From apology to truth? Settler colonial injustice and curricular reform in Australia since 2008

ABSTRACT

This article explores how recent curricular reform in Australia has been responsive to a culture of redress. It argues that taken together, the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2010 national curriculum reform marked a turning point, whereby settler colonial injustices have since been systematically included in the curriculum. This is explored through a case study analysis of the two iterations of the Victorian Curriculum: History post-Apology— 2012 and 2016—the latter of which remains in current use. Using discourse analysis methods, this article argues that the inclusion of colonial injustice in the post-Apology era signals a consensus that has emerged around the significance of representing injustice in history curriculum, and by extension, for shaping future citizens. Through close textual analysis of the curriculum documents, this article finds that representations of historical injustice have been organized by four frames: memorialization, equivalence, personalization, and human rights. It argues that these frames curtail opportunities for the development of an understanding of the structural character and effects of settler colonialism, and limit consideration of the longer history of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. These failures raise questions about how impending reforms might respond to the contemporary political context where treaty negotiations and formal truth-telling with First Nations’ polities are unfolding.

KEYWORDS:

• History education
• social studies education
• historical injustice
• curriculum change
• settler colonialism
• reconciliation

Introduction

In 2022, education ministers endorsed a new version of the Australian Curriculum following a 2020–21 review. The new curriculum will be gradually implemented by state and territory authorities over the coming years. In the Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) domain, content related to Australian history has been revised ‘to focus on “truth-telling” within the broader history of Australia as a successful democracy and prosperous society’ (ACARA, 2023). Truth-telling is a topic of considerable public debate in Australia and refers to formal and informal processes of reckoning with the historical and contemporary truths of colonial injustice on the continent (Ebony Institute, 2020). For the first time, the language of ‘truth-telling’ appears in the HASS domains, for instance in new content descriptors in History and Civics and Citizenship at Year 10 level. This explicit focus on truth-telling in the national curriculum is part of a shift in curricular reform in the post-Apology era, analysed in this article from the inaugural national history curriculum in 2010, through the two substantive reforms which have occurred since (2012, 2016) in the state of Victoria.¹

As the new version of the national curriculum was rolled-out from late-2022, debate about enshrining an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body, or ‘Voice’, in the Australian constitution grew increasingly hostile.² Campaigns backed by financial and political elites and the Murdoch media empire (Keane, 2023), systematically spread misinformation to undermine the ‘Yes’ campaign, emboldening racist hate speech and abuse directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (MC, 2023). Resounding defeat of the proposed amendment in October 2023 led some Indigenous leaders to declare that ‘reconciliation is dead’ (Langton 2023, Gorrie & McKinnon 2024) and for others to begin organizing around alternate campaigns for truth and justice (James 2023). In the state of Victoria, where a First Peoples’ advisory body already exists, and where truth-telling and treaty negotiations are underway, defeat of the Voice does not impede the formal reckoning with injustice already ongoing. Victoria has been labelled the ‘most progressive’ state in the Australian federation owing to its policy leadership on treaty-making and truth-telling with First Nations’ polities, as well as strong support for equal marriage and a long-standing Labour government (Dunstan et al., 2022). In other jurisdictions, it remains to be seen whether political commitments to treaty and truth will be honoured (Gillespie & Smee, 2023).

In Victoria, reckoning with injustice involves an aspiration to ‘overhaul’ history education including ‘how history is taught in schools, universities, museums, and is part of both statewide and localised conversations around the true history of the colonisation of Victoria’ (First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, 2021, 32). This aspiration echoes long-standing demands by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars and leaders for meaningful curricular reform to reflect more accurately Indigenous and settler colonial histories, including their entanglement and contemporary legacies (e.g. Heiss, 2017, Paton, 2012). Those demands go beyond the mere inclusion of additional historical content in the school curriculum but call for a more fundamental disruption of the master narratives at work in the curricula which continue to uphold and justify settler colonialism at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood (Moodie, 2017; First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, 2021).

Scholars of Indigenous education have consistently shown how the ‘mirage of Indigenous content’ operates in ways that subsume Indigenous knowledge into the established settler-colonial narrative permeating the curriculum (Lowe et al., 2021, p. 73). This narrative continues to deny Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty and to misrepresent Indigenous political aspirations (Keynes et al., 2023). Since the 1990s, curricular reform has been underpinned by a national policy discourse of ‘reconciliation’ that frames the inclusion of atomized Indigenous content as something ‘all’ students can benefit from (Lowe et al., 2021). As Moodie and Patrick (2017) have shown, the inclusion of Indigenous content has gone alongside the responsibilisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their families for their own successes and ‘failures’. Both the inclusion of atomized content and the responsibilisation of outcomes have elided systemic barriers to equitable outcomes and directed focus away from the goals of Indigenous community control of Indigenous education. Reconciliation discourse in education has produced limited substantive reforms for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and continues to neglect their own proposals for reform.

