FOREWORD
This is my major research essay for the History of White Supremacy. It considers the Australian ‘History Wars’, a debate which sprang up in the 1970s and became publicly controversial in the 80s and 90s, concerning the extent to which racism towards Aborigines has played a part in Australian history. The first part of the essay explains the development of the History Wars as an intellectual and political debate, and the second section traces the impact of that controversy on Australian history education in schools.
While I have made reasonable efforts to write historically and accurately, I must warn the reader that the errors and imperfections in the essay are likely to be many and large. The interested reader should seek out Stuart MacIntryre’s The History Wars (2nd ed.), which makes a very thorough analysis of most of the topics covered below.
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Beginning around the 1960s, the Western world began to think very differently about its own story. The impact of postmodern perspectives on colonisation, multiculturalism and epistemology led to new views about history which conflicted with received knowledge. The first part of this essay investigates the dynamics of these ‘History Wars’ in Australia as they relate to the telling of Australian indigenous history. The second and final section analyses the impact of this debate on school history teaching.
THE HISTORY WARS
In Australia, the History Wars can be traced to the 1970s writings of Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, two historians representing the political left and right of the debate respectively. In his treatment of the Aboriginal history of Australia, Clark placed a strong focus on frontier massacres and dispossession. ‘Wherever the Aborigine stood between the white man and the ‘superfluity’ which he craved and confounded with survival,’ wrote Clark, ‘the white man resorted to violence. In defending their material interests the white men were at times transformed into monsters in human flesh.’[1] Responding to this depiction of Europeans as rapacious and violent, Blainey criticised Clark for presenting a view of history which promoted national guilt rather than national pride. Referring to this model as ‘black armband history’, Blainey argued that ‘in recent years… [it had] assailed the generally optimistic view of Australian history.’[2] Blainey was particularly concerned with the impact of this way of thinking on the next generation of Australians, insisting that it was a ‘deprivation’ of their ‘inheritance’ to claim that young Australians have little to be proud of.[3] Equally, Blainey was concerned with exaggerations of frontier violence: ‘Again and again we see and hear the mischievous statements that the Aborigines’ numbers were drastically reduced primarily by slaughter. In fact diseases were the great killer by a very large margin.’[4] For Blainey, the ‘gloomy view’ of black armband history consisted essentially of allegations of mistreatment of various minorities by large groups of European Australians.[5] The conflict between the Clark and Blainey viewpoints signalled Australia’s move towards heterogeneity and postmodernity as well as an increased consciousness about civil rights and minority interests, both 1960s traditions inherited from America. Prior to the 1960s Australian historians had told a more or less unified story of Australian settlement which concentrated on Australia’s commonwealth inheritance and viewed the Australian past exclusively from the point of view of white colonists, a model which Blainey referred to as ‘three cheers history’.[6] But the emergence of marginal voices in the post-colonial world of the 1960s, where categorical truth claims became suspect and a plurality of perspectives became the mainstream, encouraged the articulation of new perspectives and new purposes in history writing. Now more than ever before historians were conscious of the political significance of their work, and the political commitments of different historians came to shape the historical debate. [7]
A second, perhaps more memorable stage in the development of this debate was the conflict between historians Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle. In various 1990s books variously entitled Frontier, Dispossession, etc, Henry Reynolds followed Manning Clark in portraying the violence and bloodshed in Australia’s colonial legacy. In the introduction to Frontier, Reynolds wrote: ‘No one who reads colonial newspapers, speeches, letters or books can overlook the persistent racial violence without grossly distorting the truth. Three chapters out of seven [in his book] are not an overemphasis on conflict given its ubiquity and longevity and its continuing influence in many parts of Australia.’[8] In opposition to this thesis, Keith Windschuttle launched a public and in some important ways eminently justifiable criticism of Reynolds and other historians, arguing that they had misused evidence and that they represented European Australians as significantly more violent and oppressive than they had ever in fact been. Certainly the objections based on misuse of evidence were valuable, and Windschuttle demonstrated that in some cases historians had actually fabricated evidence, citing sources that didn’t even exist. For Windschuttle, ‘The majority of deaths on both sides resulted from individual conflicts. To discuss all frontier conflict under the name of “massacres” is to falsify and wilfully exaggerate the down side of Australian history.’[9] But Windschuttle’s own arguments about the diminished responsibility of European Australians in frontier conflicts, etc, were every bit as speculative as any of his opponents’ cases. [10] In some senses the Reynolds / Windschuttle debate constituted a different sort of conflict from the Clark / Blainey dispute. Whereas Clark and Blainey had argued mostly over the role and effect of history – how it made people feel about their nation – Reynolds and Windschuttle gave more attention to the substance of history: what in fact were the details of Australia’s past.
