Rhetoric of Redress: Australian Political Speeches and Settler Citizens' Historical Consciousness

ABSTRACT

This article traces the convergence of state redress and the educational construction of citizenship from the 1990s onwards in Australia. It examines how successive settler political leaders used the education of a historical consciousness—settler citizens’ relation to past, present and future—as a core strategy to seek resolution to the problematic national past. The article examines key political speeches that sought to mediate the settler nation's past in light of growing international and domestic pressures, including Keating's 1992 Redfern Park speech and Rudd's 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, and one of conservative backlash: Howard's 1996 Menzies Lecture. Rudd's subsequent national policy agenda of apology and an Australian Curriculum sought to inaugurate a new era in the settler nation's history. That program was embodied by the figure of the future citizen positioned to reckon with the nation's unjust past, a task inscribed in the inaugural national history curriculum.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• civics and citizenship education
• history education
• curriculum
• nation-building
• apology
• settler colonialism

Introduction

In late 2007, the Rudd Labor government swept to power in Australia upon a wave of possibility and promise following 12 years of conservative government. Two policy items were particularly emblematic of the optimistic national feeling at the time: the announcement of an inaugural national curriculum to be delivered within three years, and the delivery of a National Apology to the Stolen Generations. In drawing a line under the divisive past, the apology proclaimed a new era in the (settler) nation's history, and the national curriculum looked to shape a new citizen for that future.

This article explores the convergence of state redress—official processes to address the past and restore legitimacy—and the educational construction of citizenship from the 1990s onwards in Australia. While numerous possible ways exist to scrutinise that nexus, here I analyse three prime-ministerial speeches. I borrow this model from researchers who have analysed political speeches for how they have attempted to shape the national image, redefine issues of national significance, and renew national ideals and identity.¹ Paul Keating's 1992 Redfern Park speech, Howard's 1996 Menzies Lecture, and Kevin Rudd's 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations represent key instances where political leaders looked to innovate the settler state's self-understanding based on acknowledgement (or denial) of the unjust past. In each instance, the educational construction of citizenship emerged as a core political strategy, and the settler citizen was positioned as the state's ameliorative agent tasked with mediating the settler nation's problematic past.

This article analyses citizenship education as a key vector through which liberal democratic states look to integrate shameful episodes discordant with their 21st-century legitimacy and aspirations into their self-understanding. My use of “citizenship education” throughout conveys two interrelated meanings: first, the process of forming future (settler) citizens through formal school education; and second, modes of subjectivation by which the individual is configured as citizen.² While each of the speeches I analyse in this article addressed multiple audiences—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, international onlookers, parliamentary representatives, for example—I focus here on how they address, understand and seek to configure the “settler citizen” as inheritor of the national past and nation-builder of the future³—both within the speeches themselves, as well as in how dilemmas of settler legitimacy were directed into educational domains as an imagined solution.⁴

I read the speeches and related curricular debates as part of an unfolding strategy of political legitimation whereby the crisis of the difficult past comes to be seen as something able to be addressed by educational means. In doing so, I place the educational construction of citizenship at the centre of understandings of state redress and as a technology of liberal governance in the post–Cold War era. I show how the increasing synthesis of state redress and education from the 1990s signals shifting configurations of the liberal settler citizen and their relationship to the past. This article argues that since the apology and instantiation of a national curriculum, school curriculum has been inscribed with a new task: to shape a settler citizen positioned to reconcile the unjust past for the sake of the national future. This article tracks those shifting imaginings as evidence of a dispersed crisis of modern liberal self-understanding, whereby state redress agendas are educationalised, that is, thought to be resolved through the subjectivation of individuals in relation to both themselves and their citizenship.⁵

Beginning with the 1988 bicentenary protests and accelerating under the Keating Labor government's official policy agenda of “reconciliation”, the 1990s marked the intensification of a wide-scale public reckoning with the nation's history. My approach in this article shows how political leaders worked to graft state redress to (or disconnect it from) educational agendas by seeking to reorient citizens’ orientation in time—their historical consciousness.⁶ I analyse the speeches for how politicians encouraged distinctive ways of relating past, present and future to realign moral frames and to legitimate both the historical foundation of the state and foster a justifiable sense of national loyalty and belonging.⁷ In each moment, political leaders imagined education as a crucible through which crafting a new national citizen of the future (via the past) could be realised. My purpose in recontextualising these speeches as moments that seek moral realignment through citizenship education is not to add to the already extensive myth-making surrounding them, but rather to reread them as responding to a crisis of liberal self-understanding about the past. In this way, the article sheds new light on contemporary debates about citizenship, history and justice in Western states implicated in colonialism.

Education, Citizen Formation and Political Legitimation

Scholars generally agree that the educational construction of citizenship is central to the governance of individuals and societies in democratic liberal states today.⁸ Typically, modern citizenship has been understood as taking shape within the context of the nation-state, a view comprising both the legal rights ascribed through birth or residence, and the construction of the self-as-citizen with civic responsibilities anchored in a shared understanding of the nation-state throughout time.⁹ From the 19th century in Australia, one way that understanding was fostered was through the shaping of historical consciousness in schooling. I use “historical consciousness” to signal an individual understanding of the relations between conceptions of past, present and future that form part of an integrative framework of life orientation.¹⁰ A foremost aim of schooling from the 19th century onwards was the production of the national citizen, imagined as the vessel through which society's ills might be resolved and its hopes realised.¹¹ The national citizen would ideally possess a historical consciousness that was grounded in a shared experience of history from which to construct a shared civic solidarity and to legitimate the nation-state's demands and benefits.¹² Education became the primary vehicle to realise and resolve national challenges, and through to the late 1960s, instruction in history was intended to develop citizenship, patriotism and character formation.¹³ Until then, the use of history to promote civic cohesion, legitimise political authority and shape citizens, including by political leaders, was a relatively untroubled practice.¹⁴

