Propaganda or History?

The Liberal Party’s proposed curriculum changes would leave Australian children knowing less about their country, while asking them to feel greater pride in it. 

By John T. Patten

According to a report in the 19 September edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Coalition proposes removing the cross-curriculum priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, sustainability, and engagement with Asia. Julian Leeser, the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, wants greater emphasis on Western culture and national pride. First Peoples history would remain, but within “discrete, carefully planned topics”, alongside British foundation and Australia’s multicultural character.

It’s a very familiar Liberal Party schtick, of elevating British inheritance, minimising any reference to First Peoples history, and dismissing any truths that threatens a preference for blind patriotism, whilst presenting the resulting imbalance as common sense.

To be clear, this is not a proposal to remove every mention of First Peoples from schools. The problem is the unequal status being proposed for different bodies of knowledge. Western culture receives an expansive role in explaining who Australians are. First Peoples history is assigned a more confined, supplementary place. The people whose Countries became Australia are again to be fitted into a story whose organising authority starts with Captain Cook, the First Fleet, and invasion.

It’s a prejudicial hierarchy, where the most objectionable feature is not that European Australian, or Anglo-Celtic history is taught. Of course it should be. It is that a British inheritance is treated as the framework through which the nation understands itself, while First Peoples knowledge and 65,000 years of experience, history, and culture, become marginalised.

We’re dealing with a menagerie of politicians who know very little of this nation’s origins, beyond what they were taught as children, and those lessons were overly simplistic, and highly prejudicial towards First Peoples.

Australian history wasn’t written by historians. It was written by farmers, squatters, gold miners, and urban folk with a little too much time on their hands. Every historian of the 20th century spent their entire careers venerating the historian who sat in their chair before they did. Exploring the archives, digging through diaries, journals, and newspapers, they pieced together “frontier” tales, and only those that supported their prejudices. Even those that didn’t, were reworked into new assemblies that justified white Australia’s actions.

Every historian is the inheritor of the historian’s efforts that came before them, and accordingly, at the start of that long line of academics, is that squatter, or a farmer’s wife, telling a story with all of their prejudices intact, and often with none of the skills to observe impartially, or accurately.

White unsettlers and historians interpreted traditional life through prejudices they were already familiar with. Gammage shows how Europeans admired open, park-like landscapes without recognising the First Peoples knowledge and work that had helped create them. They saw untouched nature where people had carefully managed Country (Gammage, 2011). Wayne Atkinson provides another example in ‘Not One Iota’, challenging squatter Edmund Curr’s claim that he obtained land in exchange for tobacco. Curr had not learned the local language, so his account cannot establish that both parties understood the exchange as a sale. Atkinson also shows that Curr regarded Aboriginal adults as children who could be coerced for their own good. Yet Curr’s writings were later given considerable authority in the Yorta Yorta land claim, helping determine whether descendants had maintained their traditions (Atkinson, 2000). Historian Ernest Scott made a similar error when he presented Australian history as beginning with a blank map, confusing European ignorance of the continent with an absence of history (Scott, 1916, as cited in Clark, 2018). These distortions reinforce colonial prejudices and authority through repetition, while First Peoples explanations are pushed aside. 

Professor Henry Reynolds’ Why Weren’t We Told? should make any politician hesitate before proposing a minimisation of facts relating to how modern Australia came to be. That is, if any bothered to read his seminal work, which should be mandatory reading for anyone who is responsible for education in this country.

Reynolds describes in the book, his own emergence from an education that had given him a distorted, idealised understanding of Australia’s past. His encounters with First Peoples, and his historical work which unsettled the comforting national account he had inherited (Reynolds, 2000).

The importance of Why Weren’t We Told? extends beyond the facts missing from our school lessons. It concerns the confidence with which people can mistake an incomplete education for a complete or functional understanding of their country. Someone can be well educated in many respects and still know remarkably little about our nation’s true origins. That ignorance becomes demonstrably politically dangerous when its holder gains the authority to decide what the next generation needs to learn.

Adults unfamiliar with an empowered and honest black history may regard its inclusion as a recent political intrusion, and something imagined. What they remember learning becomes a well regarded standard against which everything else must justify its existence.

W. E. H. Stanner identified the “great Australian silence” in his 1968 Boyer Lectures. As historian Anna Clark explains, his criticism concerned a national habit of excluding First Peoples from the account Australians gave of their own past (Clark, 2018). The Coalition’s proposal risks giving that old habit a new administrative form. First Peoples can still appear, but the wider national story is protected from the full implications of our presence.

This matters to the curriculum because it changes both the questions a student asks, and the assumptions they make, usually in silence. 

Consider Budj Bim, on Gunditjmara Country in south-western Victoria. UNESCO has documented an aquaculture system developed over at least 6,600 years, using channels, weirs and dams to manage water and trap, store and harvest kooyang, or short-finned eels. Its significance includes engineering, ecological knowledge and the continuing relationship between Gunditjmara people and Country (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.). This was a heavily engineered system, supported by a permanent village, built with stone foundations.

Why should such history, which is already under siege because many European Australians didn’t learn about it in school, be marginalised, or lost from our schools, simply because of the ignorance of older generations?

Or why should a student encounter that only in an isolated Indigenous topic? A lesson could examine the movement of water, the life cycle of eels, or the relationship between food production and social organisation. Each would require accurate subject teaching. Each would also make Australian achievement visible where a Eurocentric education might fail to notice it.

