ABSTRACT
School history has been a particularly heated site of dispute. Successive state and federal governments have fought significant public battles over the terminology of Australia’s colonial memory, inserting and deleting words like “settlement” and “invasion” in turn; “discover,” “pioneer” and “genocide” have been similarly fraught. Yes, disagreement over teaching Australia’s “difficult history” has literally been as a crude as that. The rewriting of history syllabuses and teaching documents wasn’t far behind the growing reappraisal of Australia’s past. In schools around the country, students described being “over” Indigenous history. A generation ago, Indigenous perspectives were marginal at best, and until waves of new historical writing emerged the 1960s and 1970s, Australian history was relatively untroubled by the questions it posed. It was, as the anthropologist W. E. H. Stunner famously said in his 1968 Boyer lectures, a “Great Australian Silence".