From the late 1960s onwards, however, history presented a growing ethical dilemma for the settler nation-state. Decolonisation and civil rights movements drew attention to racist policies, and political movements for Aboriginal self-determination, land rights and historical truth-telling challenged the settler-national master narrative of benevolent progress.¹⁵ Breakdown of the British Empire, declining influence of British identity, and the formal end of “White Australia” during the 1970s generated renewed interest in Australian national identity and citizen formation.¹⁶ In the 1980s, the twin forces of neoliberalism and globalisation weakened the settler nation-state's claim as the sole authority and vestige of identity that had stood since the 19th century.¹⁷ Simultaneous revelations associated with postmodernism created an epistemological crisis in the human sciences, and history's association with truth and objectivity were undermined. From the 1990s, the production of an influential body of documentation revealed entrenched patterns of disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and the “web of interconnected historical and contemporary social, economic, and political structures” underpinning them.¹⁸ This, according to Celermajer and Kidman, constituted a “new normative environment” whereby large swathes of the Australian public became “unwilling to continue to uphold the national myth of peaceful settlement of an empty country”.¹⁹

Without recourse to an assured national past from which to anchor citizens’ orientation in time, Australian political leaders looked to reimagine their polity's relationship to the national past. They were responsive to an emergent liberal international morality based on making amends for the past, as well as growing public agitation, and they channelled their agendas into the crucible of citizenship education.²⁰ Since then, official efforts to redress the unjust past have become a defining feature of the political landscape. This trend signals a deep-seated crisis in the settler state's understanding of, and relationship to, its past. This article examines citizenship education as a central arena where liberal anxieties about the unjust past have played out, and as a prominent site of political legitimation intended to renew liberal authority and shape a fresh moral self-understanding for the 21st century.

In this article, I draw on two concepts to theorise the nexus between education, citizen formation, and political legitimation. The first is the educationalisation of social problems, which describes the ways that responsibility for perceived social problems has been directed into educational domains as a viable solution. This concept is derived from the history of education and was intended to trace the qualitative expansion in educational interventions in society from the 19th century onwards, whereby all manner of social ills became matters to be resolved through education.²¹ I use this concept to trace the ways that the crisis of the unjust past has come to be seen as capable of being resolved through educational means, in particular, through the subjectivation of the individual through their education. I marry this notion with Foucauldian scholarship on subjectivation and historical consciousness to explore how past, present and future are connected (through education) to shape a normative understanding of ourselves as citizens.²² While numerous possible approaches are available to scrutinise that process, in this article I analyse two key sources: political speeches and curriculum policy.²³ Importantly, I do not seek to assess how ideas articulated in the political speeches were subsequently represented in curriculum policy, because this asserts a hierarchical relationship between fields, but instead consider the ways that discourses about the moral crisis of the unjust past were being articulated and negotiated in each field.

Keating's Redfern Park Speech

In 1991, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCADIC), established in 1987 after years of activism from Aboriginal organisations, delivered its final report to the Australian government.²⁴ The report revealed the extent of institutional racism and violence that characterised the criminal justice system leading to the disproportionate and unjust overrepresentation of Aboriginal people within it. In 1992, the High Court of Australia overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius, and both the Mabo decision and the findings of the RCADIC foreshadowed Paul Keating's speech at Redfern Park in December 1992.²⁵ Keating referred to both in his speech, arguing that the report showed “the past lives on in inequality racism and injustice”, and that the overturning of terra nullius marked a “historic turning point”. Keating's speech invested responsibility for the past in the settler polity: “It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life … We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.”²⁶

Keating's use of the collective “we” was an acknowledgement of the ongoing harms of dispossession and colonisation. Together with the RCADIC report and Mabo decision, for the first time the connection between dispossession and the forms of disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was publicly acknowledged by a settler political leader, and responsibility for those harms assigned to the white settler polity.²⁷

While the speech focused on acknowledging harms experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, it was also intent on taking steps to resolve the damage that past injustice had inflicted upon liberal political authority. For example, Keating's speech foregrounded Australia's status as a “first rate social democracy” as the principal factor at play. He noted the fundamental injury done to Australian democracy as “the test which so far we have always failed”. Keating also situated efforts to restore legitimacy within a global context, noting “our success in resolving these issues will have a significant bearing on our standing in the world”. In doing so, to mark the International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples, he signalled awareness of the increasing importance of redress to the liberal international community and sought to project moral clout on the world stage.²⁸

Keating also deployed history to avoid “the trap of a discourse of White guilt” and any requisite legal implications.²⁹ He worked to orient subjects to the past in ways that would engender a recognition of the truth of dispossession as a basis for commitment to practical action in the present to create a reconciled national future.³⁰ “Concrete actions” and “practical building blocks”, such as the Mabo decision, would herald genuine change. Mabo, he thought, had done away with “the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans”. It had established a fundamental truth that laid “the basis for justice”, a basis, he implored, that was “much easier to work with than has ever been the case in the past”.³¹ In this way, Keating used the past for the purposes of spurring national repair, attentive to global pressures and sensitive to his multiple audiences. He invoked Mabo as a turning point, entreating settler citizens that “there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include Indigenous Australians”.

