Historical Inquiry : Case Study 4

NSW History Project : Workshop Materials

by Marnie Hughes-Warrington

>> Varieties of Australian History
>> History of Australian History

I. Varieties of Australian History

1975 saw the publication of three significant works of Australian women's history by Miriam Dixson, Beverley Kingston and Anne Summers. Dixson took issue with Russel Ward's narrow, masculinist account of distinctive Australian traits. Kingston called for new understandings of work that would write women into history; and Summers complained that when Australian men gave thought to women, that they seemed unable to steer between the twin shoals of 'Madonna' or 'Magdalene'. Since then, Australian women's history has become a well-established field, with many innovative courses of study and books available on topics ranging from nation building (Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly), convicts (Kay Daniels, Portia Robinson, Joy Damousi and Deborah Oxley), suffrage (Audrey Oldfield) and 'femocracy'* (Marian Sawer and Lyndall Ryan). Recent works also suggest that historians have heeded the American writer, Joan Scott's, call for a shift away from simply adding women to history to a consideration of gender relations (Kay Saunders and Raymond Évans).

There are now, as the title of Anna Green and Kathleen Troup's book suggests, many 'houses' of Australian history. Questions are now being raised, though, about whether those houses are shut off from one another, and whether the project of merging them in a new, single house is possible or even desirable. While the idea of a merger raises fears that marginalised groups will again be silenced, there is also the worry that segregation excuses groups from the consideration of others. What is the good of building a new house of history if nothing is done to change the understandings? As Henry Reynolds has said of Aboriginal history, for example:

"It is not just a matter of attaching Aboriginal history to the back left corner of the old homestead or of even glassing in the back verandah. The changes will ultimately have to be far more radical; a new floor perhaps, even new foundations."*

Bibliography

Daniels, K., Convict Women, 1998.
Damousi, J., Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, 1997.
Dixson, M., The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788-1975, Ringwood: Penguin, revised 1984.
Grimshaw, P., Lake, M., McGrath, A., and Quartly, M. (eds), Creating a Nation, Ringwood: Penguin, 1994.
Kingston, B., My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia, Melbourne: Nelson, 1975.
Oldfield, A., Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or Struggle?, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Oxley, D., Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia, 1996.
Robinson, P., Women of Botany Bay, 1988.
Ryan, L., 'Feminism and the Federal Bureaucracy, 1972-83', in Watson, S. (ed), Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, London: Verso, 1990.
Saunders, K., and Evans, R. (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Sydney: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Sawer, M., 'Feminism and the State', in Refractory Voices: Feminist Perspectives on Refractory Girl, 1993.
Summers, A., Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, Melbourne: Penguin, 1975, revised 1994.
Ward, R., The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958.

* Name given to feminists in government bureaucracy.
* Henry Reynolds, 'History from the Frontier', in B. Attwood (ed.), Boundaries of the Past, p. 26.

Up until the 1960s

In the 1960s, in line with most of the countries in the West, Australian history took a turn towards epistemology. History, many people argued, could not be practised without an appreciation of the nature, origins and limits of knowledge. Further, history teachers called for greater understanding of knowers and knowledge and the relation between the two. In so doing, Australian historians shifted away from relaying the truth about the past towards the idea that there are many sorts of pasts to explore and even a deep scepticism about the possibility of truth in history. Today, Australian historians engage in lively debates over the question - What and whose knowledge is of most worth?

For some, the recent history of history writing provides many examples of fads overriding careful research. Others, though, have found in it a new social relevance for the subject and the rise of innovative and challenging views. For most of the twentieth century, when people talked of Australian history, they assumed a unified, European view of the past. However, (Keith Windschuttle) it is now clear that there is no single Australian history, but many varieties of Australian history.

Most historians agree that the journey from a single Australian history begins with the words 'ordinary people'. As with historians in Europe and the US, greater knowledge of epistomology fostered an embarrassed self-consciousness about the fact that history was almost exclusively written by and for a relatively small group: educated, elite men. Groups such as the History Workshop Movement in Britain determined that the past could not be known, let alone understood, without a consideration of the ideas, hopes and experiences of 'ordinary people'. Studying their experiences, however, turned out to be difficult, as most of them were illiterate and little of what they did was documented. Thus historians were required to look for new sources and to read old sources in new ways. For instance, historians of the twentieth century in Australia realised that oral testimonies are both a rich and a problematic source (Penny Russell and Richard White, Kate Darian Smith and Paula Hamilton, Janet McCalman and Alastair Thompson). 'Social' or 'New Cultural' historians were also keen to show that people's experiences are shaped by both conscious and unconscious rules and principles that govern interactions. In the search for these 'rules', some found the ideas and methods of anthropologists helpful (Greg Dening, David Goodman and Tom Griffiths). Others looked to the writings of European theorists like Michel Foucault for inspiration (Judith Allen, Lyn Finch, Mark Finnane, Stephen Garton and Gail Reekie).