Recent research has argued that curricular reform in the past decade has been increasingly responsive to a ‘culture of redress’ (Miles 2021, Henderson & Wakeham 2013), that is; an international policy context concerned with redressing the past as the basis for social transformation (see e.g. UNESCO, 2021). Redress culture is reflected in the rise of transitional justice as the established international framework for addressing the legacies of past violence (Nagy, 2008) and in the dramatic increase in redress processes such as truth commissions. As transitional justice is used to address past human rights violations against Indigenous Peoples and has begun to engage more directly with Indigenous perspectives, some scholars have argued that transitional justice framework and instruments present promising opportunities for advancing goals such as justice, healing, truth-telling, which might exceed those contained by prevailing policies of reconciliation (Balint et al., 2014). In Canada, for instance, in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2009–15) ‘there have been a wide range of responses to the issue of historical injustice in the curriculum’ (Miles, 2021, p. 48), and scholars have closely scrutinized the effects and limitations of those reforms (e.g. Cutrara, 2018; Gibson & Case, 2019). If in Australia the defeat of the ‘Voice’ marks the ‘death’ of reconciliation policy discourse, how are the growing ‘culture of redress’ and imperatives for truth-telling reshaping curricular reform? How might the design and implementation of the new Victorian Curriculum F–10 set to begin in 2024–25, be responsive to ongoing truth and treaty processes in Victoria? To a broader redress culture?

To address these questions, I undertake a case study analysis of curricular reform which, I argue, has been responsive to agendas of redress. The inaugural national curriculum in 2010 was positioned as having emerged from a new public recognition and understanding of settler colonial injustice marked by the 2008 ‘National Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’. The Apology ‘turned a new page in the nation’s history’, in the words of then-Prime Minister Rudd, and curricular reforms that followed signalled a new consensus about the importance of recognizing historical injustice in history education, and in the formation of future national citizens . Since the 2012 implementation of the national curriculum in the Australian state of Victoria, settler colonial injustices—including dispossession, Stolen Generations, and forms of discrimination and disenfranchisement—have been explicitly included in the history curriculum in the compulsory years (K-10). This was a turning point marked by two iterations of the curriculum: 2012 and 2016, the latter of which remains in use. By focusing on these two documents, I explore how settler colonial injustices came to be represented in new ways after the Apology of 2008.

Using textual analysis methods, I analyse shifting discursive frames in Victorian curriculum and policy documents since 2012 that have sought to render historical injustice intelligible within an emerging global language of historical justice and redress, restore the legitimacy of the settler state, and mediate changing moral frames of past and present. Drawing on theories and critiques of state redress (Winter, 2014), citizenship (Hodgson, 2016), and liberal governance (Friedrich, 2010, 2014), I theorize the inclusion of historical injustice in the Victorian curriculum as a changing strategy of political legitimation and liberal governance directed through the subjectivation of the individual in relation to their citizenship and the unjust past. I also consider some specific implications of representing colonial injustices in a curriculum model organized by historical thinking concepts, as well as that shaped by broader discourses of globalization, national identity and economy, and human rights. These considerations have broad relevance beyond the case of Victoria, as societies around the world are grappling with the legacies of colonialism and racial injustice, as well as the emerging challenges of climate justice and reparations (Sriprakash, 2022). Questions of how to adequately address these challenges in and through curriculum and formal education are of considerable importance for teachers, scholars, policymakers, and politicians alike.

This article draws attention to the growing significance of history curriculum for mediating pressing questions of historical justice, redress, and moral understanding in Australia and beyond. While history curriculum does crucial work to negotiate changing moral frames and expectations as they are unfolding in the present and mediates how those frames are instantiated in future generations, it is increasingly tasked with complex, sometimes contrary, agendas. This can include cohering to an understanding of the past on its own terms and the context that made reprehensible actions legitimate, as well as an awareness of how those actions have damaged the state’s political legitimacy in the present, caused harms to particular groups and individuals, and how they could be redressed. Exploring the ways colonial injustices are represented in a curricular process of shaping future citizens is an emerging and important field of study in the current global policy era of truth-telling, decolonization, and transitional justice.

State redress and subjectivation

Since the 1980s, established liberal democracies, including settler colonial states constituted by large-scale violence and injustice, have increasingly sought to confront the legacies of their violent pasts (Winter 2014). In Australia since the early 1990s, this has taken the form of a state-sponsored policy agenda of ‘reconciliation’ aimed at mending the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and settler Australians, addressing disadvantage and aspirations for justice, and repairing the state’s legitimacy (McMillan and Rigney, 2018). Mechanisms utilized in Australia include truth-seeking processes like official inquiry commissions, apologies for state crimes, institutional and policy reform efforts, and reparation payments.³ In particular, the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) and the (1991) Stolen Generations Inquiry (BTH) brought the systematic nature and extent of historical and continuing injustice into mainstream political discourse. At the present juncture, there is a formal truth-telling process ongoing in the state of Victoria, with commissions planned for several other Australian jurisdictions.

The question of state redress is particularly vexed in settler colonial societies where the foundation of the state is tied to the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands. In the continuing absence of both a treaty and human rights framework to regulate the relationship between the settler state and First Nations polities in the Australian context (Hobbs, 2016) state redress efforts have been characterized by top-down and symbolic gestures that have left colonial structures intact. While the RCIADIC and BTH commissions have created an extensive public record of systemic colonial injustices, the subsequent failure to implement many of their recommendations has been linked to the continuation of both Indigenous deaths in custody and child removals at rates higher than at the time of the inquiries. Instances of state redress in Australia, such as the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations, have done little to engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led movements for treaty and land repatriation, and have been criticized for being complicit in a broader settler colonial logic that marginalizes structural harms and prioritizes settler nation-building and social harmony (Henry 2015, p. 204). Without accompanying structural reform, state redress in Australia has largely worked to incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ claims for justice and self-determination within the framework of settler national sovereignty. This is reminiscent of Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million’s argument (2013), that 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’.

