At the last federal election, Kevin Rudd promised an “education revolution”. However, the appointment last month of Stuart Macintyre to draft the national history syllabus for Australian high schools is anything but revolutionary. It is a return to the past with a vengeance. It is guaranteed to entrench within the teaching of history all the […]

Read More

This political caricature of the Australian experience is the curriculum we can expect Macintyre to deliver to the Rudd government. It is no wonder that schoolchildren who have tasted earlier offerings from the same left-wing menu regard Australian history as dreary and uninspiring.

Read More

Academics in the field of terrorism studies at two Australian universities have responded to a critique of their work by Dr Mervyn Bendle in Quadrant’s September edition by trying to close down debate and punish its author. They have approached Bendle’s employers at James Cook University in Townsville to recommend he be investigated for academic misconduct and suitability for academic employment.
Within a week of the publication of Bendle’s article, the left-wing academics he criticised approached the JCU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sandra Harding, to take action against him and suggested his head of department, Professor Richard Lansdown, re-think Bendle’s fitness as a university-employed scholar. At the same they also demanded the September edition of Quadrant be recalled and pulped, and that Quadrant Online remove the article in question from the internet.
These actions represent disturbing developments not only for academic freedom but also national security.

Read More

In the ancient fable, Chicken Little thought one acorn dropping on her head meant the entire sky was falling. Today’s Chicken Littles show similar insight.

Read More

IN THE BUILD-UP to the last election campaign, a small news item got largely lost in the melee. Since the Rudd victory, however, the reported topic has assumed a new importance in the Australian political agenda. On September 13, 2007, the United Nations’ General Assembly adopted its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The […]

Read More

In 2005 Robert Manne edited a collection of his political essays entitled Left Right Left. It is a large book of thirty-eight works, ranging from those published as long ago as 1977 to as recently as 2005. The turning point within them, Manne says, is the year 1995, roughly the time when he switched his […]

Read More

In this article, I want to show how the two postmodernist tactics of language games and character assassination have been deployed in this debate.

Read More

Bain Attwood has spent a lot of time, and a good deal of university money, in an obsessive pursuit of my past. For this project, he had two research assistants and funding from the School of Historical Studies at Monash University.

Read More

In October, November and December 2000 Quadrant published the three parts of a long essay by Keith Windschuttle which heralded a new beginning to the writing of Australian history, prepared the way for the first volume in his Fabrication of Aboriginal History series of books, and set in motion what became known as the History Wars.

Read More