In 1992 Paul Keating delivered a memorable address at Redfern Park in Sydney. A small park surrounded by state housing in a suburb just farther than a stone’s throw from Sydney’s CBD, Redfern Park today bears no witness to the significance of the speech which was given there in December of 1992.[11] The Redfern address essentially constituted an apology to Aboriginal Australia for the wrongs visited on it by European Australians. For Keating, the process of creating a new national story was an ‘act of recognition’: ‘Recognition that it was we [‘non-Aboriginal Australians’] who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.’[12] Keating dared to voice his apology on a very broad scale. However when John Howard won the prime ministership in 1996 and the Report on the Stolen Generations, Bringing them Home, was tabled in federal parliament in 1997, Howard defied the example of state premiers in refusing to formally apologise on behalf of the Australian government for its role in the Stolen Generations removals.[13] According to Howard, ‘Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.’[14] In a later address, Howard stated that his refusal to make the apology had three bases: first, it was nonsensical in principle to take responsibility for wrongs committed by one’s forbears; second, not all the removals had been forced or unreasonable; and third, providing an apology could create the impression that ‘the indigenous box’ had been ticked and cultural inequality had been solved.[15] In Keating and Howard, we can observe two diametrically opposed approaches to talking about Australian history, clearly aligned with the political left and right respectively. Keating’s ‘big picture’ for Australia involved multiculturalism and the promotion of minority interests. For Howard, like Geoffrey Blainey, dealing appropriately with Australian history meant concentrating on the parts of Australia’s past that inspired pride, nationalism and respect for government.[16]
Frontier violence and the stolen generations figure prominently as two focuses on the content of Australian history. Clark, Reynolds and Keating had argued that settlers had dispossessed Aboriginal Australians of their land by oppressive force and, in some cases, massacre; whereas Blainey and Windschuttle maintained that the death toll was significantly smaller or at least not so comprehensively attributable to violence; disease, which was an unintended injury, played a greater role. As for the stolen generations, historian Robert Manne concurred with the authors of the original report, Bringing them Home – including Sir Ronald Wilson – in concluding that the stolen generations essentially formed a calculated effort at genocide, aimed at completely annihilating the ‘pure-blood’ Aboriginal race. Ron Brunton treated this thesis as ludicrous and went along with Howard in presenting the policy of removal as well-intended programme with some undesirable consequences (but nowhere near on the scale that Reynolds and Wilson had suggested).[17]
As for the function of history, the ‘leftists’ had very little to say explicitly, whereas in their reactive criticisms of leftist history the ‘conservatives’ extolled history’s importance as a nation-building tool and a potential source of national pride and criticised history which promoted guilt about the past.[18] These themes were to become prominent in the debate over school history.