This raises questions about the role of state redress, including its educational dimensions, in shifting modes of settler-colonial liberal governance and political legitimation. If state redress seeks principally to repair the damage caused to state political legitimacy by historical injustices, as Winter (2014) has argued, scholars are yet to fully consider how education reforms that are responsive to redress agendas, function as modes of governance. Foucauldian-inspired scholarship on governmentality, education and citizenship offers ways of thinking about the relationship between education and redress as a mode of governance. The idea of education as a cultural transformation of the population carried out in the interests of the state was constitutive of the political mentality which Foucault (1979, 2020) labelled ‘governmentality’. Governmentality entails the efforts aimed at shaping, guiding, and directing the conduct of others in a range of spaces, as well as endeavours that aspire to conduct one’s own behaviour. Liberal governmentalities aim to shape a specific type of subjectivity through education—the responsible citizen—as part of an assemblage of governing technologies (Friedrich, 2010, 2014). It is through the constitution of the citizenry that the liberal state is legitimized and that problematics are addressed in ways that frame the individual’s freedom as a way of managing conduct (Hodgson, 2016; Hunter, 2013).

The explosion of state redress in Western societies since the 1990s signals fissures in liberal states’ moral self-understanding as enlightened and progressive ‘world leaders’ (Matsunaga, 2016). As states grapple with how to integrate injustices discordant with their twenty-first-century legitimacy and aspirations into their self-understanding, education has emerged as an important medium through which to do so and thereby seek resolution to the damage caused to political legitimacy. Central to such efforts is the figure of the future citizen, who is positioned to learn a shared understanding of history to which a number of normative ‘goods’ are connected such as economic prosperity, responsible active citizenship, and capacities for ethical reflection (ACARA 2023). Placing knowledge of the unjust past in curriculum signals the growing significance of the state’s so-called ‘difficult’ history in shaping an understanding of the self-as-citizen, with obligations and responsibilities to the nation-state.

In doing so, the curriculum addresses and seeks to configure the future citizen as inheritor of the national past and nation-builder of the future. The inclusion of content about the histories and cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in curriculum broadly, as Maxwell et al. (2018) have argued, is intended to acknowledge and respect those histories and cultures while contributing to the development of the nation. In this case, the inclusion of settler colonial injustices reflects the growing (albeit contested) view that constructing national citizens in the twenty-first century should be founded not only upon a national story of progress and success, but also a recognition of past injustices and failures. As historical justice agendas are channelled into the domain of education, the future citizen is imagined as a transformative agent tasked with repairing the damage caused by the unjust past. Yet, little is known about the precise modes by which knowledge of historical injustice gets inscribed in educational media, nor the particular effects of doing so. This includes a limited understanding of how such efforts contribute to projects of state legitimation vis-à-vis more critical or radical anti-colonial agendas.

History curriculum in a culture of redress

Both the RCIADIC and BTH inquiries engaged closely with the school education sector, including the curriculum. The RCIADIC report ( 1991) included a section dedicated to school education, which the Commission deemed was inextricably linked to the disproportionate representation of Aboriginal people in police and custodial facilities. Concerning school curricula, recommendation 290 stated ‘that curricula of schools at all levels should reflect the fact that Australia has an Aboriginal history and Aboriginal viewpoints on social, cultural and historical matters’. Further recommendations stressed the importance of Aboriginal history and viewpoints in teacher education (295a) in service training (295b), and of engaging Aboriginal people to design, implement, prepare and deliver such courses at local levels (291a&b). Six years later, publication of the BTH report (1997) spurred a heated period of public debate concerning the gross wrongs committed under government patronage—including agencies and churches that acted with the authority and knowledge of government—and the kinds of reparatory actions to be applied. In particular, the report’s finding that policies of child removal amounted to the crime of genocide under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, incited divisive and lasting controversy (Barta, 2008, Bailey, 2020). The report made 54 recommendations for reform, not least the provision of an official apology and financial reparations for survivors. Significantly, the report recommended ‘that State and Territory Governments ensure that primary and secondary school curricula include substantial compulsory modules on the history and continuing effects of forcible removal’ (1997, p. 255). The recommendation included imparting an awareness of the continuing and contemporary character of child removal policies and practices, as well as the ‘resolute resistance Aboriginal people have continuously maintained’ against child removal. However, as I have explained elsewhere (Keynes & Marsden, 2021b), in Victoria it took until the implementation of the national curriculum in 2012, more than 20 years after RCAIDIC and 15 after BTH, for settler colonial injustices to be systematically included in compulsory history curriculum.

