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When little else in the world makes sense, history is the defining discipline. It carries extraordinarily important lessons for us and the future that we seek to shape. It can demolish prejudice. It is a reminder that there are hard decisions that have to be made, and the importance of making them and not shying away from them. And it can also inspire and point us to new horizons … We cannot, in facing our future, in the most consequential geopolitical realignment in our lifetimes, abandon what Arthur Schlesinger described as “historic purpose”. We have to be informed by a sense of not only who we are, but from where we have come.
—Brendan Nelson, on launching A Liberal State: 1926–1966 by David Kemp
The audience at the launch in Sydney on April 29 of the fourth volume of David Kemp’s monumental history of Australian Liberalism nodded in agreement at Nelson’s comments on the centrality of history to understanding society. He described the book of his former ministerial colleague in the Howard government as a “towering masterpiece” which he wished he had read at the outset of his political career: “It brings so much understanding and enlightenment to who we are and where we are today.” (The book is reviewed in detail by William Poulos in our Books section in the upcoming June issue.)
On the night, those attending were obviously pleased with the impact both the book and its three companion volumes were likely to have on the future writing of political history in Australia and on the reputation of the single most influential character in Kemp’s latest narrative, Robert Gordon Menzies. The organiser of the book launch, the Menzies Research Centre’s Nick Cater, also announced that he had just signed a deal with the University of Melbourne to host the Robert Menzies Institute, a prime ministerial library and museum with Georgina Downer as executive director. Everyone hearing this felt things were looking up.
The next day, reality returned with a vengeance. The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority released the new national school curriculum for history from Years Seven to Ten. None of its content bore any resemblance to that of David Kemp’s book. The curriculum has no analysis of the origins and history within Australia of liberalism or democracy. No appreciation of the degree of political, social and economic freedom enjoyed by all Australian citizens. Nothing to give any idea of how Australia became the prosperous, civilised country it has long been. No clue about why the great majority of Australians feel so lucky to live here.
The curriculum contains no mention of Robert Menzies or his political rivals John Curtin and Ben Chifley, or of any other of our prime ministers. No mention of other long-serving leaders such as Bob Hawke or John Howard. Yet there are plenty of names of other political identities that students will be required to study. Here is one list from the syllabus for Year Ten:
William Cooper, Jack Patten, Sir Douglas Nicholls, Lady Gladys Nicholls, Vincent Lingiari, Charles Perkins, Shirley Smith, Gladys Elphick, Essie Coffey, Joyce Clague, Roberta (Bobbi) Sykes, Gary Foley, Michael Anderson, Eddie Koiki Mabo, Lowitja O’Donoghue
There is no prize for guessing what they have in common. They are all Aboriginal political activists. These are the people the curriculum wants young Australians to regard as our most historically significant.
In September 2012, when the Gillard government published the first national curriculum for history, John Howard felt called on to re-enter public debate to denounce it as “unbalanced, lacking in priorities and quite bizarre”. He accused it of marginalising the Judeo-Christian ethic and purging the British contribution to Australian history. The 2021 ACARA curriculum is far worse than the one Howard saw. It is even worse than made out in the highly critical review by Geoffrey Blainey in the Australian on May 6. It reads like a wish-list straight from the Green Left Weekly. It endorses every one of the major claims currently being made by left-wing climate warriors, LGBTI advocates and indigenous activists. In fact, it is not a curriculum that teaches history at all. It is an exercise in the indoctrination of identity politics.
What makes this especially concerning is that it has been produced in a period when John Howard’s Coalition successors have held the reins of political power, and when all the members of the ACARA board responsible have been appointed or re-appointed by either the Turnbull or Morrison governments. If the Coalition allows this atrocity to be inflicted on the current generation of Australian high school students, Robert Menzies will be groaning in his grave. As both John Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs and Rita Panahi in the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph have written, this curriculum is aimed at teaching kids to hate Australia.
The curriculum for history covers Years Seven to Ten of high school. The full text can be read here.
