ABSTRACT
In this chapter I attempt to sketch a brief genealogy of the subject, English, in Australian secondary schools. By using the term genealogy I acknowledge a debt to the work of Michel Foucault, a French cultural analyst who called the philosophical-historical investigations he undertook ‘genealogies’. He saw his research as opening up ‘spaces’ for debate rather than dogmatic assertions, describing them as ‘philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems’.1 The preliminary work I describe here focuses initially on curriculum and syllabus statements and on examination documents produced mainly in New South Wales from 1860 onwards. This is followed by a consideration of historical accounts of English published over the past two decades with particular reference to those of Terry Eagleton (1983), John Dixon (1991) and Ian Hunter (1988).