From late-2012 onwards, the introduction of the AusVELS curriculum marked the development of the national curriculum in Victoria. The national curriculum aimed broadly to shape national citizens to succeed in the global world and secure the nation’s future prosperity. However, in a departure from previous curricular iterations, future citizens were also positioned to reckon with the nation’s unjust past, a task especially directed towards the domain of History. The inclusion of history as one of the first four subjects included in the national curriculum demonstrates its foundational place in visions of the nation-state reckoning with its colonial legacies. In both 2012 and 2016 compulsory history study designs, an increasing attention to historical injustice—including dispossession, Stolen Generations, and forms of discrimination and disenfranchisement—was clear.

Representations of historical injustice in the Victorian history curriculum from 2012 onwards were contained within four broad logics which I have labelled memorialization, equivalence, personification, and human rights. Discursive strategies in the curriculum worked to convey assumptions that colonial injustice has ceased or has been transcended by the settler state; that injustice is something that occurred in a distant time; that injustice can be resolved by developing empathy for past actors, or, through the gradual extension of human, civil and political rights. By containing historical injustice within these frames, history education’s broader role in redressing historical injustice is positioned as part of a contemporary democratic process which presumes that injustice itself belongs in the past, while the memory of injustice remains contested. Yet, settler colonialism is both historically specific and also an ongoing structure—an enduring web of relations and process of domination (Kauanui, 2016; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). I explore how these frames generate significant tensions in the ways that history curriculum is imagined as contributing to agendas of historical justice and state legitimation alike.

Methods and sources

This article undertakes a case study analysis of compulsory (K-10) history curricula in Victoria since the implementation of the national curriculum in 2012. Through analysis of study design and curriculum policy documents, I consider how the curricula that developed from 2012 onwards included settler colonial historical injustices directed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. This comprised policies and practices of child removal, dispossession of land, violence, and forms of discrimination and disenfranchisement. I used interpretative textual analysis (McKee, 2003) to read curriculum documents in an inductive way, attentive to the multiple, possible meanings inscribed in the text, finding patterns, and reading those back in light of broader contextual analysis. Through that process, I identified four repeated and overlapping frames which I thought captured the ways in which settler colonial injustices had been represented in the syllabus.

My positionality was important to the design and process of this research. I am a non-Indigenous person of English and German descent, raised on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar (Perth, Western Australia), but living and working now on unceded Wurundjeri land. I am trained as a historian and worked for the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria during a period which coincided with implementation of the national curriculum (the 2012 AusVELS curriculum), and later, the Victorian Curriculum in 2016. Those texts comprise the documentary sources analysed in this article. My experience working with Victorian history teachers, policy, and curriculum influenced my selection of case study, as did the fact Victoria is the first Australian state to undertake a truth and justice commission concerned with redressing colonial injustices. While I do not seek to understand the factors which influenced curriculum development, my experience as an insider in this community has inevitably shaped my perspective.

Taking a case study approach focused on the interpretation of the national curriculum in the jurisdiction of Victoria allowed a depth of reading and level of granular analysis that would not be possible in a federal or international study. That said, analysis of Victorian curricula has broader relevance given it is based on the national curriculum. An important contextual note is that in Victoria from the late-1980s, the curriculum policy landscape shifted from school-based control to standardization. The 2010 national curriculum arguably marks the high point of standards-based education in Australia, and the curriculum documents that followed, and which I analyse here, are highly prescriptive standards of knowledge, concepts, skills, and competencies. This case study provides insight into the specific ways in which discourses of redress are reshaping the Victorian history curriculum and advances analytical themes that are useful for developing in other cases and in comparative analyses, both in other subject domains and in other jurisdictions.

Analysis

In what follows, I present and discuss my analysis of the curriculum documents. I demonstrate how, despite subtle shifts between 2012 and 2016, settler colonial injustices were largely contained within the four frames of memorialization, equivalence, personification, and human rights. I explore key examples and some of the curricular effects, possibilities, and limitations of each frame.

Memorialisation

The first reference to settler colonial injustice in the 2012 AusVELS history curriculum appears benign. At Level 3, ‘Sorry Day’—a day commemorating the strength of Stolen Generations survivors observed since 1998—was listed alongside other ‘days and weeks celebrated or commemorated in Australia’ including Australia Day, ANZAC Day, NAIDOC and National Reconciliation weeks (for example, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2012). At Level 3–4 in the subsequent 2016 Victorian Curriculum, injustice is first referred to under ‘the significance of days celebrated and commemorated in Australia’, which in addition to the previous instances, also includes the commemoration of the Australian Government’s (2008) ‘National Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’ (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2016, p. 38). These seemingly benign examples from the primary years show evidence of historical injustice being contained within the logics of commemoration and celebration, which collectively I have termed ‘memorialisation’. This framing positions knowledge of settler colonial injustice as something contained in the past which ought to be remembered and that the settler state has already reckoned with.

In The Touch of the Past (2005), Roger Simon argued that modes of remembrance embody divergent assumptions about pedagogy. For example, he showed that the two dominant modes through which questions or practices of remembrance take shape—history and memorialization—presupposed contrary ideals of pedagogy; as the provision of information and insight, on the one hand, or as an injunction not to forget, on the other (Simon, 2005, pp. 105–6). Pedagogical structures oriented by memorialization aim to:

Bond emotions and processes of identification with narrative and symbol in ways that reinforce the significance of specific memories for the identities and commitments of specific groups, be they families, communities, or nations.

