In his 2006 Australia Day address, the then Prime Minister, John Howard, explained how teaching the nation’s past was key to any effort to sustain Australia’s identity and national ethos. ‘Part of preparing young Australians to be informed and active citizens is to teach them the central currents of our nation’s development,’ he insisted. In other words, not teaching this national story could threaten the future of the nation itself: ‘young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history’.[3]
Coming so soon after the Cronulla riots in December 2005, the timing and tone of Howard’s speech was pointed: social cohesion was not the product of good fortune but conscientious and collective efforts. A number of influential commentators also picked up on Howard’s reference to the riots a couple of months earlier, and connected his call for a more systematic and nationally affirming history education with these divisive demonstrations.[4] The Cronulla riots embroiled hundreds of young Australians in disturbing scenes of violence, drunkenness and racism masquerading as patriotism. They also confirmed an apparently fractured national identity that many Australians, including the Prime Minister himself, found worrying and extreme.[5]
Howard’s Australia Day speech responded directly to these divisions in Australia, and suggested that they threatened the fabric of the nation’s future. While he acknowledged that ‘Australia’s ethnic diversity is one of the enduring strengths of our nation’, he offered the following caution: ‘our celebration of diversity must not be at the expense of the common values that bind us together’.[6] Those common values had to be deliberately cultivated, he reasoned, and the history curriculum was a natural place for promoting Australia’s shared identity and heritage. While the Prime Minister shied away from advocating an overly celebratory history education, he believed in the fundamental importance of a distinct national narrative for schools that was ultimately affirming: teaching the nation’s story was critical to ensuring its strength and identity.
References to nation-building conjure up images of bridges, irrigation projects and even institutions — those building blocks that are tangible tributes to national strength and prosperity. And taken together, they form a sort of narrative of nation-building, if you like, documenting its triumphs and contributions over time. In Howard’s Australia Day speech we had another sort of nation-building narrative — less tangible, perhaps, but no less real. This was the nation-building potential of ‘history’ itself. For nations are built on stories that their peoples collectively believe in and aspire to as an ‘imagined community’, to use Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase.[7] And there was a strong underlying message in Howard’s speech that without this story of the ‘Australian Achievement’, young people risked being nationally illiterate.
He had plenty of supporters. The historian Gregory Melleuish applauded the Prime Minister’s ‘vision for a new style of Australian history’. For too long the subject has often ‘had as its main objective the indoctrination of students into a set of narrow dogmas,’ he cautioned, but Howard ‘has provided the outline of an Australian history that is humane and open-minded in approach, and which will enlarge the outlook of our young people. Let us hope that a ‘coalition of the willing’ emerges to make this vision a reality.’[8] In another article for The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen was similarly unequivocal: ‘there is much work to be done in undoing the progressive curriculum foisted on Australian schoolchildren’.[9]
Members of the public also supported the Prime Minister’s announcement as evidenced in correspondence to major Australian dailies and weblog postings. In a letter to the Adelaide Advertiser Grattan Wheaton agreed ‘with everything Mr Howard said about the teaching of history/geography subjects in schools’.[10] Contributing to Andrew West’s weblog in the online edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, some eager bloggers also backed the Prime Minister’s history initiative. ‘In my opinion, history should be a mandatory subject during a person's education,’ offered ‘Lexa’. ‘With all the “Aussie Pride” of Australia Day and the togetherness that is being touted around, perhaps it would be easier to implement if people KNEW what they had to be proud of.’[11]
Comments like these were by no means isolated. There is a powerful popular sentiment that the role of national history is to strengthen the nation itself. Correspondingly, the role of history education is commonly held to bolster that national story by passing it on to the next generation.[12] So when the former Education Minister, Julie Bishop, announced a national history summit a few months after Howard’s Australia Day address, there were similar messages of support published in newspapers, online journals and discussions around the country. Comprising eminent historians and public commentators from around the country, the Australian History Summit was proposed to develop a new national approach to teaching the nation’s past. ‘The time has come for a renaissance in the teaching of Australian history in our schools,’ Bishop insisted. ‘By the time students finish their secondary schooling, they must have a thorough understanding of their nation’s past.’[13]
In a letter to The Australian, Jenny Hammett commended the minister’s summit initiative: ‘I am frequently staggered by how little people know of our history. Australia has a richness of history full of the drama, tragedy and joy of human experience. It is a unique tapestry that for too long has been hijacked by the self-interest of those who seek to force a dominant view and have stifled argument by controlling the education of our children.’[14] Another correspondent to The Australian, Miranda Kelly, expressed similar concern: ‘How can we, as a nation, possibly expect to compete on the world stage if Australian history — warts and all — is not taught as a compulsory subject in our schools?’ she asked. ‘If not, we face the tragic reality that our future leaders will have no idea how our nation developed.’[15]
Such support was hardly unexpected. The urge to teach the ‘Australian Achievement’ in schools is a position that many Australians of varying political persuasions actively share. They see the role of history education is precisely to educate ‘tomorrow’s citizens’ about their national heritage and identity. It is the conduit for developing knowledge and pride in the nation and its past and any failure to connect with our national story is seen as a threat to the identity, strength and future of the nation itself.
It is not my intention to dismiss these popular understandings of history’s national importance, for this belief in the nation-building potential of history education is widely and deeply held across the political spectrum. I also think it is misleading to suggest that ‘mainstream Australia’ has been manipulated by some sort of conservative political campaign to redefine Australian values. Like Judith Brett, I sense that ‘ordinary Australians’ have helped shape the past decade in Australian political life, as much as they have been defined by it.[16]
But I remain concerned if Australian history teaching is coopted to promote or instil any national affiliation that is automatic, rather than reflective. History education is uniquely placed in the culture wars over ‘Australianness’ because it is the only place that citizens are formally presented with their nation’s past. Despite the obvious inconsistencies in the delivery of history education, in one form or another, students learn about their national heritage and identity in thousands of schools around the country — that is why claims to define approaches to Australian history education generate such heated public debate. Nevertheless, I argue that the current problems of history teaching around the country must not be met with a narrowly ‘national’ curriculum response.
When Howard concluded his 2006 Australia day speech with some words from history, he was laying out what he hoped would be a return to the nation-building hopes and beliefs of previous generations: ‘we should also affirm the sentiment that propelled our nation to Federation 105 years ago — one People, One Destiny’, he pledged.[17] But there are significant pedagogical problems with such expressions of history’s national potential and importance: while I agree that understanding the nation’s past is essential for all students, I also want them to learn about history as a discipline — above and beyond any ‘Australian story’ or core national knowledge. I’m aware that this desire for a more complex approach to the subject rubs uneasily against the widespread belief in teaching an Australian history that strengthens the nation rather than critiques it. But it is clear that historical understanding and awareness do not come from parochial national knowledge. Indeed, the term ‘historical literacy’ does not mean demonising or demolishing the national past, but it does require a capacity to reflect upon it.