While the work of social and new cultural historians opened new vistas on the past, it was realised early on that talk of 'ordinary people' bestowed a unity upon a great variety of people traditionally excluded from history. Australian history thus fragmented into a number of sub-fields, of which gender, economic, educational and or professional status, ethnic background, religious affiliation, disability and age are a few. Probably the first field to emerge clearly was that of women's history.

Many traditional topics were re-worked. George RudE uncovered the experiences of convicts transported for political activities, Ken Inglis visited the ANZAC myth through the 'sacred space' of memorials, Gavin Souter examined the symbols and rituals of the new Commonwealth and Paul Carter plotted a 'spatial history' of the mental maps of European settlers. Done to change the intellectual or institutional conditions that led to their exclusion in the first place?

Allen, Judith, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women, Melbourne, 1990.
Carter, Paul, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London, 1987.
Darian-Smith, Kate and Hamilton, Paula, History and Memory in Twentieth Century Australia, Melbourne, 1994.
Dening, Greg, Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Performances, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996.
Finch, Lyn, The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class and Surveillance, Sydney, 1993.
Finnane, Mark, Punishment in Australian History, Melbourne, 1997.
Garton, Stephen, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in NSW, Sydney, 1998.
Goodman, David, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Green, A., and Troup, L., The Houses of History, Mebourne: Manchester University Press, 1999.
Griffiths, T., Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Inglis, Ken, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne, 1998.
McCalman, Janet, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, Melbourne, 1984.
Reekie, Gail, Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy, Cambridge, 1998.
RudE, George, Protest and Punishment: The Story of the Social and Political Protestors Transported to Australia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Russell, Penny and White, Richard (eds), Memories and Dreams: Reflections on Twentieth Century Australia, Sydney, 1997.
Souter, Gavin, Lion and Kangaroo: The Initiation of Australia 1901-19, Sydney: Collins, 1976.
Thompson, A., ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend, Melbourne, 1994.
Windschuttle, K., The Killing of History, Paddington, 1994. *Page 5.

Women's history encouraged thought about the other gaps and silences in history. Perhaps the most dramatic development in the last forty years has been the emergence of Aboriginal history. In the 1968 Boyer lectures, the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner spoke of the 'great Australian silence' on relations between Aborigines and settlers in Australia's story. Stanner's agitations for legal equality, better living conditions and compensation for past wrongs, fostered the growth of anthropological and historical research into the experiences of Aborigines. Charles Rowley, for instance, brought to light many grim episodes in which colonial administrators failed to protect Aborigines from settler violence, and even assisted in such violence. Rowley, in turn, prompted other historians to take a closer look at Aboriginal/settler relations. Raymond Evans detailed how racial stereotypes and opportunism fuelled violence in Queensland; Geoffrey Blainey demonstrated that traditional Aboriginal lifeways were adaptive and versatile; Ann McGrath demonstrated that Aborigines had exploited opportunities to work with cattle farmers in the Northern Territory; and Lyndall Ryan shattered the myth that the Tasmanian Aborigines had died out with Truganini. More recently, and more famously, Henry Reynolds has showed that Aborigines used a variety of strategies to resist, accommodate and adopt European ways of life. Given the legal and political impact of Reynolds' work, complaints by historians like Blainey and Windschuttle that Aboriginal history rests on a few documentary sources and that accounts of Australian history are unbalanced in favour of the bad things that had accompanied the growth of the nation ('black armband history') were inevitable.

Importantly, too, Aborigines have begun to take control of their past, writing, dancing, painting and singing their people's stories and working with anthropologists and historians to preserve and promote their experiences. Deborah Bird Rose, for instance, has documented Ned Kelly and Captain Cook stories told in Aboriginal communities that bear little resemblance to European notions of those figures and of history itself.