Keating singled out history books twice in the speech for their sustained failure to truthfully represent the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ resistance to occupation, frontier wars and Aboriginal people's service in peace and war.³² He focused explicitly on the education of “this generation of Australians”, noting that settlers’ improving knowledge about Aboriginal culture, achievement and experiences of injustice was cause for hope. A sustained attention in the final stanzas of the speech to learning—about “how to live with our physical environment … to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes … to recognise the wisdom contained in their epic story”, for example—showed Keating mobilising historical consciousness to create a new mandate and program for national regeneration. The nation's political leader actively promoted a reorientation of citizens’ historical consciousness grounded in frank reckoning with frontier violence and dispossession as part of a continuous and present history of racial injustice.

1990s Curriculum Policy

New history curricula launched in Victoria and New South Wales, in 1991 and 1992 respectively, mirrored growing public cognisance of legacies of injustice.³³ The Victorian senior history syllabus called for attention to the “ways in which the past had been represented” and the “social, political and cultural implication of these representations”, with concepts such as “power, race, gender, class and ideology” framing the study.³⁴ The course in Australian history outlined the national story as one characterised by silences concerning women and Aboriginal people, and, notably, it used “European invasion” to describe colonisation.³⁵ The inclusion of perspectives previously excluded from the national narrative and attention to contemporary issues saw the NSW syllabus labelled a “radical text” by political commentators, and it swiftly became an object of conservative ire.³⁶

Keating's policy emphases on the regional and global were echoed in the 1996 Victorian senior Australian history syllabus. That syllabus noted the way in which Australia since the mid-20th century had been involved in “a quest for a more independent stance in regional and international affairs”, and that “international events and ideas have influenced domestic politics and policy”,³⁷ which included the “growth of social movements such as feminism, Aboriginal civil rights and multiculturalism”, and which “led to a revisiting and reassessment of our past, and changing understandings of what it means to be Australian”.³⁸ The writers called for greater attention to the influence of the international sphere on Australian history, citing examples such as migration, foreign wars, movements for land and civil rights, environmentalism and multiculturalism.³⁹

Like Keating's speech, the 1991 Victorian and 1992 New South Wales curricula generated a sustained public conservative backlash. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Padraic McGuinness argued that the syllabus instilled a “politically correct” orthodoxy focused on “controlling the future through indoctrinating our children”.⁴⁰ In 1993, conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey delivered his famous assessment that the nation's historical narrative had been besieged by a “black armband” view of history written by radicals.⁴¹ The furore that erupted over the use of the term “invasion” rather than “settlement” to describe British colonisation in the syllabus was particularly fierce and sustained, and similar debates played out in Victoria.⁴²

By 1998 in NSW, a short-lived, conservative, reactionary syllabus had replaced the previous version, a shift reflective of political pressure.⁴³ Likewise in Victoria, “invasion” was replaced by “settlement” in 1996.⁴⁴ Clark has established that the change of the Victorian state government in 1992 from Labor to conservative saw the senior history curriculum “radically overhauled”, and by 1996 references to “race, gender and class” had been removed.⁴⁵ While curriculum reform and implementation are always subject to considerable competing pressures, the curricula that emerged in New South Wales and Victoria during the 1990s certainly broke with prior models. Those had been “underpinned by a sense of acceptance of the grand narrative of Australia's great achievements, in the context of a larger history of the British Empire”, according to Parkes.⁴⁶ The curricula that emerged in the 1990s were broadly reflective of the growing national awareness of the nation's difficult history, contemporary Indigenous movements for justice, and efforts towards historical justice, themes reflected in the Keating government's agenda. They were also underpinned by a growing understanding of the political potency of certain historical approaches for electoral success.

The Keating government was invested in civics education, an agenda inherited from the previous Hawke government. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the older, white patriotic civics education was gradually replaced by a curriculum more responsive to contemporary social issues and drawing on social-scientific methods.⁴⁷ From the late-1980s, a model of “active citizenship” intended to prepare students for participation in a society of increased diversity and complexity was ascendent. “Active” citizenship education became a national policy initiative in 1989, as reflected in the Hobart Declaration on Schooling and subsequent National Goals for Schooling of 1991.⁴⁸ In 1994, Keating established the Civics Expert Group, chaired by Stuart Macintyre and comprising Ken Boston, director-general of the New South Wales Department of Education, and Sue Pascoe of the Catholic Education Office, Melbourne, as members.⁴⁹ This responded to the settler state's “legitimation crisis” generated by the influence of globalisation, rapid cultural change, subsequent experience of social disruption, and evidence of declining civic knowledge among young people; subsequent moral panics also played a key part.⁵⁰

Importantly, the group's report, Whereas the People, promoted knowledge and understanding of Australian history as an “essential foundation” for civics education. It suggested Australian history be based in a narrative beginning in 1788, which should include histories of migration and claims for inclusion by excluded groups such as “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, convicts and women”.⁵¹ Both the Keating and subsequent Howard governments supported the recommendations of the report by providing $25 million for civics and citizenship education programs in the 1995 budget.⁵² While the revival of civics education was begun under Keating, it was largely delivered by the subsequent Howard government, which had a very different agenda for the national past.⁵³

Howard's Menzies Lecture

In 1996, recently elected Prime Minister John Howard declared: “I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement.”⁵⁴ At the same time, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission was partway through an official inquiry into the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The resulting Bringing Them Home (BTH) report—based on testimonies given by First Nations people—detailed the devastating impact of state-sanctioned policies of systematic forced removal of children from their families, communities, land and culture.⁵⁵ The BTH inquiry was one of an increasing number of international inquiries focused on the impact of legislation, policies and practices targeting Indigenous people, and abuse and neglect in child welfare.⁵⁶ Amid a growing transnational discourse of redress, Howard was doggedly reactionary, as were conservative reactionaries elsewhere.⁵⁷

