The Guardian 1 February, 2006
Howard’s history re-write
Tom Pearson
John Howard chose in the lead up to Australia Day to announce that his government intends to re-write the history books and force-feed this new version of old and discredited views to the coming generations of children. It includes the rote learning of historical dates such as the Battle of Hastings and the landing of Captain Cook, and the re-writing of the history of Indigenous Australians, colonialism and immigration. Of course, he tied this white arm band version of history to the bogus war on terrorism.
"Our social cohesion and national unity is pivotal in enabling Australia to contribute effectively to the international effort to combat terrorism …", said the man whose government has been the cause of more national disunity and social division than any before it.
Former NSW Premier Bob Carr chimed in with his $500,000 worth (the crony’s salary he’s now paid at Macquarie Bank for services rendered while in government). "When I was Premier it was possible for students to pass through the school system without learning about Gallipoli. We corrected that", stated Carr.
The material for the projects that students must complete in NSW public high schools is of the most narrow and superficial kind, learning about the food the soldiers ate; the trenches they lived in; their uniforms and weapons.
The fact that Australian soldiers were cannon fodder for the benefit of robber barons — monopoly capitalists in pursuit of a greater slice of world markets, is anathema to myth-makers like Howard and Carr who want to obscure and romanticise the landing at Gallipoli by imperial troops whose lives were squandered in the name of the British Empire.
Let’s reverse the scenario: a flotilla of tens of thousands of Turkish troops arrive at Bondi in 1915, invade Australia and occupy Bondi Beach in the name of the Ottoman Empire. Australian troops, with British forces, invaded Turkey as a result of the subservient government of that obsequious and warmongering Prime Minister Billy Hughes, a remarkably similar chain of events to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with the US replacing England.
Howard wants a whitewash of the British colonial occupation of the land that became known as Australia: the policy of genocide carried out against the Aboriginal people (in his address he referred to "the great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation"), the fact that the colony was built by the slave labour of convicts, and much more. I can reel this list off rote because Howard has been regurgitating the stuff for ten years.
Nor did his spin on history impress educators. "We would have serious concerns about the style of history teaching the Prime Minister is proposing", said Nick Ewbank from the History Teachers’ Association. "He seems to be talking about a grand narrative with British history at its centre."
The NSW Board of Studies’ history inspector Jennifer Lawless said memorising dates is "a fairly lower order skill that students acquire early on. We move on from that and teach more sophisticated skills, like using historical sources appropriately, questioning those sources, analysing an interpreting, looking at perspectives and interpretations."
The Australian Education Union President Pat Byrne noted that Howard was pushing for a curriculum along the lines of the one used when he was at school.