Blainey, Geoffrey, 'Drawing Up a Balance Sheet of our History', Quadrant, 1993, no. 298, vol. 37(7-8), pp.10-15.
Evans, Raymond
Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
Rowley, Charles, Aboriginal Policy and Practice, 3 vols, 1971.
Ryan, Lyndall, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1981.
Stanner, W.E.H., The Great Australian Silence, St. Leonards: ABC Books, 1968.
Windschuttle, Keith, 'The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History: The Fabrication of the Aboriginal Death Toll', Quadrant, November 2000, vol. 44(11), pp.17-25.6.
Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, A Reinterpretation of the Role of Women in the Origin of Australian Society, North Ryde: Macquarie University Library, rev.edn. 1993.
Canberra: ANU Press, How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Paddington: Macleay, 6.
Rose, Deborah Bird, 'Ned Kelly Died For Our Sins', Oceania, 1994, vol. 65(2), pp.175. *86.6

Aboriginal history raises many of the same issues that dominate the more recently emergent field of environmental history. Work by Tim Flannery, James Kohen and David Horton, for instance, has debated the extent of Aboriginal influence in the disappearance of certain types of flora and the megafauna. Alfred Crosby has noted the multidirectional impact of introduced species and Flannery has warned of the size of the European settlement's ecological footprint.

Crosby, Alfred, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Flannery, Tim, The Future Eater: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, Sydney: Reed Holland, 1995.
Horton, David, The Pure State of Nature: Sacred Cows, Destructive Myths and the Environment, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000.
Kohen, James, Aboriginal Environmental Impacts, Sydney, 1997.6, St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin: UNSW Press.

Additionally, the experiences of Australia's minority cultures and sub-cultures came to the fore. Stephen Castle's edited a collection on Italian immigration and settlement, James Jupp mapped the Australian people, David Fitzpatrick traced Irish experiences and Graham Willett has brought Gay and Lesbian activism to the fore.

Castles, Stephen (ed), Australia's Italians: Culture and Community in a Changing Society, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992.
Fitzpatrick, David (ed), Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Willett, Graham, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2000.7.

Works by historians like Katherine Biber, too, suggest that Australian masculinity is due for reappraisal.

Biber, Katherine, 'Turned Out Real Nice After All: Death and Masculinity' in K. Biber, T. Sear and D. Trudinger (eds), Playing the Man: New Approaches to Masculinity, Annandale, NSW: Pluto, 1999, pp. 27-37.5-.

Complaints that Australian history is boring and out of touch with current historiographical developments cannot be sustained.

II. History of Australian History

A. Indigenous histories

B. 150 years of European histories

C. Impact on school histories

A.

The earliest histories recorded in Australia were not written histories at all, but artworks, dances, ceremonies, songs and oral traditions of Indigenous people. The creation of the landscape, the existence of megafauna, contact with Macassans and the arrival of Europeans are some of the aspects of history recorded by Aboriginal people. We can only wonder at the explanations given for the behaviour of the white invaders. Images of sailing ships are engraved on rock platforms and men on horseback appear in cave paintings. Events as recent as the Japanese bombing of northern Australia in World War Two have been recorded in dance form by northern communities.

These non-literary forms are histories in the sense that they record events which have happened. These histories, in their various forms, are transmitted from generation to generation, however other cultural functions relating to ceremony and lore are usually also present.

B.

The earliest Australian histories written by Europeans are records of events which, in a way, also served cultural functions, for example the engendering of pride in the achievements of British colonisation, or, in the case of C. E. W. Bean, the performance of Australian solders in battle.

Histories written in the first 150 years of white Australia were very much in the mould of English histories. For those schooled in English academic traditions, Australian history was simply too short to be considered as real history. As late as 1937, the year before the sesquicentenary of British settlement, G.V Portus, Professor of History at Melbourne University, said that "I do not think Australian history is a subject at all". There was no Chair of Australian History in any university until 1949. Stuart Macintyre argues that Australian history as a genuine academic pursuit did not begin until around the middle of the 20th century. After World War Two, of course, all sorts of new influences came into play and the old moulds were broken.

But to return to those early histories. I'd like to try to address very briefly the following questions:

1. What material did our early historians draw from?
2. What were these early histories like? What themes did they trace?
3. Who was included and who was left out of these histories?
4. How did these histories shape school history?

