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findings of the analysis through articulating the various curriculum approaches that have been
deployed in History curriculum across the selected eras; and by reporting on the general
representations of British heritages and Indigenous representations through the History
curriculum.
The historical analysis of History textbooks that has taken place in this project, highlights the
complexities of History as a school subject, and can be contextualised within current issues
facing this curriculum area. The first of the issues identified is one that was repeated
throughout the duration of the history/culture wars; an increasingly crowded curriculum and
one which marginalises History at the expense of an all-encompassing SOSE (or, as in
previous eras, Social Studies). As a distinct issue, this can really start to be seen in the 1980s,
with an a-historical and multicultural approach that Social Study took at the expense of
accurate historical information and narratives. Instead, content was subsumed within
emerging dominant socio-political discourses of the time (buoyed by government policies
and initiatives). This saw the privileging of a vague multiculturalism as the nation’s historical
narrative, rather than a depiction of the past based on history discipline concepts. Although
Social Studies has long been a subject taught during the primary school years in Queensland
schools, this subject had previously maintained distinct History and Geography discipline
dimensions. The point here is not to form a criticism or evaluate the usefulness of a
multicultural policy or approach; but rather to point out that from the data collected and
analysed for this project, it appears that a ‘multicultural’ perspective has replaced a coherent
‘historical’ approach in this curriculum area.
A second obstacle is the perception that young people are ignorant of Australia’s national
history/ies. This has surfaced through a number of examples in both the public arena and in
school debates (see Taylor, 2008a for a succinct overview on this topic). There is a deep
concern held by some in the community (as detailed in Appendix A: Contexts), that school
students are leaving school without an adequate grasp of their nation’s ‘History’ (and it is
often a singular history debated). The concern of students’ ignorance of national history is
arguably negatively impacted by the binary of history that has been established through
reporting of the history/culture wars, as either a ‘three cheers’ or ‘black armband’ view of the
nation’s history. This has not impacted positively on school curriculum debates, with Taylor
writing:
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