Anthropologist, activist and public intellectual, W.E.H. Stanner used his words to change Australia. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures Stanner exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale', regarding the fate of First Nations people, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. And in his essay 'Durmugam' he provided an unforgettable portrait of a warrior's attempt to hold back cultural change. This selection of writings spans Stanner's career as well as the history of Australian race relations. They reveal the extraordinary scholarship, humanity and vision of one of Australia's finest essayists. Stanner's writings remain relevant in a time of reckoning with white Australia's injustices against Indigenous people and the path to reconciliation.