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establishing the trustworthiness of any study comes down to the quality of the
relationship built between the researcher and the community of readers and critics
who examine the study... (Chenail, 1995, pp. 1-2)
Due to the anticipated difficulty in finding textbooks and other school documents that are no
longer used in classrooms, collecting textbooks (which make up the bulk of the data) was
planned through a variety of ways. Generally speaking, once a textbook is superseded by a
new edition or new publication, it is thrown away, a point made by Issitt writing “very few
people and organizations have had the foresight to keep their collections” (2004, p. 692). This
creates a potential difficulty locating the required documents. It was therefore necessary to
collect textbooks from a variety of sources, over a prolonged collection period. Throughout
this process, historical research processes were followed, and in particular mindful of the
following statement by Marwick:
Primary sources, numbingly copious in some areas, are scarce and fragmentary in
others. Much has to be garnered indirectly and by inference. Historians do not rely
on single sources, but are always seeking corroboration, qualification, correction; the
production of history is very much a matter of accumulating details, refining
nuances. The technical skills of the historian lie in sorting these matters out, in
understanding how and why a particular source came into existence, how relevant it
is to the topic under investigation, and, obviously, the particular codes or language in
accordance with which the particular source came into being as a concrete artefact.
(2001, p. 27)
The gathering and acquisition of textbooks and other school curriculum documents, was
achieved through:
• The Education Queensland Library at Coorparoo, Queensland which has a special
collection of school historical documents;
• Personal collections borrowed for the purposes of this research;
• Purchasing books at second hand book shops, second hand book dealers, second hand
book fairs and online auction sites;
• Advertising in newspapers for personal collections to buy. This method achieved
some success in rural areas;
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