As I showed the attendant my electronic ticket to The Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto exhibition at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, I noticed he was wearing a red button with white lettering. It read: History Matters. The message framed how I observed 13 pieces from what is known as the Ringelblum Archive, named after the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who, together with other Warsaw Ghetto Jews, collected diaries, documents, and even lolly wrappers. They wanted to tell their stories about life under occupation.
I haven’t been able to shake the History Matters message since viewing the exhibition. And I keep coming back to the question: Will history still matter?
On the surface, it appears that people have an insatiable appetite for history. Streaming services offer hundreds of history programs and my survey of podcasts reveals a sea of historical content. Historical novels, popularised by the late and eminent writer Hilary Mantel, sell well, as do nonfiction history books. The Great History Courses can be accessed online through local libraries.
There has also been an explosion in people of all ages delving into their family history, thanks to easily accessible online documents and the allure of finding out their DNA. This often prompts them to put their ancestors’ lives in context, because they want to know how historical circumstances have shaped not only the past but their own lives. The practice of using personal narratives to illuminate history is well documented in both Australian and American historical research.
For example, Australians and the Past, a major survey of historical consciousness in Australia, reveals that individuals attempt to connect to bygone eras through the specificity of their families. Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton, who conducted the research, suggest that people gain an understanding of the past via the intimacy and particularity of their families. Many people are curious.
But there is a big caveat here. While a significant number of people care about the past, student enrolments in school and university history are in crisis. Australian History, only offered in Victoria, was once among the ten most popular subjects for year 12 students. Today, it’s hard to find schools that offer it. According to the latest Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority statistics, just 421 students enrolled in Australian History in 2023.
No history subject was among the ten most popular year 12 subjects in Victoria that year. Psychology, Business Management, and Health and Human Development made the list. In 2024, Modern History was the seventh most popular year 12 subject in NSW.
University history is in an even worse position. Fewer history subjects are offered, and there have been steep declines in both student enrolments and academic staff. In 2017, historians Paul Sendziuk and Martin Crotty surveyed every history department in Australia and New Zealand to gather data on staff and student numbers. They repeated survey in late 2022 and early 2023 with academic Emily Winter and found that nearly 31 full-time equivalent history positions had disappeared between 2017 and 2023. The decline was worse in Australia.
'Juxtaposing fallacious claims with rigorous historical analysis of sources can demonstrate how the discipline of history equips students with the skills they need to navigate this online world. History is also important in getting the wider community to identify and analyse the falsehoods they encounter online.'
Student enrolments tell an even grimmer story. Since 2016, enrolments have dropped by almost 23 per cent in Australia and 10 per cent in New Zealand, with dramatic falls across undergraduate programs and higher degrees by research.
“Student load in honours, postgraduate coursework, and higher degrees by research collapsed between 2016 and 2022, and undergraduate student numbers significantly declined as well,” the researchers wrote in their report, A Discipline in Crisis?: University History Staffing in Australia and New Zealand, 2022.
The evidence, they suggest, will get worse and will impact funding. “Universities derive most of their income from student enrolments, and their reduction affects the funding of academic departments,” they note.
The report attributes some of the decline to the effects of COVID, university cost-cutting, and the introduction of the 2021 Job-Ready Skills Package, which lowered fees for degrees such as teaching and nursing to attract students into high-demand fields. For subjects like history, however, fees increased. This year, a history subject costs $2,124.
But history was in decline before 2022: enrolments were falling, and academic teaching jobs were disappearing. So this poses an urgent question about what can be done to reverse the decline.
Here I return to the museum attendant and his History Matters button. Many people already understand that history helps us make sense of the past and provides an entrée into a world of contested ideas. Historians have also been talking about this for decades. What is different now is the social media phenomenon of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. These have always existed, but access to social media has made them ever-present. The study of history has a role to play in countering their effect.
A special 2024 edition of the academic journal History Australia offered various academic voices on the state of the discipline. Not one contributor mentioned the role history can play in showing students how historical skills can help them navigate historical misinformation online.
It is disheartening to read so much misinformation and disinformation about, for example, Russia and Ukraine (including former President Trump’s misleading claim that Russia started the war), and Israel and Gaza. Juxtaposing fallacious claims with rigorous historical analysis of sources can demonstrate how the discipline of history equips students with the skills they need to navigate this online world. History is also important in getting the wider community to identify and analyse the falsehoods they encounter online.
Yet there was no discussion in the journal about why students are turning away from history or why they may be more interested in popular subjects like psychology. Research is needed to understand this disconnect: Why are so many people hungry for history while so few want to study it?
Nor was there any discussion in the journals about whether university history offerings are too narrow. Given the global popularity of family history, why don’t universities offer majors in the discipline? Historians have traditionally dismissed family historians as amateurs, but many use the rigorous methods used by academic historians.
This leads me to wonder: Do students see history as elitist, irrelevant to their lives? I once attended a talk by David Cannadine, the British author and Princeton history professor, who was concerned that “the allure of deconstruction, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism” had led academics to write “tortured prose and indecipherable jargon... for each other — and for no one else.” He suggested that humanities academics needed to be less cloistered.
Australian National University historian Frank Bongiorno has made a similar argument. In a keynote speech to the Australian Historical Association, he urged historians to engage more deeply with the public. Historians, he said, need “to take much more seriously how we can contribute to the vitality of the public sphere in our democracy, in a world where evidence-based knowledge and civil debate are under intense pressure.”
Bongiorno asks whether historians have contributed “enough value” to debates about “the entire range of issues on which our future depends.”
That might be one way to show students — and the wider community — that history matters.
Dr Erica Cervini is a freelance journalist and sessional academic.