In Year Seven, the study of ancient Aboriginal society, now re-branded by this curriculum by the legally inaccurate term of “First Nations Peoples”, is compulsory and takes up half the course. The other half can be a study of either ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, India or China. For the study of the First Nations, it lists the following (this and other dot-point lists are all reproduced verbatim):
# the development of innovative technologies by early First Nations Peoples of Australia
# how the ancestors of the early First Peoples of Australia are recognised as the first seafarers on record and how this is considered as one of the greatest achievements of early humans
# the technologically advanced societies of early First Nations Peoples of Australia and their highly sophisticated development of stone tools and stone knapping techniques
# First Nations Australians’ cultures as ongoing and dynamic entities that continue to successfully respond and adapt to broad scale environmental shifts as they have done over millennia and continue today such as Sabai Island and Western Cape York
# the absence within Aboriginal society of such technologies as wheels, pottery, farming and metallurgy were not signs that it was primitive. Such an idea comes from “now discredited” theories of cultural evolution.
In Year Eight, there are three sub-strands, one on the Western and Islamic societies; one on societies in the Asia-Pacific region, and the third called “Expanding Contacts”. Students must take at least one topic from each sub-strand. There is actually some interesting ground that could possibly be covered here, especially on the origins and rise of Christianity and Islam and their spread across the globe, and also on Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages. However, it is organised so that teachers can choose between covering the origins and growth of either Christianity or Islam, but don’t have to study both. This virtually guarantees that students at Islamic schools will gain no knowledge of Western history and its place in Australian society.
In Year Nine, the curriculum returns to its central political objectives. It requires students to study the awful destruction wreaked on the First Nations Peoples by the evils of European imperial expansion. In a study of the “making and transformation of the Australian nation from 1750 to 1918”, students will study:
# the impact of invasion, colonisation and dispossession of lands by Europeans on the First Nations People of Australia such as frontier warfare, genocide, removal from land, relocation to protectorates, reserves and missions.
# the effects of colonisation, such as frontier conflict, and the massacres of First Nations Australians; the spread of European diseases and the destruction of cultural lifestyles [NB: diseases such as smallpox are identified as “European” rather than originating in Asia]
# the effects of sheep and cattle farming on the Australian landscape, such as loss of native plants, compacting of soil, and water run-off
# the forcible removal of children from First Nations Australia families in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century (leading to the Stolen Generations), such as the motivations for the removal of children, the practices and laws that were in place, and experiences of separation
In Year Ten, students are required to study two main topics: the Second World War and “significant movements for rights and freedoms in the world”. The second of these is a list comprising: “the US Civil Rights movement, First Nations Peoples of Australia rights movements, South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, women’s movements, the LGBTQI+ movements”. Once again, the curriculum devotes most of its attention to the study of indigenous Australians. The following is a list of content descriptions:
# the significant events in the movement for the civil rights of First Nations Peoples of Australia and the extent they contributed to change, including 1962 right to vote federally, Freedom Rides, 1967 Referendum, Tent Embassy, Reconciliation; Mabo decision, Bringing Them Home report (the Stolen Generations), the Apology
# areas, such as education, health and employment, that are the focus for continued civil rights action for First Nations Peoples of Australia, and why there continues to be a need for such action
# the legacy of children’s experiences in “care” (their placement in orphanages, Children’s Homes, foster care and other forms of out-of-home care), and the significance of this in relation to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990)
# Australia’s responsibilities as a signatory (in 2009) to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and how this continues the legacy of First Nations Australians rights and freedoms
# the concept of popular culture and how it influenced First Nations Australians to become provocative, such as the development of cultural performing arts, for example, the Bangarra Dance Theatre in advancing First Nations Australians’ cultures, beliefs, and stories and issues through dance and music
Although this course is supposed to be about “rights and freedoms”, the course content also places environmental topics within this category. Hence, if teachers or students have had enough of the problems of indigenous Australia they can study green ideology instead. Here is the recommended list of topics:
# the Australian government’s response to environmental threats including deforestation and climate change
# the influence the rise of the Australian Greens party has had on shaping Australian government policies on environmental threats, including deforestation and climate change. [NB: No other political party gets this kind of treatment]
# how international organisations, such as Conservation International, Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Ocean Conservancy, the World Resources Institute and the World Wildlife Fund, advocate to change government policies around environmental threats, including deforestation and climate change
# the impact of the United Nations on responding to environmental threats, including climate change, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), the Kyoto Protocol (1997), the Copenhagen Accord (2009), the Paris Agreement (2016)
# the historic impact of the pictures of Earth taken during the Apollo 8 mission and how they influenced people’s view of the world
# the significance of ideas about the environment, such as Gaia theory, the limits of growth, sustainability and rights of nature
# environmental effects such as the flooding of Lake Pedder in Tasmania, deforestation in Indonesia, the decline of the Aral Sea, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the whaling industry
# the struggle over American, British and French nuclear weapon testing in the Pacific from 1946 to 1996 or the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985.