(Simon, 2005, pp. 105–6)

In the curricular examples detailed above, historical injustice is imagined as something to be remembered and never forgotten, but also to be incorporated as part of a progressive national story alongside other occasions of national significance. Significantly, state-sponsored violence is first introduced to students as an event contained to the past and something that ‘we’ (the imagined community of the reconciled Australian nation) commemorate together. This is as opposed to understanding settler colonial injustices as something continually unfolding and contemporary, and which continues to differentially impact the lives of minority and majority groups alike.

Many of the other days of ‘celebration and commemoration’ listed at Level 3 are characterized by violence and conflict that was foundational to the settler nation-state. Australia Day, for example, commemorates the landing of the First Fleet at Botany Bay on 26 January 1788, and the beginning of British colonization, while ANZAC Day commemorates Australian and New Zealand lives lost during war and conflict, with special emphasis on the imperialist First World War. The effect of placing Sorry Day and the Apology alongside these other monuments of foundational violence is to convey the assumption that the violence of child removal, in these two cases, ‘belongs’ to the settler nation. It does not afford opportunities for coming to know the truth of child removal, as a state-sanctioned, national policy architecture that authorized genocide and gross violations of human rights, which might fundamentally challenge dominant conceptions of settler-national belonging, possession, and identity.

Equivalence

At Levels 3–4 in the 2016 syllabus, readers are directed to ‘begin with the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’, but then to ‘examine European exploration and colonization in Australia and throughout the world’ including the ‘impact of exploration on other societies, how these societies interacted with newcomers, and how these experiences contributed to their cultural diversity’ (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2016, p. 34). The violence—physical, epistemic, cosmological—of settler colonialism is rendered benign through rhetorical strategies that displace attention from the direct experiences and effects of violence. This is an example of a frame I have labelled ‘equivalence’. Equivalence is where settler colonial injustices are positioned as being equivalent to other forms of injustice. Following Tuck and Yang (n. d.) and Moodie (2017), I read these instances as part of a symbolic and ‘thin’ decolonization discourse ‘that can function to equivalise Indigenous rights with other social justice projects’ (37). Placing injustice alongside other episodes of comparative violence or conflict has the effect of normalizing settler colonial statehood and violence.

In an international study of the legitimation of political violence through history education, Angela Bermudez (2019) found that despite regular references to violent events in history textbooks, violence as such was rarely discussed or made the object of explicit analysis. Instead, Bermudez found violent events and processes described in ways that precluded reflection about its roots, causes, consequences and alternatives, and therefore which worked to normalize them. In the example from Level 3–4 detailed above, an effect of placing ‘the impact of exploration’ alongside ‘how these experiences contributed to cultural diversity’ is the normalization of the violence of colonization: violence is positioned as having facilitated the possibility of something positive, in this case, cultural diversity.

This echoes what James Miles labelled the ‘embedding of multicultural discourses’, where colonial injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples are placed alongside those suffered by other minoritized groups (2021 p. 13). In the Canadian context, Miles argued that a multicultural approach to historical injustice has had the effect of exalting the nation-state as ‘the only sovereign actor on the land that is now Canada’ such that colonialism comes to be ‘represented as just another example of historical injustice faced by a minority group on the path to recognition and acceptance in a multicultural state’ (2021 p. 13). In the 2016 Victorian history curriculum, historical knowledge of ‘Country and Place to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who belong to a local area’ is placed alongside ‘The role that people of diverse backgrounds have played in the development and character of the local community’. This organization of the historical past reflects a multicultural orientation that positions Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as one of a number of minority groups that make up the Australian population.

At Level 3–4 in the 2016 curriculum, there is an emphasis on ‘first contacts’ where students learn about the history of settler colonialism for the first time. Therein, the colonization of Australia is placed within a broader frame of ‘world history and movement of peoples’. Students are expected to ‘examine the impact of exploration on other societies, how these societies interacted with newcomers, and how these experiences contributed to their cultural diversity’ (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2016, pp. 34–36). Settler colonial injustices are positioned as being equivalent to other forms of injustice or conflict happening elsewhere. At the same time, the settler state goes unnamed as the perpetrator of violence, and operates rather as a benevolent, raceless, and sole sovereign polity of the continent.

Levels 5–6 ‘Making a Nation’ in the 2016 curriculum direct readers to consider the ‘different experiences and perspectives of Australian democracy and citizenship, including the status and rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, migrants, women, and children’. In the content elaborations, this includes ‘the lack of citizenship rights for Aboriginal Peoples […] leading to the Stolen Generations’, and also in the same section, ‘the experiences of democracy and citizenship of migrant groups, for example, internment camps during World War II, assimilation policies, anti-discrimination legislation, mandatory detention, pay and working conditions’ (VCAA, 2016, p. 54). Again, a logic of equivalence is at work that functions to make different types of historical injustice coherent and comparable. The primary agent of these historical injustices (the settler state) is not named, while the experiences and effects of violence are located with various different groups, ‘migrants’ and ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’, for example. Both the settler state as the main perpetrator and the ideologies of white supremacy and racism that legitimated reprehensible policies and practices against minoritized groups and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are elided.

