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important for this project as it demonstrates the close link people have between self-identity
and the ‘nation’ as a political construct.
In an example of a large-scale textbook study that identified racism within Australian history
and linking this to discourses of national identity, Bill Cope commends the use of school
textbooks as the basis for analysis as their impact is wide reaching and significant, writing:
They [school texts] are both indicative of broader shifts and very significant elements
in the making of popular culture in their own right. Most of these texts achieved
mass circulation, much greater that the more noteworthy contributions in high social
science and historiography. They were used on the compulsory site of enculturation
that is institutionalised education. School curriculum, moreover, is highly responsive
to the changing cultural policies of the state, given its institutional role. Changes in
historical interpretation are cruder and more clearer in school textbooks; even the
big-name historians such as Russel Ward and A.G.L. Shaw, when they write for
school students, use large generalisations, simplifications, condensations and
interpretive homilies, which are revealing caricatures of their more guarded academic
works. (1987, p. 1)
Montgomery also highlights the influence textbooks have on students, arguing:
Notwithstanding the potential for students to dislocate such discursive structures of
dominance in their responses to the textbooks, the powerful hold of these narratives
of the nation is secured by the fact that students are inducted en masse to such
representations, since in order to pass the course and to graduate from high school
they must prove their knowledge of their particular history… (2005, p. 439)
Discussing how History is constructed and written, especially in relation to narratives
presented to school students through textbooks, but also to other published histories, Coffin
writes:
The view that the narrative ‘far from being a neutral medium for the representation
of historical events and processes, is the very stuff of a mythical view of reality’
(White, 1989: ix) challenges its role as a value-free discursive form and questions the
role of the historian as an objective recorder of an indisputable past…since the events
of a historical narrative are selected, ordered and attributed with historical
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