Reading History Curriculum as Postcolonial Text: Towards a Curricular Response to the History Wars in Australia and Beyond

Abstract

This article is concerned with theorizing a curricular response to what has become known in Australia as the “history wars” (Macintyre & Clark, 2003). The central debate in the history wars is over the representation of the colonization of Australia. Because History curriculum serves as an apparatus for the social (re)production of national identities, the importance of school history as a battlefield in the “history wars” should not be underestimated (Clark, 2003). This article explores as a case study the emergence of and political backlash against a critical History curriculum in the state of New South Wales, Australia, during the decade prior to the millennium. The case, reflecting similar debates over History curricula in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, provides a useful starting point for reconceptualising critical approaches to History as curriculum. Reading History curriculum as a postcolonial text, it is argued that what have remained uncontested in the struggle for histories have been the representational practices of “history” itself, and that attending to representation opens new possibilities for school History as critical pedagogic practice.

Notes

Notes

1 Despite the clear resonance between the 1992 Syllabus and the social conscience of its time, it is important to note that I make no claims about how this curriculum document was ultimately enacted, or what its educational effects were.

2 Some of these shifts in Aboriginal history had been canvassed somewhat earlier by Frank Farrell (1980), in Teaching History, the journal of the History Teachers’ Association. More recent work by Veracini (2003b) documents “four waves” in Aboriginal historiography. According to Veracini (2003b), the first wave took place during the 1960s and 1970s, establishing “a dialectical opposition between Aboriginal absence and Aboriginal presence” in “Australian history” (p. 225). The second wave occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s exploring issues relating to Aboriginal passivity and resistance in relation to colonisation. The third wave emerged in the late 1980s and continued through the early 1990s, examining “the tension between Aboriginal strategies of confrontation and collaboration with invaders” (Veracini, 2003b, p. 225), and ultimately affirmed Aboriginal agency. The fourth phase commenced in the late 1990s, and continues into the present. It involves debates over “the tension between unsurrendered sovereignty and unilateral extinguishment of native rights to land” (Veracini, 2003b, p. 225). Thus, while the “new Aboriginal historiography” in general refers to the tendency of historians in the latter half of the 20th century to pay attention to Indigenous perspectives on the past, the central debates in the field have undergone a number of transformations. By the time of the 1992 Syllabus, history educators who were keeping up with the academic debates would have been aware of literature that fitted into the first three phases of the debate. The development of a new syllabus in 1998 could be seen to coincide with the beginning of the fourth phase of Aboriginal historiography, although Windschuttle’s (2002) polemic work for example, continues in part, the battle of the third phase.

3 Howard’s views on Australian history have most recently led the federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop (2006), to conduct a National History Summit, where she called for “a renaissance of Australian history in our schools” (p. 1), to be achieved in part by defining “the essential narrative—the facts and details—of Australian history with which every student should become familiar during their schooling” (p. 2), inviting a strong return to “chronology” (p. 2) and “narrative” (p. 3).