By 1996, national history had become an item of considerable public interest and contestation, a situation Howard exploited for political advantage. He had campaigned on a mantra that encouraged Australians to feel “comfortable and relaxed about their history”.⁵⁸ This successful strategy signalled the resonance of Howard's “three cheers” vision of the national past—a patriotic narrative grounded in the heroic achievements of established nationalist symbols: Anzacs, bushmen and pioneers.⁵⁹ Notably, Howard's vision of the national past allowed settler Australians to relate to and use the past productively without having to consider their treatment of First Nations people.

Howard's Menzies Lecture, delivered six months into his prime ministership, aimed to reframe Australian history.⁶⁰ Howard's lecture on “The Liberal Tradition” addressed “the challenges of Australia's future”. He had in his sights the diversification of the nation's history that had occurred since the 1970s, which, under his reading, cast the nation's historical record in an overly negative, moralistic inflection, and which had spurred claims for state redress. His vision of historical knowledge defied developments in the historical profession that attested to its provisional and changing nature.⁶¹ Howard represented historical knowledge as unchanging, pre-given and grounded in “the facts”. In this way, he painted revision of the nation's history as partisan and politicised and set up “the opponents of Liberal inheritance in Australia” as those self-same historical revisionists. “A year or two ago,” Howard conspired, “we witnessed one of the high-water marks in the attempt to re-write important parts of Australia's political history.”⁶² He claimed the attempt to establish “a form of historical correctness as a particular offshoot of political correctness” had failed: it was “divisive, irrelevant and prejudiced” and the “facts of history did not sustain it”.⁶³ Here, Howard was constructing plot points for a narrative that became an enduring feature of his leadership.

Howard used history to actively create a sense of “us” and “them”—and a sense of perceived threat to the idea of a cohesive (but exclusionary) settler national identity. For example, in the speech, Howard characterised historical revision as pandering shamefully to “elites” and “a noisy minority” at the expense of the majority society.⁶⁴ His own agenda was to wrestle back national history and identity from the falsifications of this elite partisan cause. In appeals to the Australian mainstream, he styled himself in the image and service of “everyday Australians”.⁶⁵ Howard argued that Keating's politics had made Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a special category in national life who were owed compensation, an idea at odds with his vision of the Australian “fair go”. According to Howard, ordinary Australians had been unnecessarily chastened by the divisive politics of the Keating era and made to feel guilty for crimes they did not commit. To alleviate that sense of unjust burden, Howard looked to education to correct citizens’ historical consciousness through veneration of the national past and with calls for greater objectivity and balance in the treatment of historical facts.⁶⁶

2000s Curriculum Policy

To this end, Howard directed considerable energies towards citizenship education, including school civics and the history curriculum. Howard had inherited a reformist agenda for civics education from the previous Keating government, a vision that was swiftly modified by the incoming Coalition. While upholding the commitment to teach Australian history, Howard saw a deficiency in young people's knowledge of national history as needing urgent correction if the relationship between civics and history education was to be effectively renewed.⁶⁷ The 1999 National Inquiry into School History reflected that concern, and by the early 2000s, the Howard government had implemented the Values Education Project focused on “core values” and displays of patriotism.⁶⁸ Howard continued to intervene in school curriculum into the 2000s. In a speech on 26 January in 2006, Howard called for a “root and branch renewal” of history and civics education.⁶⁹ In 2007, on the eve of the federal election, the Howard government launched its Guide to the Teaching of Australian History in Years 9 and 10, a “carrot and stick” funding scheme that threatened state governments with financial fallout should they elect not to teach the newly proposed history curriculum.⁷⁰ That patriotic curriculum included 79 milestones to be taught over Years 9 and 10. The ensuing public campaign against the document, waged by history teachers and teaching associations around the country, was an explicit rejection of Howard's fact-driven, nationally uplifting vision for history and civics education.⁷¹

Just hours before his electoral defeat in 2007, Howard—perhaps sensing the political purchase of state redress—conceded the importance of reconciliation and promised a referendum on Indigenous constitutional recognition, citing his generation and personal background as reasons for delay.⁷² The Howard era will be remembered as one of division and denial of the nation's unjust past, and Howard himself as a potent political strategist who used citizenship education as a key reactionary tool. But after four terms in power (1996–2007), the tides of historical justice (along with other electoral agendas such as climate change and industrial relations reform) proved too great. At the federal election, the Howard government was resoundingly defeated, and his slated curricular reforms were abandoned.

Rudd's Apology

Howard was replaced by the Kevin Rudd–led Labor government. Rudd immediately announced an inaugural national curriculum, and the delivery of the National Apology to the Stolen Generations.⁷³ The apology was a bipartisan commitment, and the establishment, in late 2008, of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) as an independent statutory authority devolved curriculum out of government. Both policy items focused on turning a new page in the nation's history, initiating a process of state redress attentive to global expectations. In drawing a line under the divisive past, Rudd's apology proclaimed a new era in the (settler) nation's history, and the national curriculum looked to shape a new citizen for that very future. The relationship between Rudd's apology and the development of the national curriculum has received little attention, and in this section, I discuss them as performative acts of transitional nation-building that used educational language and ideas to frame and solve the challenges of settler illegitimacy and historical injustice.

