Why our greatest story is just not being told

Australian teachers are also told that how one interprets history is subjective and relative to one’s culture and place. As argued by the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria in the early 90s:

One of the great developments in history teaching has been the emphasis on the nature of representations, or versions, of history. There is no single version of history which can be presented to students.

History is a version of the past which varies according to the person and the times ... So not only is there no single version of history, but each generation re-interprets the past in the light of its own values and attitudes.

Taken to its logical conclusion, such a view allows Japanese textbooks to ignore the rape of Nanking and for the British author, David Irving, to deny that millions were killed in the holocaust.

The belief that different versions of the past are of equal value and that each generation has the right to re-interpret history in terms of current values also allows revisionist historians to judge past actions in terms of what is now considered politically correct.

As a result, today’s historians describe the First Fleet as an invasion even though the Admiralty had given Governor Phillip express orders to co-exist with the Indigenous population and Phillip, after being speared, did not punish those responsible.

As noted by the Monash University historian, Mark Peel, of greater concern is that generations of students no longer understand or appreciate the grand narrative associated with the rise of Western Civilisation and Australia’s development as a nation.

Peel states:

Students seem anxious about the absence of a story by which to comprehend change, or to understand how the nation and world they are about to inherit came to be …

Indeed their sense of the world’s history is often based upon intense moments and fragments that have no real momentum or connection … The 20th century is largely composed of snatches, moments that rarely gel into a longer narrative.

As expected, advocates of the new history, such as Stuart Macintyre from The University of Melbourne, argue that the more traditional approach to history teaching is obsolete, inequitable and educationally unsound.

In The History Wars Macintyre argues in defence of the new history, one were the view of history as a dispassionate discipline seeking to interpret and record the past is replaced by one that focuses on celebrating and empowering the marginalised and the dispossessed.

Macintyre also complains that any criticism of the new history is a media beat up and that John Howard is simply involved in “wedge politics” calculated to pander to “public opinion”.

In opposition to Prime Minister Howard’s criticisms, Macintyre extols the virtues of Paul Keating’s “big picture” approach to Australian history, supposedly, one that embraced “diversity and tolerance with an egalitarian generosity”.

Ignored, as demonstrated by recent elections, is that the Australian people have passed judgment on the history wars and the black armband view, so prevalent during the Keating years, has been rejected.