Equivalence works to create an impression of normalized ‘agentless’ colonial violence. Placing historical injustices committed against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people alongside the experiences of minoritized groups has multiple effects. At one level, it represents an ‘act of recognition’ that had hitherto been absent from history curricula in the compulsory years (Coulthard, 2014). Yet, at the same time, it works to efface Indigenous sovereignty and to normalize the setter state as the only legitimate sovereign body of the continent, which presides benevolently over a number of multicultural claims for recognition and belonging.

Personalisation

In Victorian history curricula since 2012, there has been a pronounced emphasis on the personalization of the history and impacts of settler colonialism. For example, at Level 3–4 there is a focus on ‘exploring different stories about contact experiences and early penal life to discover the thoughts or feelings or the people at that time’, listed under the concept/skill of ‘cause and effect’ Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2012). This emphasis on reconstructing the actions and intentions of historical actors, leading to both intended and unintended causes and consequences, is a hallmark of so-called ‘historical thinking’ approaches. The personalization of history has become a popular pedagogical strategy to engage students and develop historical empathy, and it has become common to teach about large-scale structures and events such as wars, migration, genocides, and revolutions using personal narratives and primary sources as evidence (Pearce and Foster, 2021). Personalization aims to make the past present and animated in ways that encourage students to connect and identify with people in the past.

However, recent scholarship has drawn attention to some of the shortfalls and complexities of using personalization to teach about structural violence and racism. Swedish scholars Arvidsson and Elmersjö and Arvidsson (2021) have shown how, in the context of a textbook aimed at detailing the Swedish state’s crimes committed against the minority Roma population, an over-emphasis on personalization and individual struggles for human rights worked to psychologize the problem as one of overcoming discrimination and protecting human rights. The emphasis on first-person narratives and personal experiences of discrimination detracted from an understanding of the structures behind discrimination. Robinson (2021) came to similar conclusions after ethnographic work with secondary history teachers in South Africa. There, Robinson found that one teacher’s emphasis on personalizing feelings of hurt and exclusion experienced due to racial discrimination in the past and present did not illicit a deep understanding of apartheid’s structural character and its contemporary legacies.

In the context of teaching about settler colonialism, any focus on personalization needs to be approached carefully. In seeking to reconstruct the intentions and interior-experiences of historical actors, such as pastoralists or members of colonial government (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2016, pp. 42–43), care should be taken to ensure that (a) privileging individual experiences does not detract from an understanding of broader colonial structures and, (b) focusing on personal experiences is not unduly geared towards eliciting a sympathetic response from students in the present. An over-emphasis on the personal dimension could promote decontextualized understandings that privilege an emotional response at the expense of an awareness of the broader and long-term implications of settler colonialism.

In a settler colonial context, it is also important to question the curricular value placed upon understanding whether the effects of colonization were intentional or otherwise. What kind of historical understanding does this logic of intentionality, cause and effect, make possible? In the 2012 syllabus at Level 9 ‘The Making of the Modern World’ within the ‘Making a nation’ study, readers are directed to explore ‘the extension of settlement, including the effects of contact (intended and unintended) between European settlers in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’. In the content elaboration, this included:

the forcible removal of children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century (leading to the Stolen Generations), such as the motivations for the removal of children, the practices and laws that were in place, and experiences of separation.⁴

In the 2016 curriculum, it became optional to study Australia and/or an Asian society but as in 2012, readers are directed to explore ‘Intended and unintended causes and effects of contact and extension of settlement of European power(s) including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2016, p. 81). The task of evaluating ‘intended and unintended cause and effects’ encourages students to reconstruct historical actors’ interior experiences as explanation for past actions, and then to weigh past intentions and motivations against the action’s effects.

This is akin to a broader phenomenon in historical practice. Settler historians have spoken about their affective experiences using colonial archives (Jones, 2021), leading to a connection with or ‘understanding’ about marginalized subjects’ experiences in the past. These collections were often created about First Nations communities and people without their permission and using extractive practices (Marsden 2022). Like settler historians enamoured by the colonial archive, the curriculum does not distinguish the ethical stakes of learning about colonialism through personalized, emotional frames. Yet, there are risks and limits involved in expecting or encouraging settler students to reconstruct the intentions, ‘thoughts and feelings’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the past. Should non-Indigenous students be encouraged, for example, to understand what it felt like for land to be stolen, and for family and community to be fatally impacted by introduced disease or conflict? Appropriating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ imagined emotional responses to settler colonialism in the past might be well-intentioned, but the ethical implications of efforts to promote historical empathy need to be carefully considered.

