Antinuclear

With all VCE history courses under review this year, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) has indicated that Koorie Hhistory will be cut due to declining enrolments. This leaves the one-year Australian history course as the only way for Victorian students to study Australian indigenous history in their final two years of secondary school.

The authority is responsible for both the construction of the study design and assessing VCE students. Given that its assessment largely determines students’ admission to university, teachers are under enormous pressure to adhere to the Study Design.

Thus, the content of the proposed VCE Australian History Study Design is extremely important to those who recognise that widespread ignorance of indigenous matters in mainstream Australia is an underlying cause of the acute disadvantage indigenous Australians face today………..

according to the study design, a student may excel in Australian history without any demonstrated knowledge of the experiences or perspectives of Aboriginal people after 1860. Even those who study Aboriginal activism post-1970 will be left with a 110-year gap in their knowledge.

Furthermore, there are troubling ambiguities in the way the study design outlines the optional unit on Aboriginal activism that could lead to confusion about these 110 years. The study design claims that from 1970, indigenous communities “shifted from a struggle for civil and equal rights to indigenous rights, especially land rights”. Yet, as historian Heather Goodall clearly elucidated in her 2008 book Invasion to Embassy, indigenous communities have fought tenaciously to assert their sovereign rights to their land since British invasion. They did not merely seek to be recognised as Australian citizens.

Other aspects of the study design that erase indigenous perspectives from Australian history include its timeframe. Although there is no shortage of historical scholarship and indigenous knowledge of pre-1788 Australia, it presents Australian history as beginning with British invasion.

Also concerning is its use of the euphemism “settlement” to stand for “colonisation” or “invasion”. The term “settlement” has long been criticised for masking the violence indigenous peoples suffered at the hands of British “settlers”. Moreover, equating Australian history post-1788 to “the history of settlement” implies indigenous peoples were not themselves “settled” on the land, which reinforces the historical fiction of terra nullius.

The systematic exclusion of indigenous perspectives from Australian history classrooms is a phenomenon that prominent academics, such as W. E. H. Stanner and Henry Reynolds, have recognised and sought to rectify since the 1960s………………..http://www.theage.com.au/comment/vces-australian-history-study-design-snubs-indigenous-perspectives-20141111-11jl95.html