1. What material did our early historians draw from?

In his book, The Manufacture of Australian History, Pascoe claims that "Australian colonial society was one of the most heavily documented societies ever to have existed", p. 163. There were the journals and logs of sea captains and explorers, correspondence between governors and British Parliament, a wealth of travel writing and personal observations, a great body of scientific writing by naturalists, scientists, geologists, botanists and zoologists, and an enormous amount of material written about Aboriginal people, including extensive collections of papers of missionaries and humanitarian organisations.

Australia, as the least known of the six continents, was like another planet to people of the 19th century. There was a great sense of scientific curiosity on the part of readers and a keen awareness of the potential market on the part of many writers. The greatest audience for the earliest publications was in England where readers devoured information about exotic places, strange animals and the primitive inhabitants of wild landscapes.

Examples:

• 1832 Henderson, J., "Observations on Zoology, from the order Insecta to that of Mammalia: the latter including the Natives of New Holland".

• 1846 Mitchell, T. L., Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia.

• 1848 Byrne, J. C., Twelve Years Wanderings in the British Colonies From 1835 to 1847.

• 1874 Trollope, A., Australia and New Zealand, a volume of almost 700 pages.

• 1888 Flanagan, R. J., The Aborigines of Australia. This book is a collection of papers which originally appeared in 1853-4 in the Sydney Empire, a journal owned and edited by Sir Henry Parkes.

So, there was plenty of material to draw from, but our early historians, like all historians, were faced with issues of selection, perspective and emphasis. What to emphasise, what to leave out. This was determined by a number of things, ranging from the historian's training, his world view (and they were almost all men) and the time in which he was writing. The emphasis historians place on events and people shape the history that is produced.

2. What were these early historians like? What themes did they trace?

Every generation is said to write its own history in its own image, so it is not surprising that the earliest national histories are very much in the mould of 19th century British imperial histories, tracing the planting of the English outpost of empire and the inevitable unfolding of its success. The ideas and deeds of 'great men' guided this successful progress. Most of these histories were written by English educated people looking at the landscape through English eyes.

Australian histories written in the first 150 years after the arrival of Europeans can be grouped into three main types of history: imperial, liberal patriotic and labour.

• IMPERIAL HISTORY

Earliest works were celebrations of the "indomitable courage, heroic self-sacrifice and dogged perseverance of exemplary figures who marked out a triumphant story of the possession of an empty land". Tales of man (and they were always men) conquering nature, grand narratives of heroism, endurance and ingenuity where the frontier was the meeting point between savagery and civilisation. No matter how hard the struggle over the elements, British civilisation triumphed over all.

• LIBERAL PATRIOTIC HISTORY

Histories of this type were still in the British imperial and 'great man' style, but with a nationalist perspective. They were tales of people of sturdy British stock, toughened by pioneering experiences in a harsh new environment, who took essentially British institutions and practices and moulded them into a characteristically Australian civilisation. These were tales of the conquest of the land but also the democratisation of political institutions.

Examples:

• W. K. Hancock, Australia, Ernest Benn, London, 1930.

• C. E. W. Bean (gen. ed), The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18, 12 vols., Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1921-1942.
  

• LABOUR HISTORY

These histories, which emerged later than the others, were in the Marxist tradition in the sense that they focused on economic and social issues. They traced the rise of the union movement, stressed the importance of the working class, and saw Australia's development in terms of the struggle between labour and capital. These historians tapped into different kinds of sources, drawing on bush ballads, pamphlets, minutes of labour organisations and statistics from trade and industry. Like imperial and liberal patriotic histories, labour histories were often celebratory, which is understandable when we consider the achievements of social and labour legislation of the first decade of the 20th century.

Example:

• B. Fitzpatrick, Short History of the Australian Labour Movement, Melbourne, 1940, which opens with the words: "I have taken the view that the history of the Australian people is amongst other things the history of a struggle between the organised rich and the organised poor . . ."

These three broad types of histories existed side by side and exerted considerable influence on school history, which we'll come to shortly.

Manning Clark and other idiosyncratic writers who do not fit these categories, emerged at the end of the 150 year period focused on - as do those who deliberately went against the conventions of history writing with an expressed purpose, such as 'redressing the balance'; 'allowing the silenced to be heard', 'challenging accepted representations', 'opening our eyes to a new picture of our past' or 'setting ourselves free from the influences of the past'. These types of histories emerged after World War Two.

