Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, and other myths from old school text books

A picture titled ‘Captain Cook taking possession of the Australian continent on behalf of the British crown, AD 1770’. Drawn and engraved by Samuel Calvert from an historical painting by Gilfillan in the possession of the Royal Society of Victoria.
Trove/National Library of Australia

Louise Zarmati, University of Tasmania

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here, and an interactive here.

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Approaching the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first journey to the Pacific, The Conversation asked readers what they remembered learning at school about his arrival in Australia.

Most people said they learnt Cook “discovered” Australia – especially if they were at school before the 1990s.

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Depending on when you went to school, you may have learnt differently about Captain Cook’s role in Australian history. To find out how the teaching of Cook in Australian schools has changed, I examined textbooks used in the 1950s until today.

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School years 1950s and early 1960s

Conquering the Continent, 1961.
Author provided

If you were at school after the second world war to the mid-1960s, Australia still had strong links to the British Empire.

Cook was portrayed as a one of the greatest explorers in history and textbooks presented clear messages Cook “discovered” Australia and “took possession” of the land for England.

The 1959 Queensland text Social Studies for Standard VIII (Queensland) by G.T Roscoe said Cook “landed on Possession Island, hoisted the Union Jack, claiming the country for the King of England”.

In Conquering the Continent (1961), C.H. Wright mentions some contact with Indigenous people at Botany Bay, but there is no mention of conflict. Wright writes

The blacks offered little resistance; they quickly stood off after being frightened by gun shots.

C.H. Wright, 1961. Conquering the Continent: The story of the Exploration and settlement of Australia.
Author provided

School years 1965 to 1979

Birth of a Nation, 1974., Author provided

If you went to school between 1965 and 1979, you were learning during the era of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments.

This was when awareness was beginning to grow of the negative impact of colonisation on Australia’s Indigenous people.

E.S. Elphick’s 1974 Birth of a Nation continued the “discovery and possession” narrative, but acknowledged Indigenous people were in Australia beforehand:

The first Australians came here at least 30,000 years ago, and for all but the last 200 years of this period enjoyed uninterrupted possession of the land they came to[…] The white man, in fact, took a very long time to arrive.

Paul Ashton’s chapter in David Stewart’s Investigating Australian History Using Evidence (1985) encouraged students to “work as historians” by examining primary sources (in this case old maps) and evaluating interpretations of history.

Ashton emphasised the importance of the scientific “discovery”:

Cook’s achievements were indeed great, as were his talents as a navigator. At last, a reasonably accurate chart of the east coast of Australia could be added to European knowledge of the continent, along with a mass of natural and scientific discoveries. However, the discovery was not as yet completed […]

School in 1981 to 1995

If you went to school in the 1980s and early to mid ‘90s, you may have learnt history from a more inclusive perspective that included the lived experiences of those who were largely left out of the traditional narrative, such as children, women and Indigenous people.

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Read more:
‘I spoke about Dreamtime, I ticked a box’: teachers say they lack confidence to teach Indigenous perspectives

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But in Australia: All Our Yesterdays (1999), author Meg Grey Blanden presented a benign account of Cook facing no resistance from Indigenous people:

On a small island now named Possession Island, Cook performed the last and most important official task of his entire voyage. Like others of his time, Cook was undeterred by the presence of native people on the island. He noted that they obligingly departed and left the Europeans to get on with their ceremony.

School in 1996 to 2015

In the first decade of the 21st century, history was embedded into social studies in all states and territories, except New South Wales. Australian colonial history focused on “discovery”, foundation and expansion was relegated to years four to six.

Some teachers may have chosen to use critical inquiry to teach about Cook’s expedition in year nine. Most tended to focus on the more complicated 20th century history of world wars and progress in year nine and ten syllabuses.

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The Australian Curriculum, which was implemented in all schools from 2012, has maintained this chronological divide of historical knowledge. In year four, students learn about Cook by “examining the journey of one or more explorers of the Australian coastline … using navigation maps to reconstruct their journeys”.

It would be unusual for secondary teachers these days to teach their students about Cook because the topic is not in the secondary curriculum.

This means if children do not learn about Cook’s achievements in the primary years it’s quite possible if they were asked what they learnt about Cook in school, they may not know anything about him.

Louise Zarmati, Lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

School curriculum continues to whitewash Britain’s imperial past

Deana Heath, University of Liverpool

The Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford campaign has drawn attention to the way Britain continues to live with the legacies of its empire – and the failure to confront the history of its imperial exploits.

Media attention on the campaign has focused primarily on a group of students’ attempt to remove a statue of the British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. But a key component of the campaign is a quest to de-colonise Oxford’s curriculum by making it less eurocentric and by including more works by people of colour and women.