THE WARS IN THE SCHOOLS
History education in Australia pre-1960s had followed the entrenched pattern of emphasising Commonwealth connections, politicians and ‘great men’ of Australian colonial development. As Blainey reminisced, he had been raised on a ‘three cheers’ history whose jingoistic pride constituted something of an extreme.[19] Furthermore, the curriculum was content-focused and Anglocentric.[20] As the 1970s Clark/Blainey debates reached into the public consciousness, curricula began to change to reflect the importance of civil rights and minority groups. Instead of studying James Cook, Federation and Sir Robert Menzies, students learned about Aboriginal customs, African American liberation and female suffrage.[21] This movement towards a more ‘inclusive’ curriculum was solidified in the 1994 Commonwealth Curriculum Corporation Studies of Society and Environment curriculum framework. This document represented not only a crystallisation of the new content of history education within the SOSE model initiated by the Hawke government, but also an entirely new meaning of history. Whereas traditional education had distinguished history as a discrete discipline, SOSE fused history, geography, sociology, environmental and political studies into one catch-all subject where different sections of the course were called by names such as ‘continuity and change’. Teaching was now explicitly directed towards learning skills – called ‘outcomes’ – rather than specific factual knowledge.[22] The new curriculum presented history in light of all the developments of postmodernity: ‘Stories, historical accounts and other representations come to be understood as versions of human experience, based on selected evidence and able to provide no more than tentative conclusions. Increasingly, students see that the course material used as evidence, the person who interprets it, and the reader who studies it are all bearers of the assumptions, beliefs and value positions of their times and places.’[23] In the Curriculum Profile document, outcomes for Level 8 learning under the ‘Culture’ strand of SOSE education were: ‘8.7: Analyses contemporary issues of cultural importance from the perspectives and beliefs of [indigenous Australians]. … 8.8: Analyses factors that bring about cultural adaptation within groups, communities or societies. … 8.9: Evaluates moral and ethical issues and justifies personal positions.’[24] Under the ‘Time, Continuity and Change’ strand, outcome 7.1a was ‘Critically analyses the ways core values of Australian society have endured or changed over time.’[25] The results of the new teaching model for the purpose and content of Australian history were marked. The once ‘required knowledge’ of traditional history education – important leaders in Australian government, for example – began to lose out to theme and skills-based education which focused less on facts and more on ‘strands’. School history turned its attention from politicians and war heroes to contemplate the marginal voices of social history. And the once-strong grand narrative of glorious Australian democracy was no longer the ursatz behind classroom history.[26]
This undermining of basic factual knowledge concerned the historical conservatives almost as much as the notion that it was seen to generate white guilt.[27] When the Howard government entered office in 1996, it was so concerned about loss of substance and generation of guilt that it called in 1999 for a National Inquiry into History Education, the Final Report of which was delivered in 2000. The Report found: ‘There was no significant weight of opinion about national identity except that history teachers were keen to differentiate between, on the one hand, promotion of patriotism and nationalism and, on the other hand, an analytical exploration of national identity issues using a historical perspective.’[28] It seems, then, that teachers were feeling the conflicting pressures of competing approaches to history. The debate around school history flared in the early to mid 2000s. In the flagship conservative journal Quadrant, Geoffrey Partington noted that ‘It is hard to define a definite core of historical studies today in Australian schools, although one notes some emphasis on the suffering s of women, indigenous peoples and immigrants in Australia…’[29] Although deliberately refraining from suggesting what they might be, Partington argued for the need to find ‘criteria of significance’[30] and scale down the scope of school history in order to focus on those topics ‘on which significance, value and relevance should be based.’[31] In October 2006, Howard said in a speech marking the 50th anniversary of Quadrant that ‘Until recent times, it had become almost de rigueur in intellectual circles to regard Australian history as little more than a litany of sexism, racism and class warfare.’ Clearly for Howard, the threat of leftist history was still large. In his 2006 Australia Day address calling for a renaissance of ‘Australian values’, he called for a ‘root and branch renewal’ of Australian history education, ‘both in terms of the numbers learning and the way it is taught.’[32] ‘Too often, it is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’.’[33] This criticism introduced a process which is still in swing to modify and standardise history education throughout Australia. One of the leading advocates of this front from its genesis was Julie Bishop, the once federal Minister for Education, who called for ‘the re-establishment of a structured narrative in the teaching of Australian history’[34] and for equipping students ‘with the fundamentals, essential and enduring skills and learning that will help make them informed and productive citizens. … History… classes should not be allowed to slide into political science courses by another name.’[35] Bishop blamed the inadequacies of history courses on ‘social engineers’ and ‘ideologues who have hijacked school curriculum’.[36] Meanwhile, other commentators, including teachers, have responded more positively to the education revolution, particularly in the area of indigenous studies. One teacher interviewed by Anna Clark reflected: ‘I’ve noticed a real difference in student attitudes over the fifteen years or so that I’ve been teaching this topic. We have a lot of country girls, boarders, and I used to find that at the beginning of the unit the country girls would be very very critical of Aboriginal people and as the unit progressed I could really see their attitudes change.’[37] However other critics from the education sphere such as Kevin Donnelly have decried the move towards a more ‘politically correct’ version of history, insisting that students who do not have a basic grasp of significant political and governmental developmental developments like federation are left impoverished and unable fully to grasp their Australian heritage.[38] In sum, the conservative critique of SOSE-era history studies does not yet seem to have had an impact on the way history is taught. In short, there has not yet been a turning point to rival the revolution of the 70s-90s. Further, although the public declarations of Howard, Bishop and others do not make the point explicitly, it seems implicit in their statements that an overly sympathetic view of the place of Aborigines in Australian history remains a deep concern alongside the lack of government and civics knowledge and the absence of a grand narrative.