3. Who was included, and who was left out of these Histories?

Women were left out of all of them - these were 'great man' or 'boys only' stories. You will search in vain for women's issues or actions. Two individuals are occasionally mentioned, Caroline Chisholm and Elizabeth Macarthur.

The people included were men, white men - heroic explorers, hardy settlers conquering the environment, wise politicians founding a new society, brave men fighting for king and country - or male dominated organisations such as unions.

A significant feature of the histories of the first 150 years has been the 'now you see them, now you don't' treatment of Aboriginal people. They figured prominently in most of the histories written before federation, yet disappeared from later histories.

Following are some examples of early histories which deal with Aboriginal issues, either as separate chapters or as an integral part of the pioneering story:

• 1867 S. Bennett, The History of Australasian Discovery and Colonisation, Sydney, p. 272.
  Many of these unfortunates [Aborigines around Sydney] no doubt perished directly from pestilence, for pestilence always accompanies famine; but it was an absolute want of food which prepared them for the diseases to which they so easily fell victims. Those who neither died from famine nor disease, nor hung about the settlements and became dependent on the whites . . . took to plunder as their only resource, and were mostly shot down without hesitation or remorse. They formed the boldest and most warlike section of their race, and their destruction left the more timid and defenceless part of the community entirely at the mercy of the strangers . . .
  

• 1883 G. W. Rusden, History of Australia.
  The former life of the scattered tribes of Australia quickly became impossible after the English appeared in any district. The settlers, for the most part as ignorant of the manners and laws of the disinherited race . . ., were ready to denounce it as an encumbering tree which ought to be cut down without delay or remorse. Not making allowances for the forced impossibility of living their former life, and the powerful obstacles to their adoption of a new one, the English public soon accepted the local maxim that the Australian black was the lowest type of man. It is but just to show some of the influences which tended to crush him.

• 1886 E. Curr, The Australian Race, p. 106.
  A considerable portion of the males of a tribe having been shot down, the Black learns the uselessness of his resistance and sues for peace. When the White man is of the opinion that the tribe has been so weakened and subdued that his small party has no longer anything to fear if moderate precautions are taken, peace is granted and the tribe is allowed to 'come in' as it is termed; that is, to make its home at some appointed place at or near the establishment of the station holder. From this epoch, a few of the tribe receive occasional employment on the station, for which they are paid in food.

Toward the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, Australian histories began to leave out issues and events relating to Aboriginal history. The conquest of the land remained a continuing theme, but frontier conflict and the conquest of Aboriginal people almost disappeared from the record. Where America had built an industry from its frontier conflict in hundreds of 'cowboys and Indians' movies, Australia chose to 'disremember' and so deny the frontier conflict which had been a fact of our history.

Examples: M. Barnard Eldershaw's My Australia (1939) has only one chapter, 'The Dispossessed' which deals with Aborigines. H. L. Harris, Australia in the Making: A History (1948) mentions Aborigines only as described by Dampier, Banks, Cook and Sturt. G. Rawson's Australia (1948) mentions Aborigines in the chapter on wildlife. Gordon Greenwood's Australia: A Social and Political History (1955) makes five passing references to Aborigines in the early chapters, but nothing after 1892. P. Coleman's Australian Civilisation (1962) doesn't mention Aboriginal people at all.

Anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner raised this issue of omission in the 1968 Boyer Lectures, published as After the Dreaming.

'. . . inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so . . . '
(After the Dreaming, 'The Great Australian Silence' pp. 24-5).

In 1972 historian Henry Reynolds continued to challenge Australian histories which ignored Aboriginal people:

The Aborigines are the fringe-dwellers of Australian historiography; neglect of their role in the past parallels the contemporary fate of indigenous communities in many parts of the Commonwealth. Yet during the early years of settlement they occupied the attention of explorers, travellers and historians, and few books about Australia published before 1850 lacked a section on the native inhabitants. Their gradual disappearance from literary attention coincided with the destruction of tribal society in south-eastern Australia and the universal acceptance of the conviction that the Aborigines were a dying race.

4. How did these Histories Influence School Histories?

 School history textbooks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were popularised forms of the intellectual traditions; imperial, and later, liberal patriotic types of history. They had an enormous influence on shaping the view of Australian history of generations of students (and teachers).

Until the 1970s Australian children studied mainly English history, although some Australian history was introduced into the junior secondary curriculum soon after Federation.