To be fair to Oxford, such a critique could be made of many – if not most – institutions of higher education in Britain and the West, not to mention primary and secondary schools. England’s new national history curriculum for five to 14-year-olds, which was rolled out in 2013, offers a case in point: it whitewashes empire and its legacies.

While the curriculum does cover the slave trade and aspects of the history of empire, it manages to avoid tackling the actual impact of empire on either colonised peoples on Britain – or its ongoing effects.

The curriculum embodies a tension between a “little island” version of history and a history that positions Britain as a part of global processes, contacts and connections. As the statutory guidance for history programmes of study puts it, students should know not only “the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative”, but “how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world”.

There is a non-statutory option (which schools are not required to teach) in Key Stage 3 of the curriculum (for 11 to 14-year-olds) on “the impact through time of the migration of people to, from and within the British Isles”. Apart from this there is very little in the curriculum on how Britain has been “influenced” by the wider world.

Narrating Empire as a triumph

The suggested topics relating to empire – all of which are in Key Stages 2 and 3 of the curriculum (for seven to 14-year-olds) – are all non-statutory, and focus predominantly on political, military and religious history. They all concentrate on the beginnings or ends of empire, not on what happened in between, therefore effectively ignoring the violence of empire and its effects.

The government’s guidance, for example, recommends that pupils study “the first colony in America” and the “first contact with India”. In other words, not the nature of British colonisation, its effects on indigenous peoples, or the ways in which it shaped Britain.

British colonialism in India crops up again in the guidance, but only in terms of “Indian independence and [the] end of Empire”. Children would therefore, presumably, have little idea at all what happened in India between “first contact” and Indian independence.

There is a similar treatment of the United States in the guidance, with the American War of Independence and the civil rights movement recommended as two additional topics. Such omissions of the periods in between make possible a triumphalist, nationalist historical narrative that renders empire a positive historical force in giving birth to nation states. This, the guidance implies, was a beneficial historical development – though colonial critics such as Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore would undoubtedly have disagreed.

Ireland, perhaps even more astoundingly, receives similar short shrift in the guidance. Other key British colonies – such as Australia – are not mentioned at all.

A history of white men

The one seeming exception to such whitewashing is teaching of the transatlantic slave trade, which the guidance says should focus on both “its effects and its eventual abolition”. But again, not only is the study of slavery non-statutory, but the narrative of slavery suggested in the guidance is again a triumphalist one. It positions slavery as having a clear end, with no enduring legacies – at least on Britain and the peoples it colonised.

Such legacies are, instead, displaced onto the US, via the civil rights movement. The curriculum guidance sidesteps the whole issue of empire and violence. While it includes topics on the Holocaust and the two world wars, colonial genocides and what historian Mike Davis has termed the “late Victorian Holocausts” – droughts, crop failures and famines exacerbated by European imperialist policies in which as many as 60m people died – are completely elided.

Cristóbal Colón – the last man to discover America.
edenpictures/flickr.com, CC BY

The progenitor of colonial genocide, Cristóbal Colón (still referred to, in the guidance, by his anglicised name Christopher Columbus) is positioned as an example of a “significant individual” who has “contributed to national and international achievements”. Yet he wasn’t even the first person to “discover” America, but the last.

This history curriculum that the guidance lays out is ultimately a history of white men. Not only does it devote considerable attention to war, politics, and military history, but women’s and gender history are notably completely absent. Non-white peoples play a small role as historical agents, particularly in British or wider Western history.

We still have a long way to go in decolonising, de-racialising and de-masculinising our past.

Deana Heath, Senior Lecturer in Indian and Colonial History, University of Liverpool

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Website News: History

All the News from Our Website on ‘Tracing our History’

This Blog belongs to a family of websites centered on the ‘Tracing our History’ website. Tracing our History is my geneaology website, where the fruit of my family history research is shared with family, friends and other interested visitors. Because I enjoy the study of history (as can probably be seen by the existence of this Blog) I decided to also have a ‘History’ site, which is really just another part of the Tracing our History website as it is joined to the same domain tracingourhistory.com.

Over the last 12 months I have concentrated on establishing the Blog, which to be honest does take up a fair amount of my time with research, writing, etc, Now it is time to try and tie the Blog more closely with the actual website. I also wish to continue building the website, with news of site progress being posted to this Blog also. There is plenty to do and I would like the site to prove useful for those interested in the further study of history, be it a general interest or for school study. If it becomes a conduit to resources available on the wider web, that will be a very useful thing as well.

I have begun my work on the site with some minor updates today – more significant improvements are to follow.

For more, visit:
http://tracingourhistory.com/history.html