COMMENT: Australia's convict past - don't mention the war!

Another extract from Bill Bryson I can wholeheartedly testify to - just to mention the word "convicts" will almost get you killed in any pub in Sydney. While Bryson is wrong about there being no mention of convicts or the First Fleet in museums in Sydney (the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, for example, is really good), he's spot on about the general athmosphere of denial. For an outsider, this is extremely puzzling, as it clearly is an indisputable historical fact. I haven't met half this hostility talking to Spaniards about Spanish atrocities in colonising South America, Germans or Japanese when discussing WW II, not even discussing Stalin's reign with Russians in the Soviet Union in 1988. But here.... Anyway, Bill Bryson:

Nowhere in [Sydney] will you find a monument to the First Fleet. Go to the National Maritime Museum or Museum of Sydney and you will certainly get an impression that some of the early residents experienced privations – you might even deduce that their presence was not completely voluntary – but the idea that they arrived in chains is somewhat less than manifest. In his majestic history of the country's early years, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes notes that until as late as the 1960s Australia's convict beginnings were not deemed worthy of scholarly attention, and certainly not taught in school. John Pilger, in A Secret Country, writes that in his Sydney boyhood in the 1950s even among the family one never made reference to ‘The Stain’, the curiously menstrual euphemism by which convict antecedents were acknowledged. I can personally affirm that to stand before an audience of beaming Australians and make even the mildest quip about a convict past is to feel the air conditioning immediately elevated.

(Bill Bryson, pp. 55-56)