And then if teachers are not interested or cannot find the time to prepare materials replete with Aboriginal or Green propaganda, the curriculum offers other acceptable topics for Year Ten students:
# the change in debate about climate change over time from the 1960s–present
# the debate over multiculturalism that arose in the 1980s
# the debate over the government policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, including its development over time from the Keating government to the present day
# the global debate over the use of nuclear energy from 1960s–present and its change over time, including the effects of nuclear disasters such as Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima Daiichi (2011) on the debate
# the changing contribution of the Australian rock ‘n’ roll, film and television industries to Australian culture and identity through the development and export of music, film and television, such as The Seekers and Kylie Minogue from Melbourne, the Easybeats and INXS from Sydney, the Bee Gees, the Saints and the Go-Betweens from Brisbane and “Crocodile Dundee” (1986)
The last item on this list is laughable. It looks like something that a long-retired curriculum author thought might attract those students who find identity politics completely uninteresting. I know this is supposed to be a course in history, but in terms of adolescent popular culture, the names in this item are like relics from an archaeological dig. Anyone old enough to remember the names of The Seekers or the Easybeats would by now either be in an aged-care facility or spoonfed at home by Meals on Wheels. No self-respecting sixteen-year-old in Year Ten would fall for this. It is, in fact, a good symbol of all that ACARA is trying to foist onto the education system: an utterly irrelevant, wearisome offering from the boring Left of the political spectrum whose only result will be to turn students off the study of history for life.
Keith Windschuttle is Quadrant‘s editor
The instruction to streamline was interpreted by ACARA to mean: get rid of everything except green-left-aboriginal propaganda, anything else being clutter.
I think Keith is right that this utterly irrelevant, wearisome offering from the boring Left of the political spectrum will turn students off the study of history for life.
Yes, the marxist-greenist, anti-Westernist, Big Statist forces dominate all the heights.
And have legitimised Total BS as the currency of life.
Notable:
The higher-ups among the nominally anti-marxist peoples have surrendered to the marxist destroyers.
There is no sign of actual counter-attack. There is only:
“Oh Dear, look at what the marxist destroyers of civilisation are doing this time to destroy civilisation”.
The higher-ups will not provide actual leadership in corrective action. It’s up to the Ordinary People now.
But the Ordinary People have been lulled into slumber/submission by the material abundance and the freedoms provided by the very system that the marxist destroyers are fast destroying.
That, and the fact that people who live in a social system dominated by Total BS in all descriptions/discussions of history, the present, and possible futures, go nuts.
I am reading this series at present – https://www.thomascahill.com/series/the-hinges-of-history. As I enjoyed lunch today with an Italian at a Chinese dive, barely a cafe, in historic Moonah, Tasmania – Hobart’s version of Dame Edna’s Moonee Ponds, I recalled the words of the author of the series- Thomas Cahill – ‘You can’t walk across the street today and be yourself without giving thanks to the Jews.’ Yesterday as I was watering the garden outside my public housing flat a very pleasant boy who is in Year 7 came by, just after getting home from school – and said, “Hello Mr Phil.” I had just collected a packet from the mail box which included two blocks of chocolate and an opera CD – send from a friend in Glasgow. “Here old darling – have this – some chocolate. Share it with your Mum and brother. It’s come all the way from Scotland.” “Where is Scotland?”
The Australian Curriculum: HASS F–6 says it “empowers students to shape change by developing a range of skills to enable them to make informed decisions and solve problems”.