A political programme that celebrates national achievement through a Eurocentric lens, whilst narrowing opportunities to learn about achievements such as these highlights a serious problem with how it seeks to define the nation.

The educational justification offered in Newling’s report is weak. Falling results, teacher shortages, disrupted classrooms and boys’ disengagement are placed alongside the proposed removal of the three priorities. The report supplies no evidence establishing that these priorities caused those problems. Nor does it demonstrate that reducing their reach would improve literacy or numeracy.

A list of genuine problems does not establish the effectiveness of a preferred remedy. If First Peoples content is being blamed for lower achievement, the necessary evidence must show how that content, its teaching or its allocation of time produces the claimed harm. 

ACARA’s own explanation also complicates the picture of competing subjects crowding out the basics. Learning areas are the curriculum’s foundation. Cross-curriculum priorities are developed through their content, rather than constituting separate areas to be taught. Content elaborations are examples for teachers, and the priorities are intended to add depth where the connections are meaningful (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], n.d.).

That does not prove every curriculum document or classroom exercise is well designed. Unnecessary workload, superficial activities and weak sequencing should be corrected. But an Aboriginal author’s text can be used to teach reading. An account of land management can supply material for analysing evidence. Subject knowledge and Aboriginal content are not inherently in competition.

Leeser’s reported claim that the priorities are, by definition, taught without subject expertise is particularly unconvincing. A connection between subjects tells us nothing definitive about the qualifications of the teacher making it. Where knowledge is inadequate, provide professional learning, sound resources and access to appropriate expertise. Confining the subject leaves the underlying ignorance intact.

If anything, Leeser’s comments and proposal act to demonstrate the need for a greater depth of First Peoples based content within the curriculum. If our politicians had been supported by our current curriculum when they were still in school, it’s likely that their decision making regarding education, multiculturalism, and our diverse origins, would be more mature, informed, and less divisive.

First Peoples political history offers ample material for a serious education in democratic values. On 26 January 1938, Koori organisers including Jack Patten, William Ferguson and William Cooper challenged the celebratory account of British settlement through the Day of Mourning. Their campaigning demanded that Australia confront the distance between its professed values and Aboriginal people’s treatment (National Museum of Australia, 2025).

These men belong in the history of Australian democracy. Their work also exposes the inadequacy of treating objection to 26 January as a fashionable hostility to the nation. The historical objection was already being publicly organised in 1938. Students who never learn that history are easier to mislead about the present.

The same standard should apply to teaching Britain’s influence. Teach parliamentary institutions and the claims made for liberty, then examine who could exercise those liberties. Ask how First Peoples campaigners confronted exclusion and demanded change. An honest account can recognise an institution’s value, while examining the injustices committed through it. 

There are reasonable discussions to have about classroom behaviour, screen use, teacher preparation and the recruitment of veterans. None establishes a case for reducing the place of First Peoples knowledge. Military experience may bring valuable skills; effective teaching still requires educational competence. 

Removing the priorities concerning Asia and sustainability, alongside First Peoples’ histories, reinforces the proposal’s narrowness, and demonstrates a lack of political awareness regarding our place in the world, or a respect for our relationships with our neighbours. The curriculum should help students understand the region in which Australia exists and the environments in which our future depends. Greater emphasis on Western culture cannot itself answer those educational needs.

The policy’s prejudice is visible in what it elevates and what it restricts. Its ignorance lies in the assumption that Australia becomes more intelligible when First Peoples history has a smaller reach. Its unfamiliarity with historical scholarship is apparent in how readily it risks rebuilding the exclusions Reynolds and Stanner identified, while disregarding the connections Gammage’s work makes unavoidable.

A serious commitment to excellence would demand better evidence for the proposed changes and a fuller understanding of the country being taught. Children should leave school able to question national myths, recognise First Peoples achievement and understand how Australia’s institutions and landscapes came to be.

They should find pride in their nation based on the whole story, and not have to discover the missing history as adults and ask, once again, why they weren’t told.

References

Atkinson, W. R. (2000). ‘Not one iota’: The Yorta Yorta struggle for land justice [Doctoral dissertation, La Trobe University]. Wayne Atkinson. 

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2022, July 27). Landline: Fire’s role in the Australian environment. ABC Education. https://www.abc.net.au/education/landline-fires-role-in-the-australian-environment/13992620

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (n.d.). The three dimensions of the Australian Curriculum. https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/help/f-10-curriculum-overview/the-three-dimensions-of-the-australian-curriculum

Clark, A. (2018, August 5). The ‘great Australian silence’ 50 years on. Open Forum. https://www.openforum.com.au/the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on/

Firesticks. (2024, May 29). Victor Steffensen on the Firesticks Indigenous Fire and Land Management Mentoring Program [Video]. https://firesticks.org.au/videos/victor-steffensen-on-the-firesticks-indigenous-fire-and-land-management-mentoring-program/

Gammage, B. (2011). The biggest estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Allen & Unwin.

Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816692163/the-white-possessive/

National Museum of Australia. (2025, July 4). Day of Mourning. https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/day-of-mourning

Newling, N. (2026, September 19). [News report on the Coalition’s proposed national curriculum changes]. Copy supplied as Curriculum article.pdf.

Reynolds, H. (2000). Why weren’t we told? A personal search for the truth about our history. Penguin Books. https://www.penguin.com.au/books/why-werent-we-told-9780140278422
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Budj Bim cultural landscape. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577/