Jonathan Strauss
The August 17 "history summit" organised by PM John Howard's government consolidated its push for a national Australian history school curriculum. This curriculum will establish one side of historical discussion in the classroom — the side that tries to tell us there is no alternative in our society to what now exists.
The "history wars" of recent years have been highlighted by an attempt to dispute that the British invasion and colonisation of Australia included genocidal policies against Indigenous people. In a speech to the National Press Club in January, Howard announced the new front in the history wars as a drive by his government to return to teaching history as a "narrative". Media reports have presented this as students being required to learn supposedly pivotal dates and facts about (white) Australia's history.
The August 17 meeting, however, set a course toward examining "big themes" in order to better obscure both the weaknesses in historical understanding and the political results of the new curriculum. Thus, in accordance with the paper presented by Wollongong University academic Gregory Melleuish, the curriculum proposed would include the negative impact of European settlers on Aboriginal Australia, the development of trade unions and the ALP, and "the emancipation of women" within a view of Australia's history being the progressive development of "liberal democracy".
These are topics that outright reactionaries might seek to exclude. However, this proposal has its own set of selected facts.
Melleuish's historical narrative is set in a framework of assumed quests for "security" and (capitalist) social stability. The inclusion of some aspects of the labour and women's rights movements or the racist oppression of Indigenous people simultaneously involves the exclusion of the history of resistance to class, gender and racial oppression — resistances that have more clearly threatened capitalist social stability.
Similarly, the Vietnam War is to be included, but as "part of this quest for security". The mass movement against Australia's participation in the US-led invasion and occupation of Vietnam isn't mentioned.
Those happy with society as it is, such as those who initiated and participated in the "history summit" — government representatives, mostly conservative-minded history teachers and academic historians, along with Gerard Henderson, head of the right-wing Sydney Institute, and Australian editor-at-large Paul Kelly — may be satisfied with such a history. Against those academics who, in recent decades, have argued that to tell the history of something is to impose a particular view and, therefore, it is better to say very little, their arguments may even have some weight.
If, however, an account of history is to aid those who want to change the world in the interests of the oppressed, then its telling must also make clear why it happened that way, because then how history's outcomes could have changed if people's actions were different would also be clear.