History Wars

John Howard is seeking to re-write history – and not just by defying predictions at the polling booth. He’s trying to re-write our children’s history books.

I wrote in an academic journal last year that it was my high school history teachers who politicised me. They taught me to think independently and interrogate the themes of history - to analyse the causes and consequences of events, not just reiterate dates. These are the skills that form my journalistic scaffolding and the lessons that inform my moral compass, socially activating me.

I suspect the transformation my history teachers effected within me is precisely the sort of outcome the Howard government is seeking to prevent through its new national, compulsory history curriculum.

The controversial plan takes a good idea – increasing high school students’ exposure to Australian history – and prostitutes it for political purposes. The Howard agenda is about white-washing Australian history. This shouldn’t come as a shock to long term observers of his ‘cultural revolution’. In the late 90’s he railed against what he described as the ‘black-armband’ view of Australian history – this was a deliberately offensive way of critiquing contemporary perspectives on the history of Aboriginal Australia since European invasion (a term he detests…it was settlement or colonisation in his view despite the bloody battles, massacres and genocide).

He’s also criticised what he perceives as Leftist interpretations of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war in some history curricula along with representations of the dismissal of the Whitlam government – Australia’s most significant political crisis and one in which he played a part. Howard’s focus is on celebrating Australian achievements…particularly on the cricket pitch.

Monash University's National Centre for History Education was originally commissioned by the Federal Government to produce the curriculum and its output was approved by the Federal Education Minister but Howard was unhappy with its direction and instead, referred it to a panel of experts. Read for: hand-picked, right leaning experts like the conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey and former Howard staffer and columnist, Gerard Henderson.

Howard released the end result last week on Federal election eve, in a carefully managed publicity stunt which involved the student captains and principal of a western Sydney school being brought back early from school holidays to accommodate the PM’s need for a classroom photo opportunity. But the curriculum, the implementation of which will be tied to federal education funding, has been criticised by the academics responsible for the first draft, the state education ministers, and history teachers themselves.

The concern of the Monash academics is that the curriculum is now too cumbersome and will be difficult to implement. The state’s say it represents inappropriate federal intervention in school curricula – and NSW points out that it already has a compulsory history course for years 9 and 10 and doesn’t need another layer of lesson plans. The history teachers themselves say it’s a politicised curriculum, a point reiterated by ACT Education Minister, Andew Barr who told the ABC "What we are effectively being asked to adopt here is ... John Howard's version of Australian history.”

There’s certainly evidence of Howard’s hand on the curriculum – date driven, rather than theme-informed, it is overcrowded with so called milestones and characters but key events and people seem to be missing. Why, for example, is the rural entrepreneur RM Williams featured, but the living political legend, Gough Whitlam ignored? And, what do we make of this: according to the ‘Howard-ised’ curriculum Aboriginal history is taught from 60,000 years BC to 15,000 years BC; the ‘Early Encounters’ end with Captain Cook scouring the Australian coast in 1770 and the period from 1788 to 1840 is titled ‘British Settlement’. As a student of history, my analysis is this: Howard is whiting out the most tumultuous period in modern Australian history – the wars, massacres and genocide that characterised white-black relations from 1788.

This is a dangerous and dastardly act. I support the compulsory study of history in secondary school and I wish more journalism students would study it at university. As long as the content is engaging and well taught, history studies can produce well-informed citizens and journalists who can understand the present and potentially predict the future in the context of the past.

It is history which teaches us to avoid repeating the mistakes of our forbears. But jingoistic history has no place in our schools and a nation which is so far from repairing the damage inflicted on Aboriginal Australia has no business erasing the harrowing history the Indigenous people of this country have endured since white invasion.

How can we even hope to reach a state of true reconciliation without confronting our black history?