Armed with Gaia Theory and knowledge about how sophisticated First Nations Peoples culture is, they may be so enabled. May be.
Mick Gooda in today’s Australian argues that the minimum age of criminal culpability be raised from 10 years to 12 and that the minimum age for sentencing to detention be 14.
He draws on his experience in the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory:
“We followed the evidence. Some of the most compelling was around the brain and cognitive development. We were told “the adolescent brain is structurally different to that of a mature adult, particularly in the area devoted to impulse control and decision making”.
Judge Andrew Becroft, the New Zealand Children’s Commissioner, said: “It’s a deeply challenging time where kids make some reckless, foolhardy and spontaneous decisions that, thankfully, most will grow out of when the frontal lobe is developed and comes on line.”
Our schools look like they will be turned, if this curriculum is adopted, into academies for training young eco- and social justice warriors, i pig – ignorant about anything other than the dogma they have been taught at school. An understanding of the brain development of children is of no interest to the members of the Curriculum Authority.
“ # the absence within Aboriginal society of such technologies as wheels, pottery, farming and metallurgy were not signs that it was primitive. Such an idea comes from “now discredited” theories of cultural evolution.”
I would be fascinated to know what this actually means ?
I recently made a sarcastic comment on an article by “The Mocker” about the aboriginal industry in The Aus, that the invention of the wheel was obviously an aboriginal achievement given that early aboriginals were now, apparently, also the first agriculturalists. I thought my comment was respectful and not rude, but it did mock the subject matter. It disappeared without trace. You can’t mock the aboriginal industry.
The other idea that I would be intrigued to understand is aboriginal mathematics. This was something that was to be suffused through all other subjects in the schools curriculum, but I’ve no idea what it means or what it is?
The move from a nomadic to an agricultural mode of living seems to be the pre-condition for people to develop systems of writing. Around the Euphrates writing developed four or five millennia ago. Aborigines have lived here for more than 60 millennia. We are told by Bruce Pascoe and the universities, the ABC and various politicians that have agreed with him that he has corrected our understanding about whether Aborigines were nomads or agriculturists. What explains their failure/ lack of need / lack of interest in devising any written record of all their other achievements?
Roger Macrury, I can say with quite a few deleted examples that the moderators of the comments in The Australian do not take any chances with Aboriginal Australia. I have given up re-phrasing the “been here 60,000 years – invented a stick” meme as no matter what you say if it’s critical or casts doubt upon the Church of Pascoe, it gets turfed.
Pasco-tarians keep on going back to the been here 50,60,70 thousand years narrative but as someone pointed out I think on this website a few articles ago – its not something to be proud of! Look what the “short-lived’ cultures like the Romans got up to, or the Egyptians, or practically every other culture in that timeframe!
One culture arrived with freshly patented blueprints of the first steam engine, the other couldn’t boil water. Give it enough time and you’ll know that the cultural achievements will be reversed and taken as gospel.
They say that it is the victorious who write history. Clearly the long march of the neo-marxist regressives have well and truly cemented their flags in the inner sanctum of the institutions that were only made possible by all that they despise. If the Morrison centre-right government allows for this to proceed unchallenged, then those fools have no one else to blame but themselves when they find their political ilk unelectable in a decade from now!
DougD – not only was the transition from nomadic hunter gatherer to an agrarian life synonymous with development of advanced writing but also with a rapid transition to early urbanisation. Prey tell – where were such examples in Australia, even just 1000 years ago?
Sorry, I couldn’t last the full read of your article. I felt too sick at the crap that is being fed to our youth.
Bastardisation of the language to create some new mystique: First Nations?? Tribes, please, tribes that fought over women and maybe were here after the massive landscape changes that allowed them to walk here after wiping out the Dennisovians (maybe they were our First Nations/tribes, ???Their DNA still resides in that of our tribal relics?)), so to say they were able to travel the seas is another confection.
In Victoria, we had a highway construction delayed as “800 year old birthing trees” were in the way. Geddit it? people with no, zero written ability, can claim “800 year old’ about trees that when first photos would be lucky to be 100 years old regeneration.
Victoria has got it bad.