Rudd's decision to deliver the apology on the first sitting of the new parliament, on 13 February 2008, was a statement of symbolic significance. Rudd's apology validated the revision of national history begun during the 1970s by “formally acknowledging past actions and judging them unjust”.⁷⁴ Rudd's apology worked as a narrative-forming device that recollected previous events and endowed them with normative significance.⁷⁵ Through the act of apology, Rudd sought to fundamentally shift settler citizens’ relations to the past, present and future. For example, Rudd historicised the apology as a temporal turning point. He said: “The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.”⁷⁶ Rudd's apology focuses less on recounting the difficult past, as featured in Keating's Redfern Speech, speaking instead to the idea that apologies contribute to future-oriented projects of political reconstitution.⁷⁷ The apology was used to mark completion of the imperatives for action signalled by Keating in his Redfern Speech. The apology worked to convey the idea that the national chapter of reckoning with its past was reaching a resolution and that the apology was ushering in a new era founded on an understanding of past injustices.

The strongest message of Rudd's narrative was of forgiveness and, implicitly, redemption. He recounted the story of Warumungu woman Nanna Nangala Fejo, who had forgiven the stockman who had “herded and piled” stolen children, including Nanna, into a truck in 1932. Rudd's selection of this account of forgiveness, one chosen from “thousands, tens of thousands”, speaks to political theorist Tom Bentley's claim that “the core function of an apology is, when successful, to mend and heal relationships”.⁷⁸ Rudd's apology aimed to reframe the settler nation as “as one that is reconciled to its past”, thus recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples’ suffering as part of a process of national healing and reflecting Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million's critique of human rights discourse in Therapeutic Nations (2013), where Indigenous peoples are called on to use the instruments of truth-telling, and in doing so become the subjects of a humanitarian project directed ultimately towards national healing.⁷⁹

Rudd used history in the apology in ways distinct from his predecessors’ speeches. He sought to elevate the task of making amends for the past above the divisive disputes of the previous decade, declaring “that this is not a black-armband view of history, it is just the truth”. He pilloried Howard's denial of intergenerational responsibility by invoking the contemporaneity of forced removal policies, noting “the 1970s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity”.⁸⁰ He lambasted the previous parliament for their “stony, stubborn and deafening silence” and inaction that had seen “this great wrong” left “languishing with the historians, the academics and the cultural warriors”. Rudd argued that the past failures of elected representatives meant it was their duty to make right today, positioning the parliament and its politicians as “the writers and righters of history”.⁸¹ Rudd sought to manufacture a rupture and point of transition with the aim to reconceive the social meaning of the past. To do this, Rudd's apology aimed to reorient the citizenry, to get them to see a previously troubled relationship towards the past as concluded, and to use that awareness as the basis for crafting a newly unified future. That agenda was then channelled into the inaugural national history curriculum.

2010s Curriculum Policy

The Rudd government's educational reforms were far-reaching and took an interventionist role in schooling policy.⁸² The Rudd-Gillard push for a national curriculum succeeded where previous attempts had failed.⁸³ Rudd had campaigned on the basis of an “education revolution”, and his reform agenda positioned education as an economic good, with unprecedented funding injected into the sector.⁸⁴ Aside from huge investments in school infrastructure, other system-wide initiatives included the development of ACARA and the My School website that aimed to deliver transparency in school performance data, reporting and assessment.⁸⁵

Like his predecessors, Rudd looked to citizenship education as a crucible through which to shape a national future by dealing with the past. Rudd's new national era required a new settler-national citizen, and that task was inscribed in the first national curriculum. The national curriculum aimed to shape national citizens to succeed in the global world and secure the nation's future prosperity. Settler citizens needed to be reconciled with the nation's past and thus oriented towards and primed for future success. The moral core of the curriculum—evinced in the three cross-curricular priorities of sustainable, Asian, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives—illustrated the government's vision for a reconciled future. The curriculum was both a moral and an economic investment in the national future.

History was one of four subjects prioritised under the new curriculum along with mathematics, English and science, a move that underscored the recurring role of history as a key vehicle for crafting citizens of the future. It reinstated history's core position in the project of nation-building, albeit in novel ways responsive to the contemporary context and shifting moral grammars of redress and globalisation. The 2010 Australian Curriculum: History made a conscious departure from the previous government's fact-based, nationalist approach, instead placing Australian history in a broader spatio-temporal context.⁸⁶ The Years 7–10 curriculum entailed a sweep of global history spanning 5,000-plus years with an emphasis on big narratives and global stories.⁸⁷ This global orientation reflected shifts in what the Rudd Labor government saw as pressing contemporary challenges compared to the prior administration. While Howard was concerned with how the complexity of global change had detracted from established national narratives and instead sought solidity and belonging in the national past, Rudd looked to respond to such pressures by shaping citizens capable of adapting and thriving in an increasingly global world. The role of history in shaping this sense of subjecthood was to provide global orientation—an integrative frame for understanding the nation over time, including citizens’ shifting moral obligations and responsibilities.

Those obligations included engaging with state-sanctioned wrongdoings in the past. The inclusion, for the first time, of sustained examples of historical injustice in compulsory history curriculum signalled a new consensus about the role of the unjust past in the educational construction of citizenship.⁸⁸ While curriculum positioned citizens to resolve the damage caused by the nation's unjust past by educating a consciousness of moral wrongs, it did so without questioning the legitimacy of the settler state itself, as Beth Marsden and I have argued elsewhere.⁸⁹ Rather than framing historical wrongs as opportunities to interrogate ongoing settler-colonial structures, practices and harms, the curriculum continued to legitimise settler possession by incorporating past injustices into a new narrative of settler-national progress based upon the gradual extension of civil, political and human rights. Still, this focus stood in stark contrast to Howard's patriotic curriculum intended to venerate the past. The citizen to be forged through the national history curriculum was positioned to reckon directly with the nation's problematic past by engaging, as they had not done before, with sustained examples of state-sanctioned injustice.

