No doubt lots of words will be written about the aftermath of the History Summit. But I think Howard should also award a prize of $100000 for best blog post on them. A panel of independent non-government experts has nominated Pavlov’s Cat.
And to get us all into the appropriate frame of mind, I will award a prize of a gold star to anyone who can correctly identify this famous explorer.
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/200px-GregoryBlaxland.jpg"
Why, blow me down, that’s my mate Greg Blaxland!
Gold star for weathergirl!
Poo, though, I was hoping everyone would take ages and some really silly and entertaining suggestions would be made!
No it’s not. It’s Captain Sugardaddy, who led his all-girl crew in the first recorded circumnavigation of the Islets of Langerhans.
As a result of a dispute concerning choco rations, the gals mutinied and threw Captain Sugardaddy overboard. He dissolved.
There is a plaque commemorating his deeds on Platform 2 of St Pancras Station in London.
Hehe.
I’ll offer two gold stars, or perhaps 100000 for the wittiest silly response!
I’m glad they did this after I graduated high school. I did Ancient, Medieval and Modern history… learning at the Egyptians, Romans, Feudal Japan and Europe, the trans-atlantic slave trade, World War 1, the American Civil Rights movement, post-war pre-Vietnam war Indochina, and the Cold War. If they’d replaced all of that with straight Australian history, learning about convicts, explorers and Anzacs… I’d have topped myself. Oh we did do a bit of Australian history mind you… like I said… if I’d had to learn more, I’d have topped myself.
I say that in junior high school years a bit of straight Australian history should be taught. But beyond that… make it contextual. Teach a bit of Aussie literature in English… religious history in religion… Political history in Civics (which should be a subject). And yes, offer a senior elective in Australian history, but I’m telling you… the kids will vote with their feet and choose something more interesting and more relevant to the current state of
THE WORLD.The world. Yes, world history. Y’know… all that stuff outside that’s gonna effect the lives of our kids in a far more potent way than what Burke and Wills, or Dirk Hartog… or some poem about a bloke riding a horse down a mountain or a vagrant stealing a sheep and then committing suicide.
I mean c’mon… spending an unwarranted amount of time focusing on nothing but your own country’s history creates people like… well, Americans. And even they have at least an excuse for focusing too much on their own history.
If Howard wants to do something meaningful for the future of Australian children… maybe he should put up more money for Asian languages or something?
Actually… I’ll retract that statement in respect for Kim. She knew who that guy in the photo was and I didn’t, so obviously she knows more Australian history than I do.
By the way… that blanket generalisation was for purposes of brevity only. I know more American history than Australian… which means I know enough to not be an anti-American.
I do, however, sound a bit anti-Australian. Oh well…
Either that, or I read Pavlov’s Cat’s post, then went to Google Images
Well… you knew who he was before I did… so it still counts technically
Heh.
Well I did know who Blaxland was.
I didn’t. I just clicked on the image above to find out its name
Heh.
You could help Cliff write the Cliff’s notes for the new curriculum, wg!
Oh, good. I’m not in trouble. (Thought you were going to write, “Why, you little…”)
You’re setting a good example for the yoof of Orstraya in subverting the dominant educational paradigm!
Bed!
Quite seriously, that history summit is quite a scary thing. Did anyone read the comments from the Queensland education minister who basically said it was tosh and that students will be far worse off in studying Australian history when it is divorced from other subjects. I’m a big history buff but I agree. History without context is quite stupid. All this stuff about “creating an Australian story” is really disturbing.
Kim, it’s like our work quiz. Even for the most obscure questions you should never underestimate the potential for some nerd around the table to pop the answer out like a piece of toast. (pre brekky hunger driven simile!)
Hmmm, Cliff, maybe you’re more influenced by your culture than you know. Or maybe you should know why the Jolly Swagman was represented as jumping into that accursed billabong. (Hint: he wasn’t really a vagrant.)
