i know you blanket your mind so much that I am blind
HISTORY IN AUSTRALIA:
THE NEED FOR A NATIONAL NARRATIVE
By Alix Baumgartner
In 2002, I entered Year 11 at high school, and a new history syllabus for Year 10, with a compulsory Australian History component, was introduced. The half-teasing, rueful grin I gave my friends in the grade below betrayed my unintentional aversion to any kind of Australian history—how I pitied those whose fate was swallowing the details of a national story I so avoided! Many of my fellow university students, normally passionate about historical pursuit in all its variety, flock to lectures on American, European and Asian history in an effort to distance themselves from the vaguely known and little understood discourse of invasion and land rights, immigration and multiculturalism, stolen generations and convict supremacy. The resultant deficiency of general knowledge about the Australian past translates to a national narrative insufficient to sustain a society of myriad experiences.
This insufficiency manifests itself in a superficial patriotism. The Australian brand of patriotism is preoccupied with cricket, beer, blow-up kangaroos, and Ian Thorpe. The Australian Election Study of 1996 revealed that while a high proportion of people were prepared to say that they were ‘very proud’ of Australian sport, there was great contention—particularly among the better educated—about the role of history and the matter of pride in Australia’s past.[1]
According to Bob Carr, “patriotism arises from a profound knowledge of your country’s history and geography. And Australian patriotism is our reflection, our response to the interaction of this motley people and a unique land.”[2] Patriotism that constitutes more than a taste for meat pies is dependent on a “profound knowledge” of history that the typical Australian just doesn’t possess, and in fact deliberately, if perhaps subconsciously, shies away from. Although the history wars consume copious amounts of newspaper ink as commentators brandish their pens over whose version of what past Australia should be remembering, the stereotype of Australian history for students is that it is repetitive and uninteresting. Christine Halse’s research into the state of history in New South Wales secondary schools betrays this sentiment. Said one student, “I would rather watch paint dry” than study Australia’s past.[3] This is nothing new. In a 1975 survey, one Victorian student said that their class had “wasted too much time learning Australian history, about which there is very little of interest to learn. It is time we faced this fact instead of trying to pretend that Australia has had a very interesting history.”[4]
In the 1990s, research revealing low levels of ‘historical literacy’ culminated in a massive government effort to increase civic and historical understanding. The realization that only 18 per cent of young Australians knew who Edmund Barton was led to the national ad campaign that asked: “What country would forget the name of its first Prime Minister?” Such results, wrote Anna Clark in the Melbourne Education Age in February 2004, are worrying because history “gives context—it enables students to think about where they come from, and the ideas and institutions (good and bad) that have made Australia what it is.”[5]
The American John Ross lamented the suppression of his country’s history in ‘Against Amnesia’:
In my own country
amnesia is the norm,
the schools teach us
to unremember from birth,
the slave taking, the risings up,
the songs of resistance,
the first May first,
our martyrs from Haymarket
to Attica to the redwoods of California
ripped whole from our hearts,
erased from official memory…[6]
The problem in Australia is not official censorship, evidenced by the enormous body of revisionist Australian history developed after the 1960s. Instead, Australians are themselves complicit: we effectively ‘rip whole from our hearts’ our cultural legacy by collective ignorance. We suffer from self-inflicted social amnesia. A person suffering from amnesia is thrust into an unknown, uncertain world, and consequently becomes acutely aware of the extent to which their identity is tied up in their past. Loss of memory constitutes loss of self, loss of identity. The parameters of our knowledge of the world are historical. History, as the famous dictum reads, is society’s memory. It is the only steady foundation for societal growth.
So, is the answer a Bob Carr-style history syllabus? The compulsory New South Wales syllabus has, after heavy criticism and disappointing student results, just been rewritten. What is needed, suggests Michael Spur, professional development coordinator for the History Teachers Association of Victoria, is a “real narrative” so that students can find the same sort of drama more obvious in the German or American contexts.[7]
Indeed.
