As I recall it, Australian history was deadly dull. Most of it could have been taught in a single half-year, with time to cover the second world war to spare. That's what happens when a very few individuals live on a continent for (at that time) less than two centuries, most of which is tied up with much larger colonial and imperial matters.
But nascent cultures and countries have to establish themselves, and the prevailing nationalisms of the past 50 years in Australia have meant that school students were force fed this material over and over. I always wanted to know about Europe and classical history, but it was never offered.
Now, a national curriculum (hear that Americans? You can have a national education if you try, or so we are told) is being proposed in which not only will the previous 35 thousand years or so of aboriginal history be covered (well, what we can actually say about it prior to European settlement), and theirs and other marginal groups' histories here be covered, but a return to a wider history as well.
Yes, there are political motives, but not all political motives are improper. History, more than any other discipline, is hostage to political influences, but it does seem worthwhile noting that Australia is a small fish in a larger pond of human social evolution, and that we are going to need to understand that pond much better as a community and culture if we are to survive.
But I reject the view of Tony Abbott, the conservative polly, that "Britain is where we came from". It's one of the places we came from, Tony. My ancestors came also from Ireland and Germany. European history is crucial to setting up Australian society - we do not want a repeat of the British Act of Uniformity, and the Thirty Years War. As Australia becomes less "British", it upsets the conservatives, and should be taken into careful consideration by others, but the fact is Australia was cut loose back in the 1970s when Britain went into the EU, and nothing changes that. In my town I meet Nigerians, Malay Chinese, aborigines, Vietnamese, Ethiopians, Bosnians, Indonesians, Lebanese and so on. While they need to learn about Australia's British past, we who have a British heritage need to learn about theirs just as much.
And maybe there will be a sea change in Australia's governments' policies of funding the humanities, so that among other departments, history will be revived rather than seen as an unwanted loss leader in industrial training.
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I also can't help pointing out the obvious - some of these countries have their own British heritage that may complement and improve our understanding of Australia's British heritage. For instance, I find it a very interesting question why Australia and New Zealand, both settled by the British at fairly close periods of time, have such different histories of colonial/native interrelations.
School history will always be a political football. Name me one country where it isn't! In addition, you're always fighting against the constraint of trying to fit, roughly speaking, the contents of an oil tanker into a pint pot.
"Britain is where we came from"
And where did the British come from?
//"Britain is where we came from"
And where did the British come from?//
Thank you Lassi !!
Tony Abbott would be one who is in favor of teaching british-centric history,obviously based on a certain worldview .
To an European it would seem thoroughly absurd to only teach,say,german history after 400 AD to german schoolkids,but to Australians it has come perfectly natural to do just that for many decades.
I learned a lot about settlement times and what other peoples were up to at similar times in History from Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse",and if even Red Symons thought it a good idea to teach "horizontal" history,this morning on ABC Melb,than it must have something going for it !
I am related on my mother's side to about half the population of Western Australia. My mother's family were Northern Irish Protestants, which means that they were of Lowland Scots extraction. They had lived and worked for many generations as tea planters in Burma then part of British India. My father served in India in WWII, which is how he met my mother. After the War and following independence for India and Burma and the expulsion of all "foreigners" from Burma my mother went to Britain with my father whereas her very extensive family all emigrated to Australia, as did many colonial Europeans in Asia during the post War wave of decolonisation. Although nominally British my mother first experienced Britain at the age of 32 and many of her relatives who settled in Western Australia had never been in Britain in their entire lives. As soon as you start to scratch the surface, questions of ethnicity, origins and extraction can very often become very complicated. To make matters even more complex both my brother and my eldest sister show obvious signs of Burmese blood: hair type and hair and skin colouring although both are very obviously the children of my father. Very British indeed!
AFAIK, the "British" came primordially from Britain, ie. that large island off western Europe, or one of its smaller satellite islands. Now if you ask where the English came from (or the Celts, or any of a dozen other groups), that's a different story. 1500 years ago my male-line ancestors were Danish, but I expect I'm a mix of everyone who was in the British Isles before 1920.
I am old enough to remember when seeing a person of another race in Britain was a novelty, when the UK thought of itself as "white". In a matter of fifty or so years it has become "multi-cultural" with large enclaves of a range of different ethnic groups. In some parts of London it is now a rarity to hear English spoken. For a small and crowded group of islands that is a cultural shift of seismic proportions. Yet, in spite of Enoch Powell's lurid warning about "rivers of blood" it has happened with relatively little violence, which says much for the basic tolerance - or just stoicism - of the indigenous population.
Yet what would the British of a thousand years ago or five hundred years ago have made of the archetypal Victorian Briton? With the influx of so many races, what will the average Briton of 2508 - assuming any of us are still around - look like?
A race is a group of individual human beings and an individual human being is not just a three-dimensional object but an event extending through time as well as space. History is the study of such human events and it makes no sense, if we are truly interested in trying to understand what happened in the past, to exclude some on such arbitrary grounds as cultural and racial chauvinism. Trying, as far as possible, to see history as it was - and I am aware that history is at best a reconstructed narrative - rather than the cultural mythologies that often pretend to be history can be an illuminating exercise.
I'm American myself. Mostly of Western European extraction. Mostly British from my father's side. French and German on my mother's side.
My Franco-German ancestors migrated into Europe via the Balkans some 40,000 years ago. My British ancestors came up from North Africa via Spain around the same time. Add a second migration from Turkey via the Balkans about 10,000 years ago, and a more recent series of migrations from Central Asia starting (possibly) about 7,000 years ago which gave Europe her Indo-European languages.
Add in people from all over the world and you've got quite a variety of people here. Note that according to linguists Apache is more closely related to English than it is to most other American Indian languages. I have no idea how they figured that out.
Amusing note here. In SM Stirling's The Scourge of God on their journey east to the island of Nantucket our heroes met, and are adopted by, a Lakota band . These neo-Lakota (as one might think of them) travel about in horse drawn girs. (Think of a gir as a Mongolian mobile home.) As a matter of fact, it is an expatriate Mongolian caught in America by The Change who teaches his new people (the Lakota adopted him too) how to build girs and use them to make life on the plains better. Think of how confused post Change scientists are going to be when they try to figure things out in a millennium or two.
I'd love to see a Diamond-style brief history of human civilisation taught in school. Bit of evolution, bit of domestication and disease, on to stages of civilisation and a comparison of the advances that were needed to get us where we got, and how advantages of the various continents shaped history.
There are so many common misunderstandings that'd be sorted out with such a course...