Conclusion

By the 1990s, history had become such a liability for the settler state that it was forced to act. This article has explored some of the different ways that Australian political leaders since the 1990s have used the educational construction of citizenship as a strategy to restore political legitimacy and shape the national future by dealing with the past. In two key political speeches—Paul Keating's Redfern Speech and Kevin Rudd's National Apology—both leaders sought to reorient settler citizens in relation to the past and educationalised the mounting challenges of the problematic past in the present. John Howard waged a cultural battle over citizenship and history, using education to venerate the past as the foundation of an assured national future. Rudd's apology speech in 2008, however, marked a concerted attempt to close over the divisive past and inaugurate a new era in the settler nation's history. Contained within Rudd's dual policy platform of apology and Australian Curriculum was a vision of the renewed state channelled through the ideal of a future citizen who had reckoned with the difficult past in schooling and was thus primed for success in a globalised world.

The compulsory inclusion of state-sanctioned wrongdoing in national curricula since 2010 signals multiple, complex agendas. One is compliance with the global liberal trend to reckon with past wrongdoings as part of a broader process of democratisation, advancing human rights, and in connection with processes of state redress. By making wrongdoing explicit in curriculum, the settler state performs how moral frames have shifted, declares past actions reprehensible by contemporary standards, and shows that the state is committed to preventing the recurrence of harms. Since the 1990s, these have become important symbols of responsibility and moral authority in the liberal international community. Further, the inclusion of wrongdoing in curricula is responsive to longstanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led agendas for truth-telling and justice, including powerful critiques of misleading (history) education. However, until the settler state genuinely revisits its foundational narratives by addressing the illegitimacy of possession, the truths of frontier violence and child removal, and the fact of enduring Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood, curriculum remains a statement of settler nation-building and a deeply compromised entity. The illegitimacy of settler possession and citizenship will continue to lie shadowlike over settler-historical consciousness until the truths of the past are directed towards shaping a decolonised future.

Acknowledgements

I thank Beth Marsden and Anna Clark for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this article, and the reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 James Curran, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2004); Tom Clark, Stay on Message: Poetry and Truthfulness in Political Speech (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011).

2 In this sense, “citizenship education” is to be distinguished from the Australian Curriculum's Civics and Citizenship education subject. See Daniel Tröhler, Thomas S. Popkewitz, and David F. Labaree, eds., Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Comparative Visions (New York: Routledge, 2011); Daniel Sergio Friedrich, Democratic Education as a Curricular Problem: Historical Consciousness and the Moralizing Limits of the Present (New York: Routledge, 2014).

3 I use “settler state” as a general descriptor for the Australian nation-state and its modes of governance. I use “settler citizen” and “settler nation” to distinguish settler-colonial claims to nationhood and sovereignty from First Nations sovereignty, governance systems and understandings of nationhood.

4 Anna Clark, Teaching the Nation: Politics and Pedagogy in Australian History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006).

5 Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, eds. Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2008); Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault,” Parrhesia 2 (2007): 55.

6 Jörn Rüsen, History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); Kenneth Nordgren, “Boundaries of Historical Consciousness: A Western Cultural Achievement or an Anthropological Universal?,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 51, no. 6 (2019): 779–97.

7 Stephen Winter, Transitional Justice in Established Democracies: A Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

8 Naomi Hodgson, Citizenship for the Learning Society: Europe, Subjectivity, and Educational Research (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2016); Ian Hunter, “Assembling the School,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and the Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 143–66.

9 Stephen Winter, “Legitimacy, Citizenship and State Redress,” Citizenship Studies 15, no. 6/7 (2011): 799–814.

10 Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development,” in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 63–85.

11 A challenge faced by state-builders was how to construct citizens who were at once imperial subjects of the British Crown but also citizens of a newly defined, distinctive nation. After Federation in 1901, there was growing emphasis on Australian nation-building; however, Australian citizens were still imagined as members of a British Empire conceived in both racial and economic terms. See Leigh Boucher, “Victorian Liberalism and the Effect of Sovereignty: A View from the Settler Periphery,” History Australia 13, no. 1 (2016): 50; Mati Keynes, “History Education, Citizenship and State Formation,” in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald, Springer International Handbooks of Education (Singapore: Springer, 2020); Andy Green, Education and State Formation: Europe, East Asia and the USA, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

12 Mario Carretero, Constructing Patriotism Teaching History and Memories in Global Worlds (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2014).

13 A. R. Trethewey, “Social and Educational Influences on the Definition of a Subject: History in Victoria, 1850–1954,” in Contemporary Studies in the Curriculum, ed. Peter William Musgrave (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974), 95–112.

14 Andrew Bonnell and Martin Crotty, “Australia's History under Howard, 1996–2007,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617, no. 1 (2008): 149–65.

15 Russell McGregor, “Another Nation: Aboriginal Activism in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s,” Australian Historical Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 343–60.

16 James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2010).

17 Keynes, “History Education, Citizenship and State Formation”.

18 Danielle Celermajer and Joanna Kidman, “Embedding the Apology in the Nation's Identity,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 121, no. 3 (2012): 230.

