their self-reflection. It is also concerned with critical analysis of work in this field from First Nations and non-First Nations writers—how much we continue the messy national papering over of our pasts and how authors or families locate themselves in ways they may be unaware of.

In terms of Australia, in the November 2025 issue of The Conversation, Debra Dank writes of an encounter with the son of a cattle station owner in Queensland. He had come up to her table in a club and apologized for what his father had done to Dank’s Aboriginal family. She writes, ‘I told that man to go. I told him to go and take his apology somewhere else because it was a little too late, too late for Dad and his Mother.’

Debra Dank’s article will result in an important ground shift in Australia in the writing of family histories by white descendants because it urges non-Aboriginal people to think about ourselves and the history of our family in colonization. Why do we write? Did we expect by ‘getting it out in the open’ that we would be forgiven? What is our purpose? Truth-telling belongs to Aboriginal people; it is not concerned with historical documentation, but with how Aboriginal people feel about their past. We cannot tack our work onto truth-telling. Where should we place it?

This kind of history will now prove complex and demanding after Dank’s essay. How non-Aboriginal people position ourselves in it tells us much about our version of Australia. I was struck when reviewing Aftermaths (2023), how different New Zealand Pakeha and Australian non-Aboriginal writers are in conceptualizing their separate violent histories.

Djon Mundine writes in 2025 of Australian Aboriginal people, ‘we are cursed to repeat our story over and over again,’ to audiences who do not listen. This Issue is also interested in First Nations perceptions of the way they want their history told and the difficulties they have in establishing protocols around their history.

Dr. Paula Jane Byrne
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• colonization
• family
• violence
• war
• mentalities