Keith Windschuttle has attempted to provide such a narrative. Just as Alfred Deakin believed that nothing less than the “national character and manhood”[8] were at stake in enforcing his White Australia policy, Windschuttle, more than 100 years on, believes that this “national character” is at stake—in the writing of history. His revisionist The White Australia Policy, published in December 2004, is the latest installment of a larger political undertaking: the project of redeeming Australia’s national honour.[9] Arguably a professional confrontationalist, Windschuttle continues in the combative and polemical strain of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.[10] “Australia is not, and never has been, the racist country its academic historians have condemned,” he declares.[11] In Windschuttle’s view, history should serve the nation. Thus he writes as a patriot, determined to rescue Australia’s reputation from those who, in his view, seek to impugn it. The academic historians he flays are a diverse group who, in actuality, disagree with each other as much as with Windschuttle, but “political combat requires the fantasy of a powerful and unified enemy.”[12]
As Windschuttle told the Sydney Morning Herald, “My broad agenda is to criticise my own generation, people who were educated in the sixties and took on board a whole range of ideas which I think are socially damaging, of which one is…hard multiculturalism, and the idea that Australia is a shockingly racist country comparable to South African apartheid.”[13] Politically driven history, which charts such a “broad agenda” and simplistically casts historical subjects as heroes or villains, can pose a barrier to understanding an ambiguous and complex past. Indeed, in arguing that Australian nationalism was not race-based, Windschuttle not only engages in perversity, but erects false dichotomies. Defining Deakin, for example, as merely a “cultural relativist” is tenuous at best: Deakin was overtly racist, recognising that the empire comprised ruling and ruled classes and insisting that, as white men, Australians belonged to the former. If nothing else, as Marilyn Lake notes, such an argument is not a fruitful way to understand “the range of race thinking and subjective identification that characterised the federation period.”[14]
Windschuttle’s ‘narrative’ of the Australian past is too simplistic. He is right, though, to observe that the central unanswered question of Australia’s national story is a racial one. Today, the noble stamp of egalitarianism is a primary source of pride for real-life Ramsey Streets with their token Asians, Arabs and Africans. Yet, Australia’s history has never been reconciled to Australia’s present. While university students keep a hand on their purses when exiting Redfern Station, John Howard’s refusal to articulate official reconciliation reflects the fact that modern-day Australians do not accept ownership of their history. The dispute over the term ‘invasion’ has echoed all over Australia, each state experiencing its own struggle over the language of Australian history syllabuses.[15] It proves not only that the teaching of Australian history is a contentious business, but that Australia exhibits significant historical problems which remain unresolved. There are enormous deficits in Aboriginal-White Australia relations, which poke as many holes in our national identity as there are stars in our southern sky.
Windschuttle is also right to assert the need for a national narrative. Yet this narrative need not be simply a black armband interpretation, or, conversely, a Three Cheers celebration of white settler achievement. In the words of Bob Carr,
Those two stories of our history for…Australians exist side by side. One can take pride in the achievement of these white intruders while at the same time acknowledge [sic] the tragedy of Aboriginal dispossession. One story doesn’t exclude the other. History is a complex contradictory process and it requires rigour to disentangle the different threads that comprise the tapestry, and it’s true of the story of our history. Those stories, those experiences…are valid for the people who lived them and both are components in our national character.[16]
Even though we may have an unexhilarating national anthem (or an inspiring disco version, as evidenced at the 2005 New Year's Eve Sydney fireworks display!), or a flag design we can't all agree on, there is a need for a more complex—and accurate—national narrative. The superficiality of Australian patriotism is evidence of flaws in our national identity. We are amnesiacs, suffering because of a lack of comprehension of our past. Our present condition must be remedied.
[1] Katherine Betts, ‘Patriotism, Immigration and the 1996 Election’, People and Places, vol. 4, no. 4 (1996), 29.
[2] Bob Carr, Heritage Week (National Trust New South Wales) Speech, 22 April 1997, at
http://www.isis.aust.com/afnt/carr.htm, viewed 1/4/2005.
[3] Anna Clark, ‘The Great History Debate’, Melbourne Education Age, 9 February 2004, at
http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=673&op=page, viewed 6/4/2005.
[4] Anna Clark, ‘The Great History Debate’.
[5] Anna Clark, ‘The Great History Debate’.
[6] John Ross, reprinted in Michael Parenti, History as Mystery, City Lights, San Francisco, 1999, p. 1.
[7] Quoted in Anna Clarke, ‘The Great History Debate.’
[8] Quoted in John Wilken, ‘Racism in Australian history: Two episodes’, Compass, vol 37 no 3 (2003), 12.
[9] Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2004).
[10] Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume 1; Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002).
[11] Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy, p. 10.
[12] Marilyn Lake, ‘The White Australia Policy,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 2005, at http://smh.com.au/news/Books/The-White-AustraliaPolicy/2004/12/22/1103391831142.html, viewed 10/4/2005.
[13] Quoted in Deborah Snow, ‘White Australia now has a history shaded grey’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 December 2004, at http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/White-Australia-now-has-a-history-shaded-grey/2004/12/03/ 1101923341702.html, viewed 29/5/2005.
[14] Marilyn Lake, ‘The White Australia Policy’.
[15] Detailed in Stuart Macintyre & Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), pp. 171-190.
[16] Bob Carr, Heritage Week (National Trust New South Wales) Speech, 22 April 1997.
