Australia’s deeply progressive education establishment long ago abandoned the idea that history should illuminate young minds. Among academics, bureaucrats, and policymakers there is now near-unanimous agreement: the story of modern Australia, though relatively short, is primarily a story of violence and genocide.
They present the nation’s past not as a complex history but as a crime scene, but in this version there’s no mystery about the culprits. They lay the blame for the problems plaguing remote Aboriginal communities fairly and squarely on the arrival of the British in 1788.
As theologian and ethicist Nigel Biggar notes: “Certain historians have chosen to exaggerate the role of settler violence in causing such (native peoples’) extinction, and some have gone so far as to equate the actions of colonial authorities with those of the Nazis, casually deploying such emotive and provocative words as ‘concentration camp’, ‘holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ in describing British policies. In fact, the colonial authorities strove to avoid the extinction of native peoples. That they too often failed was not a sign of their covertly genocidal intention, but rather a manifestation in human tragedy.”
A one-dimensional tale of violence and dispossession
No one today denies the profound injustices suffered by Aboriginal Australians as a result of colonisation. But to ascribe genocidal intent to the British, and to frame the entire national story as a one-dimensional tale of violence and dispossession, is historically reductive and pedagogically damaging. In the current political climate, to suggest otherwise risks cancellation, deplatforming and the ire of the academic establishment. It will make you deeply unpopular.
Yet some, such as Australia’s pre-eminent historian, 96-year-old Geoffrey Blainey, are, in a sense, uncancellable. “I myself believe that most Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders are far, far better off today than if they were living in 1788,” he says. “This land is infinitely more fruitful than it was in 1788, and most Aboriginals are now the gainers … Here in this continent arose a democratic society which, for all its imperfections, offers liberty in a world where liberty is not normal.”
By “better off”, Blainey means that by the end of the 19th century the application of science and a pursuit of progress by the Europeans lifted the material standards of living above the impressive level achieved by Aborigines. Even quoting Blainey, suggesting on balance that colonisation may have brought benefits, will no doubt provoke the wrath of the establishment.
Apologising starts early
For the moment, however, it is this unnuanced history that is being presented to Australian children. Just as their American counterparts must atone for its original sin of slavery, so too are Australian children required to apologise for the sin of colonisation. In Australia, this is called “reconciliation” and it starts in kindergarten. On government orders, teachers are expected to recruit their dummy-sucking charges into a battalion of “active citizens” embarking on what is promised to be a lifelong “journey of reconciliation”.
They are to decolonise early childhood education by “reconsidering education spaces, acknowledging colonisation and its continued impacts, while seeking to disrupt and reconceptualise colonial understandings”. This is extraordinary language to use, and it comes across more like a treatise on postcolonial, anti-capitalist pedagogy than guidance for toddlers. Finally, teachers are to “critically reflect” on existing curriculum resources and practices, asking whether they serve to “sustain or privilege colonial narratives – and how these might be reconfigured to prioritise Indigenous perspectives”. But what does all this decolonisation and disruption and reconfiguration look like in practice? It looks a lot like Play-Doh, sandpits and The Tiger Who Came to Tea are being replaced by political action. It looks cruel.
Toddlers are being initiated into a world of collective culpability, asked to shoulder an impossibly heavy burden of guilt for actions committed by people who died three centuries ago. And this initiation is being orchestrated by their teachers, many of whom are motivated by a genuine desire to right historical wrongs.
‘People in charge of Australia made some bad choices’
One kindergarten teacher has offered her colleagues guidance on how to mark National Sorry Day, first established in 1998 to reflect on injustices committed against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. While she acknowledges that her methods might not be entirely age-appropriate, she presses on regardless. First, she explains to preschoolers: “We commemorate Sorry Day because many, many years ago, the people in charge of running Australia made some bad choices, and many Aboriginal families were hurt and became very sad. The people in charge realised they were wrong and said Sorry.” Then she escalates the lesson, directing the children to act out emotionally charged scenarios designed to make them feel “sad, angry, frustrated, jealous, happy, excited or hopeful”.
In another classroom, teachers had a small group of children paint apology cards on National Sorry Day. The children proudly brought home their creations, bearing messages like: “Sorry for hurting the Dharawal people. We will be kind now.” They were so visibly distressed that their grandparents had to comfort them, reassuring them that they had done nothing wrong, that it was all in the past, and that they were kind, innocent children.