19 Calermajer and Kidman, “Embedding the Apology,” 231.

20 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).

21 Smeyers and Depaepe, Educational Research.

22 Thomas S. Popkewitz, “The Production of Reason and Power: Curriculum History and Intellectual Traditions,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 29, no. 2 (1997): 131–64; Daniel Friedrich, “Historical Consciousness as a Pedagogical Device in the Production of the Responsible Citizen,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31, no. 5 (2010): 649–63.

23 I use “curriculum policy” to denote major reports, syllabus guidelines and curricular frameworks. See Lyn Yates and Cherry Collins, “Australian Curriculum 1975–2005: What Has Been Happening to Knowledge?” (paper delivered at AARE Conference, Brisbane, Queensland, December 2008).

24 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody: National Report (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1991), http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/rciadic/.

25 Paul Keating, “Redfern Speech,” transcript of speech, Redfern Park, 10 December 1992, https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf.

26 Archie Thomas, Andrew Jakubowicz, and Heidi Norman, Does the Media Fail Aboriginal Political Aspirations?: 45 Years of News Media Reporting of Key Political Moments (Sydney: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2020), 99.

27 Thomas, Jakubowicz, and Norman, Does the Media Fail Aboriginal Political Aspirations?, 103.

28 Keating, “Redfern Speech”.

29 Andrew Jakubowicz, “Carved in Stone: The 1992 Redfern Statement,” in Thomas, Jakubowicz, and Norman, Does the Media Fail Aboriginal Political Aspirations?, 103.

30 Jakubowicz, “Carved in Stone,” 103.

31 Keating, “Redfern Speech”.

32 This focus echoed one of the main points of Stanner's Boyer Lectures, where he points out the limitations of history books to deal with historical truth. See W. E. H. Stanner, 1968 Boyer Lectures: After the Dreaming, Seventh Printing edition (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1974).

33 See Robert J. Parkes, “Teaching History as Hermeneutics: Critically and Pedagogically Engaging Narrative Diversity in the Curriculum” (paper given at Biennial Conference of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, Melbourne, 2007), 386.

34 History: Study Design (Carlton, VIC: Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board, 1990), 2.

35 History: Study Design, 47–49. The emphasis on women was removed in the subsequent 1996 syllabus and replaced by “men and women”.

36 Parkes, “Teaching History as Hermeneutics,” 384.

37 History: Study Design, ed. Surendra Verma (Carlton, VIC: Board of Studies, 1996), 74.

38 History: Study Design, 1996, 75.

39 History: Study Design, 1996, 79.

40 Anna Clark, “History Teaching, Historiography, and the Politics of Pedagogy in Australia,” Theory & Research in Social Education 32, no. 3 (2004): 384; Parkes, “Teaching History as Hermeneutics,” 388.

41 Anna Clark, “History in Black and White: A Critical Analysis of the Black Armband Debate,” Journal of Australian Studies 26, no. 75 (2002): 1–11.

42 Anna Clark, “The Great History Debate,” Age, 9 February 2004, sec. National, https://www.theage.com.au/education/the-great-history-debate-20040209-gdx9x8.html.

43 Parkes, “Teaching History as Hermeneutics”.

44 The 1996 syllabus marked a turn towards more detailed content descriptors as well as closer attention to the significance of global events in the national story. In the subsequent 1999 iteration, “colonisation” and “settlement” are used in place of “invasion”, and “dispossession” is listed as taking “possession of the land”. The chronological approach in 1996 and 1999 saw the return of familiar developmental narratives in the syllabus, including the idea that “Australia's history is characterised by expansion”. See History: Study Design, 1996; History: Study Design, 1999; Clark, “History Teaching,” 386.

45 Clark, “History Teaching,” 386; History: Study Design, 1996; History: Study Design, 1999.

46 Parkes, “Teaching History as Hermeneutics,” 393.

47 Barry Down, “From Patriotism to Critical Democracy: Shifting Discourses of Citizenship Education in Social Studies,” History of Education Review 33, no. 1 (2004): 14.

48 Whereas the People: Report of the Civics Expert Group (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994).

49 Whereas the People, 52.

50 Tony Taylor, “Under Siege from Right and Left,” in History Wars and the Classroom: Global Perspectives (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2012); Clark, Teaching the Nation; Alan Reid, “Selling Civics: The Curriculum Development Process in a National Project,” Social Educator 14, no. 1 (1996): 9.

51 Whereas the People, 52.

52 Down, “From Patriotism to Critical Democracy,” 14.

53 Kerry J. Kennedy, “More Civics, Less Democracy: Competing Discourses for Citizenship Education in Australia,” in Citizenship Curriculum in Asia and the Pacific, ed. David L. Grossman, CERC Studies in Comparative Education 22 (Berlin: Springer Netherland, 2008), 181.

54 John Howard, “The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values Which Guide the Federal Government,” PM Transcripts, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10171 (accessed 9 April 2023).

55 Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997).

56 During the 1980–1990s, more than 20 countries established truth commissions to investigate historical crimes. See Julia Paulson and Michelle J. Bellino, “Truth Commissions, Education, and Positive Peace: An Analysis of Truth Commission Final Reports (1980–2015),” Comparative Education 53, no. 3 (2017): 351–78.

57 Tony Taylor and Stuart MacIntyre, “Cultural Wars and History Textbooks in Democratic Societies,” in Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 613–36.

58 Four Corners, featuring interview with John Howard, aired 19 February 1996, on ABC, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-08/an-average-australian-bloke---1996/2841808.