Our enemies, in the CCP, in Islam, in black Africa, and in several other non-Western climes, are very pleased by this.
They see that Australia is actually accelerating down the path to the Fully Dumbed-Down Abyss.
Easy pickings are what they see.
Have passed this excellent analysis on to ACARA. Drowning our kids in drivel.
“the absence within Aboriginal society of such technologies as wheels, pottery, farming and metallurgy were not signs that it was primitive”. Are these so-called Marxists kidding? Haven’t they read Professor Pascoe’s Dark Emu? Don’t they know that “historical accounts of Aboriginal housing, farming and fishing were suppressed for the last 150 years”? Or that “Aboriginal people, who invented government 120,000 years ago, decided that the worst thing they could do in a society was fight for land? This so-called curriculum mentions nothing of this, and must be withdrawn immediately!
An acceptable topic in the new national school curriculum for Year Ten students is:”the global debate over the use of nuclear energy from 1960s–present and its change over time, including the effects of nuclear disasters such as Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima Daiichi (2011) on the debate”.
ACARA may have got its understanding of nuclear disasters from the ABC television news stories reporting on the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster which described it as ‘the deadly Fukushima nuclear disaster’. It’s a pity not to be able to use Fukishima to frighten children about the continuing dangers of nuclear power. But ACARA really should follow the ABC with a bit more care. It later said: “This was incorrect. The ABC acknowledges that it was the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the nuclear accident which overwhelmingly accounted for the loss of lives; no one died directly in the nuclear reactor meltdown.” See https://www.abc.net.au/news/corrections/2021-03-31/fukushima-and-tsunami-deaths/13283498
Let’s hope this brilliant analysis has an effect. Why aren’t Liberal governments taking any notice?
One of the latest claims that I have heard recently is that the Aborigines didn’t walk their way to Australia when sea levels were lower and the islands to the north of us were connected. They sailed here across the Indian Ocean from East Africa to Western Australia.
Quiet a stunning piece of ship building and seamanship indeed. It is a pity that there is not the slightest bit of evidence that this happenend. I am not holding my breath waiting for any questions from the ABC or Fairfax that might probe the veracity of this tale.
I’m guessing that the immigration by ship story will be in school history subjects before too long.
“the impact of invasion, colonisation and dispossession of lands by Europeans on the First Nations People of Australia such as frontier warfare, genocide, removal from land, relocation to protectorates, reserves and missions.
Torres Strait Islanders are considered First Nations People of Australia. They were not the victims of “frontier warfare, genocide, removal from land, relocation to protectorates, reserves and missions.”
And their lands were not dispossessed; Haven’t the authors heard of Mabo?
“First Nations Australians’ cultures as ongoing and dynamic entities that continue to successfully respond and adapt to broad scale environmental shifts as they have done over millennia and continue today such as Saibai (sic)Island and Western Cape York”
Some tribal groups from Saibai Island settlled at the top of Cape York Peninsula after WW2 at Bamaga and Seisia. Saibai Islanders served in the Armed Forces in the Cape during WW2 and considered a better future lay in Cape York rather than Saibai. There are still Islanders living on Saibai.
It’s not history, it’s nagging.
One saving grace is that students don’t pay attention in class anyway. Especially when they know it’s a soft subject like history. And many will be very aware that it’s lefty nonsense. Besides and or because of that, most will forget the material within minutes of submitting their assessment, if not earlier.
Pity that that time is wasted though.
Some parents might escalate from Alt-Right to Alt-Ed and start procuring normal reading material for their kids.
I’ll make the first submission to the alt-ed reading list; The Epic of Gilgamesh. The lessons include; what to do when you’re bored. (Ans. ask the gods to make you a friend, who then will.) Then fight the friend to learn that he’s your best friend. (Male bonding explained.) Then something about lions.
It is interesting to note that when speaking of ever changing Aboriginal heritage it is referred to as a “civilization”? My understanding of a civilization is of a sedentary society, cultivating land, breeding cattle, building infrastructure, such as was the case with Egyptian, Roman and all the other civilizations that followed on. Which is contrary to Aboriginies who were nomad tribes, hunter-gatherers, constantly moving from place to place, looking for food. Civilizations also moves forward, taking over existing ‘civilzations, and there is nothing we can do about it. You either adopt or you perish. The law of nature. The Aborigine tribes were bound to be taken over by someone, Just as well it was by the Enlightened people of England, who came to settle, not to ‘invade’ or conquer.
