You have to admire Geoffrey Blainey’s courage. His academic career was practically ended when he dared to stick his head ever so slightly above the parapet in the 1980s and murmur that perhaps unending mass immigration might be a strain on social cohesion. Perhaps appropriately for a historian, Blainey possibly made history by being one of the first victims of what we now know as Cancel Culture.
Fortunately for us, though, Blainey no longer has to care what the woke mob think: since 1988, Blainey has retired to become a “freelance historian” and a prolific publisher of widely-read books. Blainey’s place in Australian culture is assured: even his critics admit that he is “our most eminent living historian”. His alma mater, Melbourne University, recognised that “few graduates of this University have exerted greater influence on national life”.
The great historian is not exactly impressed by the proposed new national history curriculum.
What should students be taught? It is one of the vital questions facing the nation.
Should the new draft curriculum convince them to respect most of their nation’s achievements, or deride modern Australia as primarily a procession of failures, cloaked in racism?
The woke bureaucrats responsible for the draft curriculum have clearly decided upon the latter.
The draft Year 7 syllabus is breathtaking. Young students must learn world history from 60,000 BC to AD 650. A vast expanse of time embracing the rise and fall of many old civilisations, its chief events are set out in massive detail. But there is an awkward problem. Students can study only two of these civilisations, and one of the two must be the so-called First Nation Peoples of Australia.
Even the use of the term “First Nation Peoples” involves deceit. “Nation” is a word with a specific meaning: a meaning which certainly cannot apply to a people whose political organisation was a patchwork of often mutually-hostile clans and tribes, speaking hundreds of different languages.
Certainly, Australian students should learn about its pre-history – and they do, and have since at least the 1980s when I studied Australian History in Year 12. But the brutally honest truth is that the contribution of Aboriginal history to modern Australia is minimal, notwithstanding the ubiquity of facile modern inventions like “Welcome to Country” ceremonies.
Australia the nation, was, and is, overwhelmingly white, Anglo-European (nearly 90% of the population), and Christian. Not that the draft curriculum will admit that un-woke truth.
In the introduction for Civics and Citizenship for Years 7 to 10, as opposed to the actual course content, the draft curriculum document “recognises that Australia is a secular nation with a culturally diverse, multi-faith society and a Christian heritage”. But Australia can’t realistically be called a multi-faith society if five of every six Australians who profess a faith are Christian. It can’t be called a secular society if the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that the clear majority of Australians belong to the major religions.
The curriculum also promulgates the twin myths of “invasion” and “genocide”. The High Court’s Mabo decision ruled that Australia was not “invaded”. The claim of “genocide” also flies in the face of historical fact. Like the Musket Wars in New Zealand, the inconvenient facts of Aboriginal violence have been scrubbed from the history curriculum.
Genocide is hardly a fair and accurate word. Aboriginal people often suffered from the frontier wars but they suffered even more from the many wars fought by their own “nations”, one against the other, during thousands of years. These Aboriginal wars have become taboo in some of the university and school courses, but the evidence for them is overwhelming.
While dwelling obsessively on Australia’s supposed failures, its successes are ignored.
Ours is one of the oldest continuous democracies. A great achievement, it is not without its faults. Only one sentence would be needed to inform students of this feat. Australia was the first nation in the world to grant women both the right to vote and the right to stand for parliament. So far I have found no mention of this victory in a curriculum of enormous length.
The Australian
Everywhere in the “history” curriculum, white, male Australians are cast as the villains. Like the fraudulent 1619 Project, this is not history: it is a farrago of ignoble lies in the service of a destructive, hateful ideology.
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