By Carla Gorton
SYDNEY — Attempts to remove the term "invasion" from a draft primary school Australian history syllabus in New South Wales have outraged many educators. In the draft Human Society and its Environment syllabus, the word "settlement' was substituted, and other references were qualified by stating that the European arrival in Australia was an invasion only "from an Aboriginal perspective".
The NSW Teachers Federation has responded to the draft, which has been presented to the NSW Board of Studies and now awaits the approval of the minister for education, by calling for its members to ban its implementation. Senior vice-president of the federation Denis Fitzgerald told Green Left Weekly that the matter was a significant issue for public educators to address.
"All teaching in the public education system should be about teaching the truth about events. If we do anything other than that, then we are fostering lies", Fitzgerald explained. "We have to accept that the colonisers came with force, with military and religious power and forcibly took over this country."
The federation has consulted with Aboriginal education groups on this and other issues and employs a full-time Aboriginal education coordinator.
Barbara Nicholson, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, fully supports the Teachers Federation decision to ban instruction based on the new syllabus. Nicholson told Green Left that a lot of ground has been made toward acceptance of accurate terminology and that the replacement of the term "invasion" was an attempt to resanitise this terminology.
Nicholson explained that she found it "totally abhorrent that this move was once again marginalising Aboriginal people by implying that European occupation was peaceful". She stated that this move may be part of a backlash against the successes that Aboriginal people and historians have had in contributing to a more realistic view of history. "For 200 years we have been taught white history, and now as Aboriginal people barely get a toehold, we are going to be shackled by devious methods", she said.
The contradiction for those intent on removing or softening references to invasion in the primary school syllabus is that this will contrast with the information that secondary students are taught in courses such as Aboriginal studies and Australian history.