‘Migrating like birds, they were driven, she felt sure, by the same instincts [she understood] the kind of fear that had prompted the white men to kill and kill'.

This passage is from The Generations of Men by Judith Wright. She is representing the thoughts and reasoning of her great grandmother Charlotte May Wright on the Dawson River in the 1870s. This book and its reasoning went into six editions between 1959 and 1967. It could be argued the book entered the national imaginary in Australia, given its popularity. Charlotte May Wright did not think in this way. She did write ‘my father told us never to allow a firearm to point at anyone, unless you wished to shoot him… I often thought of that precept of his when I was aiming at recalcitrant blacks, even if I only had an empty gun’.  Charlotte May’s letters were self published in one edition by her great grandson Phillip Wright in 1997. This paper is about the scale of making meaning and its implications for later historical work. It draws on the work of the  historian Yael Zerubavel.