But at another level, Cliff makes another point. That is, Australians no longer connect to the stories and myths of the settler society, just like Americans now tend to leave their cowboy archetypes on the shelf. We’ve moved on, but our stories haven’t.
Just off the top of my head, here is a theme worth considering: how did a society comprised mainly of convicted felons evolve into being one of the most law-abiding and respectable societies on earth? I’m reminded of this by a viewing of “49 UP”. Look at how that poor pathetic little orphan finds his way to Australia and melts seamlessly into the Great Suburban Dream.
This is what happened to so much socially unpromising material in the first half of the nineteenth century. And it happened with a minimum of state repression.
This is a story worth telling.
To pick up on comments by Cliff and mick I did history (Australian and European) throughout secondary school and European history at university. I couldn’t do ancient history, because it wasn’t offered and geography clashed with chemistry on the time-table.
I think there is a tendency on the part of curriculum developers to think we need to start with our immediate surrounds in order to understand ourselves and to work out from there, as it were, in concentric circles. I think this is a mistake. Young children are naturally curious about peoples with strongly contrasting lifestyles (eg the Innuit) and I think it is best to capitalise on that.
Later in the personal development cycle I don’t think you can predict what will interest kids at any particular stage. At university I was totally uninterested in Australian politics and history. Studying European continental history was more relevant to solving issues of personal identity at that stage.
My interest in Australian politics and history got a new lease of life when I moved to Adelaide from Brisbane after graduating. Brisbane was part of my soul. I found that in Adelaide Brisbane dropped right off the radar. Instead we had these ridiculous people hunkering on the edge of the desert, with a strange sense of difference (not being a convict settlement), a strange sense of entitlement (a special pipeline to the national treasury) and the impertinence to think they could compete with Melbourne, plus a climate that was a joke.
At that time you could almost ignore the locals because of all the expatriates from Qld, Tasmania and WA, moving there to get jobs in the thriving economy. But not completely, of course, and the difference was enough to awaken one’s interest in understanding these people.
So I’m saying that one’s interest in history can be strongly influenced with one’s experiences in achieving a personal sense of identity. Central curriculum planners can’t anticipate how this unfolds.
You are all so gonna pay with futher cultural imports.
I’m hoping The Chaser follow this up tonight.
Who are you calling a nerd, Almaniac?
(Cheat? Sure. Nerd? How dare you!)
Weathergirl’s mate Gregory Blaxland looks an awful lot like an ancestor of Alexander Downer’s to me.
Brian B, are you sure it was Adelaide you were in? A Brisbane boy thinks the Adelaide climate is a joke? Hah.
Thanks for the nomination, Kim. I could use $100,000. Next week, children, Eyre, Sturt and Flinders, and the week after that, Burke and Wills. Would you like to hear the story of SA explorer John Horrocks, who died a slow and agonising death from septicemia at 26 after being shot by his own camel? Gather round.
My own theory about Aust Hist as traditionally taught, and indeed this applies also to popular culture, is that in fact we celebrate mainly the (male) ratbags and/or losers: the hopeless Burke and Wills, the fiasco of the Eureka Stockade, the hanged Ned Kelly, the self-slaughtered Jolly Swagman, the also-suicidal Man from Snowy River, Gallipoli, Collingwood and Warnie.
PC, I realise it works the other way round as well!
As an example, the typical forecast in winter was “mostly fine” which was short for occasional pizzle, a bit of sun, unpleasant wind and cold.
Then in about October a warm front would come through, all the women would get into summer gear, revealing acres of pure white skin. Which burnt, of course, and if they didn’t listen to the forecast they could be exceedingly surprised when the next cold front came through. You could never put your winter gear away in the summer and when it was really hot it just burnt you up, day and night.
In autumn you had dry leaves instead of genuine autumn colours.
In summer if you went to the beach(!??) the water was colder than off the Gold Coast in mid winter.
But the worst was the cold wind. My ears just ached.