Invasion before First Fleet
Remarkably, children are introduced to the concept of an invasion before they hear about something called the First Fleet. In year 3, teachers explain that “people have different points of view on some events that are commemorated and celebrated; for example, some First Nations Australians regard ‘Australia Day’ as ‘Invasion Day’ ”. It’s not until an entire year later that they hear about something called the First Fleet, which was the 11 ships carrying convicts, marines and officers under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, which marked the formal colonisation of the continent in 1788. But even then the focus is on the “effects of contact with other people on First Nations Australians and their Countries/Places following the arrival of the First Fleet and how this was viewed by First Nations Australians as an invasion”.
Guilt runs through the syllabus like cracks in a facade, as Australian history is recast as single, unbroken narrative of “frontier warfare, massacres, removal from land and relocation to protectorates, reserves and missions”. Everything, it seems, except nation-building.
But here’s the kicker: children are also taught that no number of apologies, cards or tears can atone for the sins of the past. The curriculum insists that not even “reconciliation and truth-telling” can heal the deleterious effects of colonisation. Instead, they are told that “Reconciliation is not a single significant event or change, but an ongoing process of truth-telling and healing between First Nations Australians and other Australians”. This is reinforced by national observances such as National Sorry Day, National Reconciliation Week and NAIDOC Week, which are calendar fixtures that embed a rhythm of annual remembrance, contrition and activism into school life. Children are thus trapped in a cycle of endless apology and inherited guilt, from which there appears to be no escape. As Douglas Murray notes, “If there is no possibility of forgiveness, then apology is merely the first step in a process of permanent submission.”
The shadow of Dark Emu
This sense of guilt has been amplified in recent years by Australia’s version of the 1619 Project: Dark Emu, written in 2014 by Australian author Bruce Pascoe, who identifies as Aboriginal. Pascoe claimed that Aboriginal Australians were not nomadic after all but instead practised agriculture with techniques superior to those of the white colonisers who dispossessed them. According to Dark Emu, they lived in permanent settlements, managed the land with advanced ecological understanding, invented democracy, pioneered mankind’s first complex fishing systems and even baked the first loaf of bread.
Like Nikole Hannah-Jones in the US, Pascoe positioned himself as the discoverer of a long-suppressed foundational truth that supposedly overturned everything Australians thought they knew about their past.
Pascoe claims to have arrived at this revelation after immersing himself in the diaries of explorers. “You have to read them in the original form,” he said in an interview, “without the editing, because in some of them there was a severe edit before they became public documents, and often the only stuff missing was the observations about Aboriginal use of land.” The only problem is that Pascoe missed some pretty important “stuff” himself. In 2021, Dark Emu was exposed as work of historical distortion. Anthropologist Peter Sutton, along with archaeologist Keryn Walshe, mounted a detailed rebuttal in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? demonstrating that Pascoe selectively uses colonial-era sources and misinterprets evidence to support the claim that Aboriginal Australians were agriculturalists. His book, they concluded, while well intentioned, sacrifices scholarly accuracy for a highly political narrative.
Politics disguised as history
And this is the key point. This is politics disguised as history. And despite having been thoroughly discredited, a simplified version of what is essentially a work of fiction, Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, published in 2019, has been widely adopted in Australian primary schools. Glowingly endorsed by education departments for its “corrective” approach to history and stocked in school libraries, Young Dark Emu presents children with a false version of the past in which Aboriginal people were an advanced civilisation of farmers, builders, engineers and political organisers, wiped out by colonisation.
For children raised on Pascoe’s narrative, national pride becomes difficult. So difficult, in fact, that schoolgirls such as nine-year-old Harper Neilson, who made headlines around the world, no longer have the will to stand for the national anthem because she believes it is racist. “It says Advance Australia Fair and when it was originally written it meant advance Australia for white skin people,” she explained. As one commentator writes, “Unquestioning loyalty to Australia isn’t necessary. Some loyalty to Australia, some unity and some pride in the country is enough.” It’s not that much to ask. But young Australians are increasingly less proud and less unified as the narrative of settler colonialism is further embedded in their education.
On Australia Day, many are far more comfortable waving the Aboriginal flag or the Palestinian flag or marching through the streets shouting politically loaded slogans such as “Sovereignty was never ceded” or “Always was, always will be”. But when asked if they would stay and fight in the event on an invasion, 48 per cent of Australian 18 to 24-year-olds say they would flee the country – presumably leaving the Aboriginals to defend themselves.