In 1885 the Junior history curriculum covered the Norman Conquest to the accession of Queen Victoria. A typical question from the Junior examination:

In what degree of lineage was William III to his wife? Explain this exactly. Illustrate by a table of lineage.

 Senior History covered the civil, military and constitutional history of England.

By 1911 Junior History included Greece & Rome, England and the Empire but also Australia between 1851 and 1901. Senior students studied Europe from the 16th century.

Imperial 'great man' history was the dominant form: the expansion of empire, taking civilisation to primitive peoples, conquering the land, establishing outposts of British life in hostile environments. Such self-validating histories were enormously popular. Jacqualine Hollingsworth, who has made a study of juvenile literature in the first decade of the 20th century, found exactly the same themes in the most popular books and magazines. Australian boys' heroes were English heroes.

Australian texts were written in the same vein with the deeds of governors, explorers, pioneer settlers, parliamentarians and soldiers as the main focus. As in the main histories, women were barely mentioned and Aboriginal people, if mentioned at all, were relegated to the margins. Henry Reynolds quotes from Wallter Murdoch's school history textbooks which justifies the omission of Aboriginal people:

When people talk about 'the history of Australia' they mean the history of the white people who have lived in Australia. There is a good reason why we should not stretch that term to make it include the story of the dark-skinned wandering tribes who hurled boomerangs and ate snakes in their native land for long ages before the arrival of the first intruders from Europe . . . He [the historian] is concerned with Australia only as the dwelling place of white men and women, settlers from overseas. It is his business to tell us how these white folk found the land, how they settled in it, how they explored it, and how they gradually made it the Australia we know today.

Quoted in H. Reynolds, Dispossession, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. xii.

Even once history scholarship started to construct new images of Australian history, school textbooks were slow to catch up, as the following extracts show:

Our aborigines are called 'primitive' because they do not read or write, or cultivate the ground, or build houses. This is because they have lived for so many hundreds of years cut off from the rest of the world by the sea around Australia's shores. They had never known 'civilisation' until our ancestors stepped ashore.

P. Gormley, Workbook of Social Studies, 1964 (Grade 5).

The Tasmanian no longer exists. The last one was Truganini who died in 1877. Why should a people who had managed to live since Stone Age times suddenly cease to exist? Harm was done when the Tasmanians were cast on an island reservation. But even if they had been treated more kindly they would probably have disappeared. These people had lived with no other aid than spears, clubs and flint knives. Then along came strangers with wonderful ships and tools that made sticks and stones seem silly. The Tasmanians lost pride in themselves and they lost heart and the desire to live. Their life came to an end.

M. Douglas and P. Park, "Stone Age Man", Man in his World series, 1974.

Most university libraries hold collections of old history textbooks. Take the time to browse through them and think about the effect they have had on generations of Australian students. What story have they told about our country's past and the people who have shaped it? Better still, get your Australian history students to think about it too.

School texts:

G. V. Portus, Australia since 1606: A History for Young Australians, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1932. This text enjoyed at least 16 reprints and was still in use in the 1960s.

Wood, F. L. W., A Concise History of Australia, Dymocks' Book Arcade Ltd, Sydney, 1935. This text was reprinted at least 14 times and was still in use in the 1960s.

Harris, H. L., Australia in the Making, Angus and Robertson Ltd, Sydney, 1944.

Driscoll, F., The Story of Australia, Angus and Robertson Ltd, Sydney, 1946.

Mitchell, B., The Australian Story and Its Background, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1965.

Gormley, P., Workbook of Social Studies, 1964 (Grade 5).

Histories Quoted

E. Curr, The Australian Race, 1886.

Flanagan, R. J., The Aborigines of Australia, George Robertson and Company, Sydney, 1888.

Reynolds, H., Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1989.

Fitzpatrick, B., Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Melbourne, 1940.

Bennett, S., The History of Australasian Discovery and Colonisation, Sydney, 1867.

Rusden, G. W., History of Australia, 1883.

References on the Writing of Australian History

Macintyre, S. & Thomas, J. (eds), The Discovery of Australian History 1890-1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 1995.

Pascoe, R., The Manufacture of Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1979.

Rivett, R., Writing About Australia, Foundation for Australian Studies Monographs No. 1, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1969

My own history education in government primary schools in the 1950s, when it touched on Australian history, was all about explorers who got lost, died or disappeared in the bush.