After a year I drove home, arrived near midnight and driving up the tramlines in Milton next to the XXXX brewery to get to the coffee place up on Petrie Terrace, December and the humidity wrapped around me, I knew I was home. So it came to pass and I’ve been here ever since. But Adelaide and SA had its moments, and I have a son who was born there and a daughter who calls it home )-:
I never learnt any Australian history – except for the names of the French explorers who ‘discovered’ the continent. I did learn a lot about Napolean and Louis the XIVth though…
If there is ever anything important enough about Austria to care about, maybe someone will hate on you.
As a young ‘un I hated Australian history. It was all about rum and sheep and convicts (yawn) whereas the history of places like England had kings and castles and battles. Even better was the history of places like Egypt and Greece, which had fantastic religious elements and mythic battles and the construction of giant monuments.
As I’ve grown up a bit I’ve become more interested in Australian history, especially the elided and the covered over bits.
I got into Australian history by reading labour history. No doubt that’s not the currently favoured path.
Barry Humphries in one of his autobiographies, described how bored he was listening to his Australian history teacher on a stinking hot mid-week afternoon. It was always about men with beards getting lost in the bush.
Hey Kate..fantastic religous battles and mythic struggles are going on right now.
Don’t read history, make it.
After tolerating convicts, sheep, gold, federation, etc., Australian history came alive for me via military history.
But not the usual military history of the ANZAC Legend. I came across a monograph written by an American military historian who investigated survival rates in Japanese POW camps. Turns out Australians were champion survivors. The author suggested that there must have been something about the socialisation of Australians that endowed them with the capacity to survive.
That capacity has been called “mateship”, but that quality has been thoroughly leeched of meaning, not least by Howard, when he puts on that ridiculous Oxley Akubra and pretends that he could ever be anyone’s “mate”.
Australians may have once had a genius for discipline without unnecessary hierarchy.
Bob Carr didn’t have a bad line there about lessons which were capable of holding students’ attention on a stinking hot afternoon.
The SMH helpfully has a quiz:
Anyone’s attention held by these “events and dates”?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/making-history-as-pupils-face-national-test/2006/08/17/1155407956788.html?page=2
Sorry, that should be “The Age” not the SMH.
Countries with interesting histories make bad places to grow up in. Colonial history is interesting because it is one long exercise in sado-masochism. Australia’s federal history is pretty boring, except the bitswhere we invaded and almost got invaded.
Actually, like I said Jack, what got me into it was when I started studying Australian politics at Uni – so I read a lot of Australian political history (which is full of drama) and then via that – labour and social history. I still know bugger all about explorers (though we had that stuff in primary school ad nauseam).
One of the primary schools I went to was an old-fashioned ‘country’ school so we learned about explorers, spent way too long tracing their routes on maps, and then had the odd bit of Aboriginal dreamtime stories thrown in for ‘balance’.
I did do two units of Australian Cultural History at Uni, which were interesting, in that they explored issues mentioned above – we have so much invested in this idea of ‘the bush’ when we mostly live on the coast, and so much pride in being descended from convicts when most of us are not. The fact is, we are clinging to outdated, outmoded ideas, and Howard et.al. are clinging the most.
And another thing – why this big fuss about history when most of society knows bugger all about science (and I admit I am one). Wouldn’t making sure we all have a good grounding in relevant scientific ideas be a bit more important than learning the names of explorers???
History is not the past any more than biology is life, geology is the earth and physics and chemistry are matter… As a human practice history is inevitably, must be, a contested discipline. There will never be, and can never be a definitive history of anything. That is not to say that history doesn’t exist – it does, and it is central to our understanding of how we got to where and how things got to be the way they are, and why they aren’t something different. What was it they said about history being written by the winners? And about those who don’t learn from the past being doomed to repeat it – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce…
Cheers…
Jack’s latest point is borne out to a degree by going to a serious bookshop or library, counting the number of books on 20th century Russian history, and then counting the number of books on 20th century Australian history.