THE NEED FOR A NATIONAL NARRATIVE
By Alix Baumgartner
In 2002, I entered Year 11 at high school, and a new history syllabus for Year 10, with a compulsory Australian History component, was introduced. The half-teasing, rueful grin I gave my friends in the grade below betrayed my unintentional aversion to any kind of Australian history—how I pitied those whose fate was swallowing the details of a national story I so avoided! Many of my fellow university students, normally passionate about historical pursuit in all its variety, flock to lectures on American, European and Asian history in an effort to distance themselves from the vaguely known and little understood discourse of invasion and land rights, immigration and multiculturalism, stolen generations and convict supremacy. The resultant deficiency of general knowledge about the Australian past translates to a national narrative insufficient to sustain a society of myriad experiences.
This insufficiency manifests itself in a superficial patriotism. The Australian brand of patriotism is preoccupied with cricket, beer, blow-up kangaroos, and Ian Thorpe. The Australian Election Study of 1996 revealed that while a high proportion of people were prepared to say that they were ‘very proud’ of Australian sport, there was great contention—particularly among the better educated—about the role of history and the matter of pride in Australia’s past.[1]
According to Bob Carr, “patriotism arises from a profound knowledge of your country’s history and geography. And Australian patriotism is our reflection, our response to the interaction of this motley people and a unique land.”[2] Patriotism that constitutes more than a taste for meat pies is dependent on a “profound knowledge” of history that the typical Australian just doesn’t possess, and in fact deliberately, if perhaps subconsciously, shies away from. Although the history wars consume copious amounts of newspaper ink as commentators brandish their pens over whose version of what past Australia should be remembering, the stereotype of Australian history for students is that it is repetitive and uninteresting. Christine Halse’s research into the state of history in New South Wales secondary schools betrays this sentiment. Said one student, “I would rather watch paint dry” than study Australia’s past.[3] This is nothing new. In a 1975 survey, one Victorian student said that their class had “wasted too much time learning Australian history, about which there is very little of interest to learn. It is time we faced this fact instead of trying to pretend that Australia has had a very interesting history.”[4]
In the 1990s, research revealing low levels of ‘historical literacy’ culminated in a massive government effort to increase civic and historical understanding. The realization that only 18 per cent of young Australians knew who Edmund Barton was led to the national ad campaign that asked: “What country would forget the name of its first Prime Minister?” Such results, wrote Anna Clark in the Melbourne Education Age in February 2004, are worrying because history “gives context—it enables students to think about where they come from, and the ideas and institutions (good and bad) that have made Australia what it is.”[5]
The American John Ross lamented the suppression of his country’s history in ‘Against Amnesia’:
In my own country
amnesia is the norm,
the schools teach us
to unremember from birth,
the slave taking, the risings up,
the songs of resistance,
the first May first,
our martyrs from Haymarket
to Attica to the redwoods of California
ripped whole from our hearts,
erased from official memory…[6]
The problem in Australia is not official censorship, evidenced by the enormous body of revisionist Australian history developed after the 1960s. Instead, Australians are themselves complicit: we effectively ‘rip whole from our hearts’ our cultural legacy by collective ignorance. We suffer from self-inflicted social amnesia. A person suffering from amnesia is thrust into an unknown, uncertain world, and consequently becomes acutely aware of the extent to which their identity is tied up in their past. Loss of memory constitutes loss of self, loss of identity. The parameters of our knowledge of the world are historical. History, as the famous dictum reads, is society’s memory. It is the only steady foundation for societal growth.
So, is the answer a Bob Carr-style history syllabus? The compulsory New South Wales syllabus has, after heavy criticism and disappointing student results, just been rewritten. What is needed, suggests Michael Spur, professional development coordinator for the History Teachers Association of Victoria, is a “real narrative” so that students can find the same sort of drama more obvious in the German or American contexts.[7]
Indeed.
