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elating to Indigenous Australians. The school texts, mostly represented through History and
Social Studies textbooks, portray the common Indigenous representations operating in
Queensland school curriculum. By and large, they are generally ignorant to or dismissive of
massive changes in Australian legislation and public views concerning Indigenous peoples.
Instead, the majority of knowledge students learn about Indigenous Australians concern
interactions with explorers, representations in traditional environments, and as part of violent
conflicts with early colonisers.
The following sub-sections make up the final analysis and conclusions that have been formed
from the analysis presented throughout this chapter. These topics include: absence from
national history; on the peripheral of history; narrative style of school curriculum; critical use
of sources; use of primary and secondary sources; curriculum as gatekeeper of conservative
content and values or agent for change; and disjuncture and parallels between History
curriculum and public discourses.
6.11.1 Absence from national history.
In many examples from textbooks across this era, any representation of Indigenous
Australians in Australian history is absent. For example, except for the poem The last of his
tribe in Queensland School Reader: Grade 7 (Department of Public Instruction,
1957/1960/1963/1967, pp. 168-9), there are no Indigenous representations across any other
grade in all the editions of the Readers series published from 1946 until the last publication in
1967. This is despite this series encompassing a variety of stories, poems, pictures and other
literary samples from a wide range of cultures. A second example is the 1964 first edition of
Australia’s Heritage (Sparkes et al., 1964), written by Queensland based teachers, respected
in the history teaching community, evidenced by being “...members of a committee charged
with the preparation of a syllabus in History and Civics to be introduced into Queensland
Secondary Schools in 1964” (Sparkes et al., 1964, p. 5). The aim of the textbook, in
accompanying the syllabus, “...seeks to explain the causes and effects of movements
significant in the lives of Australians today” (Sparkes et al., 1964, p. 5). Considering the
socio-political issues impacting Indigenous Australian affairs during this era, it is surprising
that the textbook includes less than one page in a 282 page textbook on an Indigenous topic.
In this case, it is titled “The Aborigines’ Way of Life” and briefly and paternalistically
describes the authors’ perceptions of indigenous lifestyle “…in Australia in 1788” (Sparkes et
al., 1964, p. 46). The simplistic overview provided on this topic seems inappropriate for the
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