That said, the histories of democratic polities are interesting and important; what is required are historians with the gift of telling interesting yet truthful stories about such societies, and divining what those stories mean. Nobody could really deny that the Tasmanian dams dispute of 1979-83 is an enthralling tale waiting to be told and interpreted (and in fairness many good academic case study accounts have been written about this episode).
It even makes a great Constitutional Law decision too. It was one of those fantastic cases that you could site in an exam just in case, because nine times out of ten it applied to whatever you were writing about.
OK, slight exaggeration, but it did cover a lot. I have always admired Gareth Evans for drafting that particular piece of legislation. It was beautiful (unlike some of the other things I have heard about him).
Fancy sending an F-111 to do a photo-recon of the protestors though. What was he thinking of?
That was probably Beazley’s idea
Well written piece from Misha Schubert in The Age:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/would-you-like-to-phone-a-friend-julie/2006/08/17/1155407956791.html
Another Kim, why should learning about history be incompatible with participating in current events? And how are you supposed to know what’s going on NOW without understanding what happened a little, or a long while ago?
During the eighties(?) Russell Braddon revisited the Burma Railway for a TV doco. On location, from experience, and with great emotion he stated, “Nobody died alone”.
The “History Debate” is in danger of being defined in “Sale of The Century” terms. The quiz published in the Age is reducing History to a game of “Trivial Pursuit”. To know the official name of the first Holden does not give one a knowledge of the past. What is more relevant is to know the background to the first Holden – what else was available at the time, did it depend on tarriff protection, who could afford to buy the car at that time and so on. History is a tool for understanding the present, but History has to get beyond the level of the knowledge of facts without understanding.
In that context, the discussion between Melleuish and Manne on Lateline just now was interesting.
Ideally, yes. But the way the world is at the moment, I’m more inclined to think that the present is a tool for understanding history.
Have you cashed the cheque yet, Dr Cat?
Only in my dreams, comme toujours.
On 21 July, Mark wrote:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/07/25/history-summit-wars/
That appears to have been spot on.
It was obvious from Lateline last night that one of the academics hired to write a paper for the summit on a model curriculum thought that the outcome had certainly not resembled the prescription of one “fact-based narrative” as Howard called for:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/
But would you get that from the coverage in the Australian?
The debate in the Oz is full of factual inaccuracies and/or lies.
For instance:
In Queensland, modern and ancient history are “stand alone subjects” in year 11 and 12. They’re not compulsory, but they never were.
But lost in all this is any real sense of the reasons why history declined in schools (which are far more complex than “postmodernist” plots), which have been analysed by Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark. A lot has to do with student choice, the tailoring of the high school curriculum to vocational outcomes, and a “crowded curriculum”.
Oopsy, here’s the direct link to the transcript of the interview with Robert Manne and Greg Melluish last night:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1718847.htm
“Postmodern subjects with titles such as Studies of Society and its Environment”?
Yes, that’s a nasty tricksy pomo field all right, and probably full of drugs as well. Oh dear lord, shoot me now. Never mind Albrechtsen — who is sourcing Howard? When is he going to check with someone who actually knows what ‘postmodern’ means and stop making a complete dick of himself?
Well, chaps, Ho for Pre-Modernism. Let us all gallop off backwards into the Middle Ages, waving a copy of the Jerilderie Letter in one hand and a personal gilt-edged invitation to the Crusades in the other.
Yeah that geography can be pretty relativist. I mean if you don’t have proper maps with most of the good bits of the world coloured Empire pink and a big warning over the Middle East, “here be dragons”, what will happen to the kiddies’ understanding of the Clash of Civilisations?
Good debate between Manne and Melluish, Kim. Thanks for putting the link up.
I was pleasantly surprised by Melleuish, Rob.
Anyway, off for the arvo!
Shouldn’t Blaxland get a gold star for having a surname that sums up why he shouldn’t have been traipsing over the Blue Mountains in the first place?