Keith Windschuttle has attempted to provide such a narrative. Just as Alfred Deakin believed that nothing less than the “national character and manhood”[8] were at stake in enforcing his White Australia policy, Windschuttle, more than 100 years on, believes that this “national character” is at stake—in the writing of history. His revisionist The White Australia Policy, published in December 2004, is the latest installment of a larger political undertaking: the project of redeeming Australia’s national honour.[9] Arguably a professional confrontationalist, Windschuttle continues in the combative and polemical strain of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.[10] “Australia is not, and never has been, the racist country its academic historians have condemned,” he declares.[11] In Windschuttle’s view, history should serve the nation. Thus he writes as a patriot, determined to rescue Australia’s reputation from those who, in his view, seek to impugn it. The academic historians he flays are a diverse group who, in actuality, disagree with each other as much as with Windschuttle, but “political combat requires the fantasy of a powerful and unified enemy.”[12]
As Windschuttle told the Sydney Morning Herald, “My broad agenda is to criticise my own generation, people who were educated in the sixties and took on board a whole range of ideas which I think are socially damaging, of which one is…hard multiculturalism, and the idea that Australia is a shockingly racist country comparable to South African apartheid.”[13] Politically driven history, which charts such a “broad agenda” and simplistically casts historical subjects as heroes or villains, can pose a barrier to understanding an ambiguous and complex past. Indeed, in arguing that Australian nationalism was not race-based, Windschuttle not only engages in perversity, but erects false dichotomies. Defining Deakin, for example, as merely a “cultural relativist” is tenuous at best: Deakin was overtly racist, recognising that the empire comprised ruling and ruled classes and insisting that, as white men, Australians belonged to the former. If nothing else, as Marilyn Lake notes, such an argument is not a fruitful way to understand “the range of race thinking and subjective identification that characterised the federation period.”[14]
Windschuttle’s ‘narrative’ of the Australian past is too simplistic. He is right, though, to observe that the central unanswered question of Australia’s national story is a racial one. Today, the noble stamp of egalitarianism is a primary source of pride for real-life Ramsey Streets with their token Asians, Arabs and Africans. Yet, Australia’s history has never been reconciled to Australia’s present. While university students keep a hand on their purses when exiting Redfern Station, John Howard’s refusal to articulate official reconciliation reflects the fact that modern-day Australians do not accept ownership of their history. The dispute over the term ‘invasion’ has echoed all over Australia, each state experiencing its own struggle over the language of Australian history syllabuses.[15] It proves not only that the teaching of Australian history is a contentious business, but that Australia exhibits significant historical problems which remain unresolved. There are enormous deficits in Aboriginal-White Australia relations, which poke as many holes in our national identity as there are stars in our southern sky.
Windschuttle is also right to assert the need for a national narrative. Yet this narrative need not be simply a black armband interpretation, or, conversely, a Three Cheers celebration of white settler achievement. In the words of Bob Carr,
Those two stories of our history for…Australians exist side by side. One can take pride in the achievement of these white intruders while at the same time acknowledge [sic] the tragedy of Aboriginal dispossession. One story doesn’t exclude the other. History is a complex contradictory process and it requires rigour to disentangle the different threads that comprise the tapestry, and it’s true of the story of our history. Those stories, those experiences…are valid for the people who lived them and both are components in our national character.[16]
Even though we may have an unexhilarating national anthem (or an inspiring disco version, as evidenced at the 2005 New Year's Eve Sydney fireworks display!), or a flag design we can't all agree on, there is a need for a more complex—and accurate—national narrative. The superficiality of Australian patriotism is evidence of flaws in our national identity. We are amnesiacs, suffering because of a lack of comprehension of our past. Our present condition must be remedied.
[1] Katherine Betts, ‘Patriotism, Immigration and the 1996 Election’, People and Places, vol. 4, no. 4 (1996), 29.
[2] Bob Carr, Heritage Week (National Trust New South Wales) Speech, 22 April 1997, at
http://www.isis.aust.com/afnt/carr.htm, viewed 1/4/2005.
[3] Anna Clark, ‘The Great History Debate’, Melbourne Education Age, 9 February 2004, at
http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=673&op=page, viewed 6/4/2005.
[4] Anna Clark, ‘The Great History Debate’.
[5] Anna Clark, ‘The Great History Debate’.
[6] John Ross, reprinted in Michael Parenti, History as Mystery, City Lights, San Francisco, 1999, p. 1.
[7] Quoted in Anna Clarke, ‘The Great History Debate.’
[8] Quoted in John Wilken, ‘Racism in Australian history: Two episodes’, Compass, vol 37 no 3 (2003), 12.
[9] Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2004).
[10] Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume 1; Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002).
[11] Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy, p. 10.
[12] Marilyn Lake, ‘The White Australia Policy,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 2005, at http://smh.com.au/news/Books/The-White-AustraliaPolicy/2004/12/22/1103391831142.html, viewed 10/4/2005.
[13] Quoted in Deborah Snow, ‘White Australia now has a history shaded grey’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 December 2004, at http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/White-Australia-now-has-a-history-shaded-grey/2004/12/03/ 1101923341702.html, viewed 29/5/2005.
[14] Marilyn Lake, ‘The White Australia Policy’.
[15] Detailed in Stuart Macintyre & Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), pp. 171-190.
[16] Bob Carr, Heritage Week (National Trust New South Wales) Speech, 22 April 1997.
painted pretty by alix @ 2:34 PM
1 Comments:
At 5:37 PM,
Anonymous said…
alix
you said you be - quote breaking it down end quote. this little phrase brings to mind a picture of tiny elves working away, devouring some kind of magical enclosure that encircles 'clear understanding'. but here the elves must have got confused or taken the wrong pills or something because they seemed to have built the barrier even higher and made it more robust. either that or my own feeble brain is just too weak to understand all that amazing stuff you wrote.
much love,
ashleigh
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