Education Quote by Phillip Noyce

The chill in Phillip Noyce's memory isn’t overt cruelty; it’s the quieter violence of a room that has agreed not to see you. His recollection turns on a string of soft verbs - “never spoke,” “kept to themselves,” “never really even locked eyes” - that sound passive until you hear what they’re doing: distributing responsibility so widely that it becomes no one’s. The phrase “kept to themselves” is the familiar alibi of segregation-by-custom, a way the dominant group narrates its own innocence while describing the outcome it helped produce.

What makes the line sting is the escalation from social avoidance to institutional erasure. “They weren’t acknowledged officially either” widens the frame from playground dynamics to policy and pedagogy: the school as a miniature state, enforcing recognition and non-recognition. Noyce isn’t claiming he was taught to hate; he’s describing a curriculum of omission, where Indigenous presence is treated as an administrative inconvenience rather than a human fact.

Coming from a film director, the language reads like blocked staging: bodies in the same set, no shared eyeline, no dialogue. That’s not incidental; it’s a portrait of how settler societies maintain normalcy. The subtext is an indictment of “polite” racism - the kind that doesn’t need slurs because it has silence, and doesn’t need laws posted on the wall because it’s already in the room. In Australia’s post-war context, that silence aligns with assimilation-era attitudes and the long shadow of the Stolen Generations: a national story that trained ordinary kids to look past Indigenous people, then later to act surprised at the consequences.