Any focus on reconstructing interior experiences rests on a host of assumptions about subjectivity and the capacity of a rational, unitary actor to understand the thoughts, points of view, motives and feelings of people they encounter in the past. Samantha Cutrara argued that the historical thinking paradigm, common to history curriculum in British settler colonial states, privileges ‘an individual rational actor who can dispassionately assess evidence to navigate towards truth’ (Cutrara, 2018 p. 267). The curricular disciplinary focus on intentionality, cause and effect, and personalization invites students to understand and appreciate why people in the past acted how they did, and why people took particular actions (Lee & Ashby, 2001, p. 21). Certainly, a crucial aspect of the historian’s task is to reconstruct historical context as a means to develop empathy for subjects in the past (Retz, 2018). At the same time, such an approach risks allowing fraught and unethical processes of emotional identification with subjects in the past, or the decontextualization of broader structural features that shaped human actions. While encouraging an understanding of humanity that cuts across times and cultures is an important aim of history education, equally crucial is developing critical awareness of how and why values change over time, including how subjectivities are shaped in specific contexts (Parkes, 2009). Teaching and learning about historical injustice affords an important opportunity to engage these dimensions (Keynes, 2021a). As human beings and societies, an understanding of changing values and moral frames is vital to help us to judge the past and understand and orient ourselves as historical actors. Processes that seek to comprehend human actions in the past are not valueless, but are specific, place-based, and time-bound. Recognizing the specific values that are at play in the processes of interpretation including how and why they have changed are crucial dimensions of historical education and justice alike. The emphasis on strategies of personalization in the Victorian history curriculum presents a clear example of tensions created by the inclusion of settler colonial injustice in history curricula organized conceptually by historical thinking, the full implications of which are yet to be fully considered.

Human Rights

In 2012 and 2016 Victorian history curricula from Level 5 onwards, historical injustice is largely framed within a paradigm of rights. This includes the exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from full citizenship and political rights, as well as the gradual extension of human rights throughout the twentieth century. In the 2012 syllabus for example, Level 5 is focused on the Australian colonies including their founding and development, while Level 6 turns to ‘the development of Australia as a nation’. Frontier conflict is listed under ‘Historical Knowledge and Understanding’ but from a colonizer’s perspective as part of ‘the impact of a significant development or event on a colony’. At Level 6, the ‘status and rights’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are mandated as part of understanding the experiences of Australian democracy and citizenship broadly. In the content elaboration, this includes the lack of citizenship rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples illustrated by various factors including ‘the forcible removal of children from their families leading to the Stolen Generations’.

In the 2016 curriculum at Levels 5–6 ‘From Colony to Nation’, the focus is on the study of colonial Australia and the development of Australia as a nation after 1900. Therein, the focus on ‘Australia as a nation’ is framed in terms of ‘different experiences and perspectives of Australian democracy and citizenship’. This is elaborated to involve a study of the lack of citizenship rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia, illustrated by controls on movement and residence, and the forcible removal of children from their families leading to the Stolen Generations. The chronology of the content constructs the path to Australian nationhood being paved by the actions of ‘key figures’ such as settler state-builders Henry Parkes and Edmund Barton, and in reference to ‘British and American influences on Australia’s system of law and government’. The pre-existing and continuing sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is not mentioned. This establishes the experience of Australian democracy and citizenship as the benchmark, where, in this case, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience a ‘lack’ of full citizenship and are rather subjected to ‘controls on movement and residence’ including the removal of children.

Finally, in the 2012 curriculum at Level 10 ‘The Modern World and Australia’ three depth studies were offered. In depth study two ‘Rights and Freedoms’, ‘students investigate struggles for human rights in depth’. As part of the ‘background to the struggle of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for rights and freedoms before 1965’, students are directed to study ‘the Stolen Generations describing accounts of the past experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were forcibly removed from their families’. They also explore the ‘significance’ of various events ‘for the civil rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ including ‘1962 right to vote federally; 1967 Referendum; Reconciliation; Mabo decision; Bringing Them Home Report (the Stolen Generations), the Apology’. In the 2016 version, ‘Rights and Freedoms (1945-the present)’ was retained as a depth study.

In The White Possessive (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson argued that white possession functions as a mode of rationality within disciplinary knowledges that works to preclude recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. The rationality of white possession is clearly at work in Victorian curricula and functions through a specific discourse of rights. The framing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ experiences of Australian democracy as a ‘lack’—a deficit experience—at Levels 5–6, sets up the subsequent Level 10 focus on Aboriginal peoples’ movements for ‘Rights and Freedoms’ contained with a broadly human rights narrative of national progress. This narrow focus on citizenship and liberal rights relates mostly to political freedoms and does not acknowledge all the other ways that Indigenous rights were controlled and withheld such as rights to language, culture, movement, religion, and privacy, for example. The Level 10 ‘Rights and Freedoms’ depth study positions the history of child removal within a human rights paradigm from 1945 onwards, beginning with the ‘significance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. It presents the history of child removal within a narrative of the gradual unfolding of more and more rights, positioning the benevolent liberal state as becoming increasingly tolerant and accepting. The list of significant events ‘for the civil rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ included: ‘1962 right to vote federally; 1967 Referendum; Reconciliation; Mabo decision; Bringing Them Home Report (the Stolen Generations), the Apology’. These are all moments where the settler state accommodated some of the political aspirations and demands of Aboriginal people. This presents the national story as one of liberal progress towards a more tolerant society. It has the effect of cleaving away injustices from the present by positioning them as unfortunate errors on the pathway to greater enlightenment. The function of historical injustice within history curriculum—framed as the unjust withholding of human rights—is to position the unfolding of expanding access to rights within a narrative of national progress, aligned with liberal and international expectations (Barkan, 2000).

