In September 2024, New South Wales Education Standards Authority endorsed a proposed Australian curriculum requirement for students in mid-secondary school years to undertake a mandatory study of First Nations Peoples’ experiences of colonisation.
History teachers have 2025 and 2026 to prepare for the introduction of the topic in 2027. That preparation will involve thinking through approaches to the topic and framing and resourcing the historical inquiries their students are to undertake.
History teachers will need a still, small voice of calm to meet the criticisms of zealous cultural commentators who see the inclusion of this mandated topic as contentious. Critics claim such a study distracts students from more important aspects of our past in reckoning democratic citizenship. They worry that the very wording of the topic frames a perspective that reawakens the history wars; it even suggests a form of black armband history. However, community readiness for the study has been well tested within ‘have your say’ feedback processes on the curriculum topic proposal at the national and state levels.
Further, most teachers will be familiar with accounts of our national past that consider the other side of the frontier. It is not a new perspective. Teachers are aware of a rich scholarship on contact zones and on frontier wars that wrestles with the moral complexities of the times and is not driven by ideology.
Still, the syllabus makers have thought it wise to boost teacher confidence by providing advice on three matters. First, the need for cultural sensitivity ranging from protocols to be observed when arranging interviews with local Aboriginal people to the careful use of respectful language.
Second, the syllabus makers also offer advice on ways teachers might approach a topic that involve not only reading but also listening, looking at visual materials and artifacts, and visiting historical sites.
Third, the syllabus makers have boldly advised teachers to look for the past in the present by asking how First Nations men, women and children were and continue to be impacted by colonisation. In this, the syllabus goes some way in the kind of truth-telling expected of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians in Reconciliation Australia’s recent report Coming to Terms with the Past: Identifying barriers and enablers to truth-telling (UNSW 2024).
A further set of three challenges for teachers are covered implicitly rather than directly.
First, the syllabus makers foresee the difficulties teachers face in helping their students to develop a well-informed historical imagination with which think about First Nations Peoples’ points of view. The archives are one-sided. That problem is not beyond the wit of those who would gladly learn and gladly teach.
Second, the local Aboriginal people they ask for help may prefer to support studies of pre-invasion times or cultural regeneration, rather than focus on the turmoil of the harrowing times of dispossession and resistance. The story focus for them is more likely to be of resilience and survival.
Third, teachers will face the challenges of engaging in place-based studies. Place-based in the sense of covering a wide variety of locations. And place-based in the sense of reading history on-the-ground.
A bibliography suggests that teachers might read Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars as well as David Marr, Killing for Country. But the Australian Curriculum and the NSW syllabus reaches beyond Sydney and the pastoral expansion northward beyond the Liverpool Plains. Initial contact took place, as Marr indicates, under Governor Gipps as well as under Governor Phillip. There is, indeed, a wide scatter of initial contact and frontier violence places. Memory of the colonial past has been decentralized. In effect, the syllabus makers have implicitly posed challenges to local communities to help their teachers and students look for and inquire into local place stories of initial contact and frontier violence.
There are difficulties in reading history on-the-ground. Heritage and Aboriginal contact place listings at Appin, Waterloo Creek and Mount Dispersion point to bare paddocks. They are places where visitors ponder the invisible. Nevertheless, during 2024 there have been valuable and meaningful commemorations at the barely visible Myall Creek Massacre site in June and at Bathurst in August.
Bare paddock field trips differ markedly from the sponsored trips students take to the well-endowed and richly resourced Australian War Memorial. But these field trips, too, are pilgrimages to public memory places. Visitors pay homage, think about the legacies of war-making and peace-making, and the bearing those activities have had on the their families and on their own lives.
The syllabus insistence on a study of Aboriginal Peoples’ experiences of colonisation is welcome. In the wake of the failed national referendum and the increasing momentum towards reconciliation at the local level, it enables schools to come to terms with the colonial past.
Bruce Pennay is an historian and Associate Professor at Charles Sturt University.