Using Archaeology to Teach Australia’s ‘Difficult’ Indigenous Past

Abstract

The inclusion of the topic ‘Ancient Australia’ in the new Australian Curriculum is causing teachers to rethink the way they teach history in schools. Year 7 students are now required to understand that Australian ‘history’ began with the arrival of the First Australians around 50,000 years ago, not with the arrival of the British First Fleet in 1788. Consequently, a number of epistemological, historiographical, and ethical challenges have emerged. In this paper I discuss the implications of this reconceptualization of Australian history in the curriculum and explore ways in which archaeology can address the ‘difficult’ history of the First Australians.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal
• archaeology
• Australian
• contested history
• curriculum
• difficult history
• Indigenous

Acknowledgement

Sincere thanks to my University of Western Sydney colleagues, Gunditjmara woman Shirley Gilbert for her feedback and suggestions for improvement, and Dr Paul Rooney for his informative conversations on threshold concepts.

Notes

1. Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal National Party Coalition, became Prime Minister of Australia in September 2013.

2. Indigenous Australians are people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and are accepted as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person in the community in which they live, or have lived.

3. The Australian Labor Party is a left-wing, democratic socialist party. Labor was elected to office in 2007 with Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister until 2011. Julia Gillard replaced him as Prime Minister until her resignation in June 2013.

4. New South Wales has been the only state to teach history as a stand-alone subject since the 1980s. All other states and territories have embedded history in the subject of Social Studies.

5. NAIDOC originally stood for ‘National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee’ which was once responsible for organizing national activities during NAIDOC Week. Its acronym has since become the name of the week itself (second week of July), which celebrates the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (<http://www.naidoc.org.au/>).

6. See ‘New South Wales syllabuses for the Australian Curriculum’, Board of Studies New South Wales (<http://syllabus.bos.nsw.edu.au/hsie/history-k10/content/>).

7. Message from Mungo, by Ronin films, 2014 (<http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/9901/message-from-mungo.html>).

8. The acceptable terms now used by archaeologists are ‘pre-contact’ and ‘post-contact’ periods.

9. The doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to no one) on which British claims to possession of Australia were based.

10. In 2007, the Gunditjmara people achieved recognition of their heritage and identity through the Federal Court of Australia’s Gunditjmara Native Title Consent Determination. In 2008, Lake Condah was formally returned to the Gunditjmara people by the State of Victoria (<http://www.lakecondah.com/budjbim.html>).

11. Culture, Climate, Change: Archaeology in the Tropics, 1–3 December 2014, Cairns, Queensland (<http://australianarchaeology.com/conferences/aaa2014-conference/>).