Heh.
Is asking questions of the narrative really in the spirit of the new official history, though?
Speaking of which – the syllabus discussion paper by Greg Melleuish was excerpted in the Australian today:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20172818-12332,00.html
Julie Bishop, with the support of John Howard, has warned that the states risk losing $33 billion in school funding (four years’ worth) unless they change their history curriculum to comply with the Federal Government’s position that Australian history be taught sequentially as a coherent narrative, according to Glenn Milne in this morning’s Sunday Telegraph.
Now we are getting to the crux of the history wars. It’s all about finding excuses to reduce Commonwealth funding to the states.
I don’t think that’s right, silkworm. They’re just using the money as leverage. Because they don’t have consitutional power over education, they have to get their way by imposing conditions. However the next funding agreement (I think) starts in 2008. So if Howard loses the election, this narrative might all be history.
There are some things of which you should take note. They are the absence of the word ‘narrative’ from the communique, the use of the phrase ‘open-ended questions about the nature of Australian society’, and the fact that Paul Kelly and Glen Milne are very anxious to establish an official narrative of what happened at the Summit and its outcome. A careful reading of the communique will find it to be quite ambiguous on what sort of history it envisages will be taught. Of course there will eventually be an official transcript but by the time it is made public no one will be interested in checking what actually happened in relation to both the communique and the ‘official narrative’ appearing in the Australian.
Yes, that’s my point made on the other thread derived from Melleuish’s paper (which was much better than might have been anticipated) and his Lateline interview, which more or less said the Summit hadn’t achieved the aims Howard might have wanted. Kelly is indeed still trying to put the official Murdoch press anti-pomo spin on it.
Greg, my comment above to which I think you’re responding is intended to be a joke.
Julie Bishop said:
Despite this, Milne specifically stated that the states risked losing this $33 billion.
In an opinion piece at the back of the paper today, Milne applauds the outcome of the summit, and takes a swipe at the “values-laden sludge that apparently now passes as history in our schools”.
Qld, SA and WA have rejected the recommendations of the summit. I think the other three states should join them, and stand up to Howard’s gang.
Of course, it will never come to cutting off funding to the states. I can’t honestly see Howard getting his way on this. I think you are right, Kim. Howard is just using the money as leverage, but I don’t believe Howard is so concerned for the education of Australian kids. I think this history war is just another stoush that is designed to distract the public from the recent failures of the government, notably the stem cell research debate, workplace relations, the withdrawn Immigration bill, and the Cole inquiry into the AWB.
Interestingly, next to Milne’s opinion piece is an opinion piece by Stephen Loosely, in which he takes on the lie that led to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war and which ended in the tragedy of Long Tan. This is the other side of the history war. Loosely writes:
Not exactly History Wars but an excellent example of what is not happening with regard to promoting History in Australia.
Way up in north-eastern Australia, in Rockhampton, is the Central Queensland Military and Artifacts Museum. It is a an all-volunteer community museum dedicated to preserving not just local military history but artifacts that put that history into a social context. The small band of volunteers are doing a mighty curatorial job on the proverbial smell of an oily rag. The displays are surprisingly non-judgemental and non-partisan. It is certainly worthy of a TV documentary program and one would expect every politician visiting Central Queensland to pop in there for a photo-opportunity. So far so good ….
A few years ago this museum offered to take over the old Archer Park Barracks, as a museum, from the Defence Dept. and moves for this to happen has been proceding slowly …. but now this group of enthusiastic citizens has to come up with a huge amount of loot within a matter of days or see all their hard work go down the gurgler; a tough problem for voluteers who get by on 10 cent ~ $5 donations.
It looks as though millions and millions of dollars are about to flung at campaigns to persuade us all of the importance of History in Australia. How much of all that money will go into slick ephemeral advertising …. and how much into practical bang-for-your-buck efforts such as the all-volunteer Central Queensland Military and Artifacts Museum?