Time & Perspective Quote by Phillip Noyce

A director admitting the cheat code of national memory: whoever wins doesn’t just take the land, the wealth, the institutions - they take the storyline. Phillip Noyce’s blunt split-screen (“winners” versus “losers”) strips away the polite language that usually cushions this topic. He isn’t describing an accident of oversight; he’s describing authorship. “We wrote the history books” lands as an indictment of cultural production itself, a reminder that textbooks, films, and museum plaques are not neutral containers but carefully edited scripts.

The knife twist is in the grammar. “Whites were the winners” is a passive construction that sounds almost like weather, as if domination simply happened. Then the “we” arrives: agency appears only when it’s time to own the pen. That move mirrors the larger pattern he’s criticizing - power is anonymized when it harms, personalized when it narrates. “They didn’t feature” is especially telling: the violence isn’t only in exclusion, it’s in relegation to the status of a minor character, an uncredited extra in their own country.

Context matters. Noyce is an Australian filmmaker who has worked on stories shaped by settler colonialism and racial hierarchy; he’s speaking from inside the image-making machine. Coming from a director, the line doubles as media critique: history is treated like casting. Who gets dialogue, who gets cut, who is rendered invisible - and how that invisibility hardens into “common sense” over generations.