PDF (Whole Thesis) - USQ ePrints - University of Southern ...

authors bite the bullet and stipulate in details a series of topics, milestones and essential
content that all students need to learn if they are to understand and appreciate the nation’s
past” (Donnelly, 2007b, p. 24).
It is claimed that the national history summit, aside from the obvious politicking of school
education, was set up as a response in part:
...of a sense, shared by many teachers on the ground, that the narrative context of
history generally, and Australian history particularly, has been lost in our schools and
that the subject, to quote John Howard...’is taught without any sense of structured
narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of themes and issues’. (Salusinszky, 2006,
p. 25)
Politicians with a deep interest in History teaching in schools such as John Howard, thenfederal
Education Minister Julie Bishop, then-federal Opposition Education spokesperson
Jenny Macklin, former federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson, retired former NSW
Premier Bob Carr and others, have contributed significantly to the national curriculum
debate, by attending summits and voicing their opinions in other public domains.
Demonstrating the bi-partisan nature of this debate both Julie Bishop and Jenny Macklin
publically supported the proposed implementation of Australian history as a distinct subject
within the national curriculum. Bishop, in emphasising the perceived need of teaching
History as a separate and distinct subject, is quoted by Kelly as stating, “We should seriously
question, for example, the experiment of mushing up history in studies of society and
environment. There is a growing body of evidence that this experiment is failing our
children.” Macklin supported this reflecting on the “...history summit as ‘an important
opportunity to do something lasting and positive for the teaching of Australian history’”
(Kelly, 2006, p. 20).
Disagreements between historians and history educators on the best approach to teach history
in schools were prolific during the time period of 2006 onwards. Played out in Letters to the
Editor pages (see, for example The Weekend Australian, 19-20 August 2006; 28-29 January
2006), there was much debate about the relative merits of narrative approach, thematic
approach, and History versus Social Studies. Key players of this aspect of the history/culture
wars on a national level such as Tony Taylor and Greg Melleuish and those on a Queensland
level such as Deborah Henderson expressed their views through this channel. Melleuish,
489