The foregoing argument has linked the debates of the History Wars with a key development in Australian history education and noted the conservative backlash to this revolution. Although the concerns of the History Wars have reached into all aspects of school history, however, it would be misleading to suggest that they were the only factor behind the major changes. Purely pedagogical interests have naturally had a profound influence on teaching approaches. For example, in her research for History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, Anna Clark discovered that while students regarded Australian history as an important subject which they should study at least until year 9 or 10, many were bored with Australian history topics and therefore opted for other units such as ‘Revolutions’ whenever the system allowed for it.[39] Students found it difficult to engage with content on settlement and federation because they were presented in a dry fashion. For Clark, it was very well for politicians to agitate for a firmer basis of factual knowledge through history education, but it was much harder for teachers to convey this relatively colourless information than politicians understood.[40] Further, students of all ages were curious and investigative, and responded with hostility whenever they felt they were being fed a particular ‘line’.[41] This may explain in part the failure of conservative interest holders to promote a facts-based civics emphasis in history teaching. Where students are unwilling to learn and teachers unable to teach well, knowledge cannot be transmitted no matter how much politicians may desire it. This lack of attention or boredom with facts about settlement and federation may be equally attributable to the genesis of a media generation – whose hunger for ‘relevance’ encourages a piecemeal curriculum structure and focus on ethnic minorities – just as much as any factors connected with the History Wars or its philosophical and political foundations.[42]
REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
The scarcity of teaching time for Australian history in schools demands a strong answer to the question how that time should be used. A strong answer would involve a considered, scholarly and practical response to the questions, ‘What happened in Australia’s past?’, ‘What part of it is important?’ and ‘What is the purpose of teaching national history?’ Far though it may be from the scope of this essay to seek to answer those questions, one observation gleaned from the literature on the United States’ own crisis of history wars in education seems relevant and significant. In History on Trial, Gary B. Nash et al argue that the right wing concern about multicultural history education having no grand narrative is misplaced. ‘Quite simply, the particularities of social history can be mainstreamed readily enough by changing the governing narrative from the rise of democracy, defined in terms of electoral politics, to the struggle to fulfil the American ideals of liberty, equal justice, and equality.’[43] Yes, as Kevin Donnelly states, an effective history curricula needs to communicate to students they are part of a ‘unfolding narrative’ or ‘big picture’ which connects them with the past, present and future of ‘something more lasting and significant than the often mundane routine of one’s day-to-day existence,’[44] possibly, for example, one’s nation. But the traditional right-wing, civics-focused historical paradigm is not the only grand narrative which communicates this meaning, and a curriculum which seeks to instil respect for ethnic minorities, including Aborigines, can conjure a powerful and prideful story about nationhood and purpose.
The development of curriculum standards focused on multiculturalism and portraying a sympathetic picture of Australian Aboriginal history originated both in the intellectual furnace of the History Wars and its foundational wellspring of postmodern philosophy. The minds of students have become battlefields where the future of nation is contested between proponents of egalitarianism and advocates of a specific brand of nationalism. However the interests underlying the debate over history teaching are not purely political, as recent sociological trends and the pedagogical responses which sprang up to address them have been equally significant factors shaping curriculum policy and classroom practice. With the implementation of a national history curriculum still in process, the struggle over classroom history is not yet at an end, and it remains to be seen what further impacts the History Wars may have on the minds of tomorrow.