59 Geoffrey Blainey, “Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture, Appeared as ‘Drawing up a Balance Sheet of Our History’,” Quadrant 37, no. 7/8 (1993): 10–15.

60 Anna Clark, “Politicians Using History,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 56, no. 1 (2010): 120.

61 As Hughes-Warrington has remarked: “History changes. At first blush, this point seems so obvious as to be hardly worth making.” Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Revisionist Histories (London & New York: Routledge, 2013), 18.

62 Howard, “The Liberal Tradition,” para 11.

63 Howard, “The Liberal Tradition,” paras 13–14.

64 Howard, “The Liberal Tradition”.

65 Parkes, Interrupting History, 135.

66 John Howard, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, Parliament of Australia, 30 October 1996, http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/howard_1.pdf.

67 Kerry J. Kennedy, “More Civics, Less Democracy: Competing Discourses for Citizenship Education in Australia,” in Citizenship Curriculum in Asia and the Pacific, ed. David L. Grossman, CERC Studies in Comparative Education 22 (Berlin: Springer Netherland, 2008), 182–83; Catherine Harris-Hart, “National Curriculum and Federalism: The Australian Experience,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 42, no. 3 (2010): 304.

68 Rebecca Cairns, “‘Western Civilisation’? History Teaching Has Moved On, and So Should Those Who Champion It,” The Conversation, 6 June 2018, http://theconversation.com/western-civilisation-history-teaching-has-moved-on-and-so-should-those-who-champion-it-97697.

69 John Howard, “A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006” (address to the National Press Club, Parliament of Australia, 25 January 2006), PM Transcripts, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-22110 (accessed 9 April 2023).

70 Harris-Hart, “National Curriculum and Federalism”.

71 Anna Clark, “Teaching the Nation's Story: Comparing Public Debates and Classroom Perspectives on History Education in Australia and Canada,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 41, no. 6 (2009): 749.

72 “Mixed Response for PM's Reconciliation Bid,” ABC News, 11 October 2007, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-10-12/mixed-response-for-pms-reconciliation-bid/696438; Clark and Macintyre, The History Wars.

73 Miranda Johnson, “Reconciliation, Indigeneity, and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States,” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2011): 187–201.

74 Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, 71.

75 Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology, 197.

76 The Hon Kevin Rudd AC, “Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples,” Parliament of Australia, https://www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Art/Exhibitions/Custom_Media/Apology_to_Australias_Indigenous_Peoples#:~:text=On%2013th%20of%20February%202008,continuing%20cultures%20in%20human%20history (accessed 9 April 2023).

77 Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation, 197; Nicola Henry, “From Reconciliation to Transitional Justice: The Contours of Redress Politics in Established Democracies,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9, no. 2 (2015): 199–218.

78 Tom Bentley, Empires of Remorse: Narrative, Postcolonialism and Apologies for Colonial Atrocity (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 24.

79 Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

80 Rudd, “Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples”.

81 Johnson, “Reconciliation, Indigeneity, and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States,” 196.

82 Alan Reid, “National Curriculum: An Australian Perspective,” Curriculum Perspectives 39, no. 2 (2019): 199; Neil Cranston et al., “Politics and School Education in Australia: A Case of Shifting Purposes,” Journal of Educational Administration 48, no. 2 (2010): 5.

83 The Australian Curriculum emerged from a neoliberal policy landscape of which the clearest iteration is the policy report Quality Education. See Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 27 August 2008), 5, https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2008-08/apo-nid9133.pdf; Glenn C. Savage, “Who's Steering the Ship? National Curriculum Reform and the Re-shaping of Australian Federalism,” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 6 (2016): 833–50.

84 Carole Kayrooz and Stephen Parker, “The Education Revolutionary Road: Paved with Good Intentions,” in The Rudd Government: Australian Commonwealth Administration 2007–2010, ed. Chris Aulich and Mark Evans (Canberra: ANU Press, 2010), https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p6031/html/ch09.xhtml?referer=&page=14.

85 Kayrooz and Parker, “The Education Revolutionary Road”; Harris-Hart, “National Curriculum and Federalism,” 298.

86 Louise Zarmati, “A History of Misinformation: Pyne Spreads Curriculum Myths,” The Conversation, 25 July 2012, http://theconversation.com/a-history-of-misinformation-pyne-spreads-curriculum-myths-8413; Deborah Henderson, “History in the Australian Curriculum F–10: Providing Answers without Asking Questions,” Curriculum Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2011): 58.

87 Kelsey Halbert and Peta Salter, “Decentring the ‘Places’ of Citizens in National Curriculum: The Australian History Curriculum,” The Curriculum Journal 30, no. 1 (2019): 8–23.

88 For comparison, consider history curricula in the state of Victoria in the two decades prior to the implementation of AusVELS in 2012 (the development of the national curriculum in Victoria). Neither the 1995 and 2001 Curriculum and Standards Frameworks I & II, nor the 2005 Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS), which remained in place until 2013, contained any explicit references to historical child removal. Mati Keynes and Beth Marsden, “Ontology, Sovereignty, Legitimacy: Two Key Moments When History Curriculum Was Challenged in Public Discourse and the Curricular Effects, Australia 1950s and 2000s,” History of Education Review 50, no. 2 (2021): 130–45. In contrast, the 2012 AusVELS syllabus listed “Stolen Generations” as part of the curricular content at Levels 2, 6, 9 and 10, for example. See Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, “The Humanities – History,” AusVELS, 2012.

89 Keynes and Marsden, “Ontology, Sovereignty, Legitimacy”.