In this way, the curriculum appears to allow a traumatic appeal to justice through the inclusion of the history of settler colonial injustice, but does so in a limited, liberal rights frame whereby the sovereign Indigenous person or polity becomes the subject of a humanitarian project (Million, 2013). This speaks to Moreton-Robinson’s claim that the 1970s marks the emergence of ‘a new Indigenous subject’ brought about by ‘the formal assertion of Australia as an independent sovereign nation, and the rights claims of subjects within its borders’ (2015 p. 134). The Indigenous subject of rights discourse challenged the implicit assumption of a white subject as the universal subject of human rights. However, for Moreton-Robinson, closer scholarly attention was needed to the ways that white possession functions through a discourse of rights within the disciplines.

Framing injustice in terms of rights steers the curriculum away from both acknowledgement of Indigenous self-determination, and settler reckoning with the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Treating with historical injustice in history curriculum has rich potential to call attention to settler colonial injustice in past and present and open opportunities for subjective reflection. However, as it is currently organized, knowledge instead works to affirm the settler state as the benevolent arbiter and protector of rights and seeks to align national responses to demands for greater rights within a global liberal rights paradigm and as part of a story of national progress. It also curtails the historical understanding of the long history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander protest, activism, aspiration, and self-determination—movements that have engaged, exceeded, and refused liberal rights frameworks (Keynes et al., 2023). Presenting historical injustice in a human rights framework, within a broader curriculum organized by historical thinking, generates substantial ethical conundrums for history education scholars and practitioners.

Concluding discussion

According to former-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations turned ‘a new page in the nation’s history’. Subsequent national curriculum reforms explicitly and systematically included knowledge of settler colonial injustice, explored in this article through a case study analysis of the Victorian history curriculum since 2012. The inclusion of injustice in the post-Apology era signals an important consensus that has emerged around the significance of representing settler colonial injustice in history curriculum, and by extension, for shaping future citizens. This consensus has developed in the context of a growing global ‘culture of redress’ that positions reckoning with past injustices as a necessary step towards social transformation and directs that imperative towards education. Including state-sanctioned wrongdoing in curriculum signals the growing significance of the state’s difficult history in shaping an understanding of national citizenship. This marks a pronounced shift from the pre-Apology era characterized by historical denial and a ‘three cheers’ patriotic vision of the national past. Curricular reforms have been responsive to the culture of redress and are an important symbol of moral authority in the liberal international community.

So, has a new page in the nation’s history really been turned? Can we view curricular reforms over the past decade as signalling a shift from apology to truth, from reconciliation to justice? Have we entered a new curricular era of truth-telling based on frank reckoning with the history and present of settler colonial injustice?

Through a close textual analysis of the ways in which settler colonial injustices have been included in history curriculum since the Apology, this article has shown that curriculum continues to legitimate settler colonialism. It also demonstrates how the curriculum curtails opportunities for the development of a deep understanding and transformation of its historical and continuing structural character and effects. Further, it limits consideration of the much-longer history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty and self-determination. This article has illustrated that the representation of historical injustice in Victorian history curriculum has been largely organized by four dominant logics: memorialization (which distance the past temporally), equivalence (where experiences of colonialism are made analogous), personalization (which seeks to elicit empathy for past subjects), and through an emphasis on the extension of rights (which positions injustice as a series of unfortunate errors on the path to a more just present). History curriculum also continues to be framed by western ways of knowing and refuses to acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty (Keynes et al., 2023)

Impetus for curricular reform has usually been a result of sustained activism, including long-standing critiques that history education is misleading articulated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars, educators, and leaders. This article draws attention to the ways that settler legitimation has come to shape the outcomes of reform. As Moodie (2017) argues, moving beyond critique and towards change must involve the ‘disruption of the knowledge-power dialectic’ (43). While discourses of truth-telling and redress are being inscribed in curricula, this article shows that they do not necessarily precipitate a disruption of settler colonial knowledge, ways of knowing, and the colonial power structures they continue to uphold. Implementation of the new history curriculum in Victoria will occur from 2025 to 2026 in a political context where treaty negotiations and the final stages of formal truth-telling are unfolding. Might history curriculum finally embrace the full promise of truth-telling as a foundation for social transformation?

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Beth Marsden, Anna Clark and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In the Australian federation, state and territory governments have constitutional responsibility for the delivery of the school curriculum. The national curriculum is intended as a framework to guide implementation in the states and territories, and there is some variation in how the national curriculum has been interpreted in different jurisdictions.

2. Following Australian convention, I capitalize Indigenous. I use this term to refer to Indigenous people internationally, and ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’ in Australia. When the distinction is necessary, I use Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or refer specifically to the Country or Nation. I use ‘Aboriginal’ in contexts where Aboriginal people, rather than Torres Strait Islander people, are the dominant population group.

3. The establishment of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCADIC) in 1987 and the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) in 1990 tasked with achieving concrete reconciliation outcomes by 2001; final report of the RCADIC (1991); Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) report on racist violence Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1991); the Mabo judgement (1992); Redfern Speech (1992); Native Title legislation (1993) and; the Stolen Generations inquiry (1995–1997).

4. There were three ‘depth studies’ comprising 30 per cent each of mandated content. Within each depth study, several options were available to be selected. In the second depth study entitled ‘Australia and Asia’, teachers had the option of selecting either ‘Asia and the world’ or ‘Making a nation’ to constitute the 30 per cent allocation. This is presents forced child removal in a very limited elective capacity, comprising an optional 30 per cent of content at maximum at best, and a wholesale omission at worst. See (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2012).