[1] Manning Clark, A History of Australia, Vol. 5 – The People Make Laws: 1888-1915, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1981, p. 106.
[2] Blainey, ‘Drawing up a Balance Sheet of Our History’, Quadrant, Vol. 37, Nos. 7-8, July-August 1993, p. 11.
[3] Ibid, p. 15.
[4] Ibid, p. 15.
[5] Ibid, p. 11.
[6] Ibid. See also Stuart MacIntyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (2nd ed.), Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2004, pp. 173-174.
[7] See generally e.g. Kevin Donnelly, Dumbing Down: Outcomes-based and politically correct – the impact of the Culture Wars on our schools, Prahran, Vic.: Hardie Grant Books, 2007, pp. 13-24.
[8] Henry Reynolds, Frontier, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987, p. viii.
[9] Windschuttle, ‘The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History: Part 2: The Fabrication of the Australian Death Toll’, Quadrant, Vol. 44, No. 11, November 2000, p. 21.
[10] Windschuttle, p. 18. For an adjudication of this controversy see MacIntyre and Clark, pp. 161-170.
[11] I was extremely disappointed to discover this when I visited the park in early 2010.
[12] The Hon. Paul Keating, ‘Redfern Address’, Redfern, Sydney, 10 December 1992, accessed 17 October 2011, <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Redfern_Speech>.
[13] Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, ‘Content of apologies by State and Territory Parliaments’, 2008, retrieved 21 October 2011, <http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/apologies_states.html>.
[14] John Howard, ‘Opening Speech of the Australian Reconciliation Convention’, 26 May 2000, retrieved 20 October 2011, <http://web.archive.org/web/20060524083706/http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/car/arc/speeches/opening/howard.htm>.
[15] John Howard, John F Kennedy School of Government, 11 March 2008, retrieved 20 October 2011, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4DzOhk6sBw>.
[16] See e.g. MacIntyre and Clark, pp. 176-177, 181.
[17] Ibid, pp. 145-146, 155-156.
[18] Tony Taylor, ‘Disputed Territory: The Politics of Historical Consciousness in Australia’, in Peter Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 225-228.
[19] Blainey, p.11. However for Blainey, this extreme was far preferable to the ‘black armband’ option.
[20] Taylor, 2004, p. 229.
[21] Donnelly, pp. 88-97.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Curriculum Corporation, A Statement on Studies of Society and Environment in Australian Schools, Carlton South, Vic.: Curriculum Corporation, 1994, p. 13.
[24] Curriculum Corporation, Studies of Society and Environment: A Curriculum Profile for Australian Schools, Carlton South, Vic.: Curriculum Corporation, 1994, p. 6.
[25] Curriculum Corporation, Profile, p. 4.
[26] Taylor, 2004, pp. 224-225.
[27] Taylor, 2004. See also John Howard, ‘Address to the National Press Club, the Great Hall, Parliament House’, 25 January 2006, accessed 20 October 2011, <http://australianpolitics.com/2006/01/25/john-howard-australia-day-address.html>.
[28] Tony Taylor et al, Final Report of the Report of the National Inquiry into School History: Executive Summary, Churchill, Vic.: The Faculty of Education, Monash University, 2000, Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, accessed 17 October 2011, <http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/indexes/documents/summary_x3_pdf.htm>, [1.7].
[29] Geoffrey Partington, ‘What History Should We Teach?’, Quadrant, Vol. 49, Nos. 1-2, January-February 2005, p. 69.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid, p. 71.
[32] Howard, 2006.
[33] Ibid.
[34] The Hon. Julie Bishop, ‘Address to the History Teachers of Australia Conference’, Fremantle, 6 October 2006, accessed 21 October 2011, <http://www.dest.gov.au/ministers/media/bishop/2006/10/b001061006.asp>
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Clark, p. 76.
[38] Donnelly, p. 94.
[39] Clark, p. 94.
[40] See, e.g., ibid, pp. 94-96.
[41] Ibid, p. 85.
[42] William J.R. Allen, An Analysis of Curriculum Policy for Upper Secondary School History in Western Australia from 1983 to 2000, Thesis, Ed.D, UWA, 2004, pp. 54-55.
[43] Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, p. 101.
[44] Donnelly, ?.