You know that annual 33 billion dollars spent on Aborigines?
I say spend an annual 33 Billion dollars, or maybe 333 Bn, to train white people to better parent their kids.
Without whites who have confidence in their heritage and their culture (which can always be improved) and who can think and act on their own bat, and be productive and contributing to their communities, everyone, of all colours and creeds, will revert to…
…the kinds of conditions seen among the most violent, misogynist, anti-productive groups seen in Australian Aboriginal communities, in black African communities here and in black Africa, and in Muslim precincts.
And/or we will be fully enslaved by the Chinese.
Thanks Keith,
I hadn’t realised how bad things are.
A balanced curriculum would include a study of your article compared with the writings of Bruce Pascoe. In Firestick Ecology, i wrote that Surveyor General “Mitchell’s enthusiastic contributions to diverse fields of science [and history/prehistory] in Australia seem now to be rather undervalued. Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia and Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia not only present valuable insights into Australian geomorphology, prehistory, climate, soils, ecology, anthropology, history and sociology but they also exemplify the value of observation and deduction. Education of young Australians would benefit greatly if these books were prescribed reading in high school curricula.
Pascoe has outrageously misquoted and invented quotations from Mitchell and has been rewarded with a job as a university Professor – ironically a very fitting title.
Mitchell’s observations are the only surviving records of many aspects of Aboriginal culture. He formed strong bonds with many Aboriginal people and recognised their superior abilities compared to his, in coping with vagaries of climate. Mitchell described the growth of scrub around Sydney, after Aborigines were dispossessed, that caused the world record Gospers Mountain fire in the Wollemi Wilderness during the Black Summer we didn’t need and haven’t learnt from. It should be called the Green Summer.
But i guess neither Mitchell’s nor my books will be on the reading lists.
Meanwhile, the ancient Chinese cultures are politically correct reading for kids. But the rainbow watermelons in our education system are hiding the fact that China is burning more and more fossil fuels and laughing at us while they publicly endorse the climate crazy bs.
Armageddon will be their triumph when we’ve destroyed our own culture and economy.
@wdr “Why aren’t Liberal governments taking any notice?”
We should have learnt over the past 50 years that Liberal governments and Liberal parties in Australia are not conservative. Their strategy for survival and to get and hang on to power has been to allow the Overton Window to be shifted by the left (as they march through the institutions) and big business (as it corrupts our culture through consumerism and Hollywood) and to scramble along behind them, looking for business opportunities and so conceding ground every time.
Summary: Things are bad. But many people who regard themselves as informed and earnest citizens are just not aware of the full extent of the anti-Westernist, marxist takeover of our institutions. Oh they have heard the cliche about the Long March -but that’s it. Then there are the people who rail at the Libs for not being anti-marxist. Look: Spectator Democracy always fails. If you want your voice to be heard in a democracy, you must team up with thousands of others in local branches of the political parties and learn to apply extreme pressure on elected politicians to do the right thing. It’s always been like that in democracies that work properly. But ignorance -is it wilful?- prevails. Ignorance and indolence among people who should know and do better is what kills civilisation.
Could any rabid communist, in his/her wildest dreams, have ever imagined that pedagogical Stalinism would ever entrench itself so forcefully in our educational systems? This is beyond stupidity; it’s criminal negligence, if not insanity. Should it be allowed to go ahead, future generations will pay a heavy price.
When Brendan Nelson was leader of the parliamentary Liberal Party, he and his colleagues voted with Rudd Labor to abolish our iconic single desk wheat export legislation and as a result I don’t care for anything that Nelson or any other Liberal have to say ; to add insult to injury they laughed as they voted and handed control of our wheat industry to the global
grain cartels.
Has anyone been to the National Portrait Gallery lately? They used to be good but now they’re up there with the national history curriculum. Captain Cook and all Liberal Prime Ministers are gone, indigenous activists like Marcia Langton are in.