paul believes the 1980’s Tasmanian school curriculum’s silence on Tasmanian Aboriginal history was most likley deliberate, and definitely racist.

1984

It is 180 years since Europeans settled in George Town at a location less than 1500 meters from my Grade 4 class room. In six generations the town, and the state, has done practically everything possible to ignore the 65,000 years of history, and the more than 1500 generations of Aboriginal Tasmanians, that came before us. The story below shares how this was perpetuated.

I’m in Mrs Gale’s class (see related post) and I’m scared to look sideways. My teacher is a hard task master. She is strict and there is order in the class. Some time after Easter, Mrs Gale announces there we will now begin a new unit of work. We commence an intensive block of “history”. We start to study, what was referred to at that point as Native Indians. She was referring to the Indigenous people of North America.

The unit explores their living arrangements – teepees. So we make several teepees out of the massive roll of brown corrugated cardboard that has sat in the corner of the store room since the first day of school. We explore indigenous art – eagles, owls, fish, and artefacts – feathers, head dresses and face masks. We paint these on the side of the teepee. We study indigenous modes of transport, namely canoes. And we make one out of corrugated cardboard. We are told to not put a base in it, so we comply.

At the same time in music class we commenced the study of Johnny Preston’s song, “Running Bear”. We practiced singing this song for weeks. Then we put our cardboard art and the music together to perform as a class in front of the entire school. The assembly marked the end of the unit. Several of us stood in the baseless canoe and walked it through the rows of crossed legged students, while our peers stood on stage with the teepees singing the 1959 hit song. All apparently harmless at the time…

…but what struck me years later when I was studying to be a teacher myself, was the simple fact that we had not learned anything factual about our own history prior to European settlement. We had dedicated zero class time to the First Nations people of Australia, and learned nothing of the war, and dispossession inflicted on Tasmanian Aboriginals. Nothing of the lasting impact of this genocide on the current generations of Tasmanian Aboriginals. We were taught one “lie” dressed as “fact” – that there were no Aboriginals in Tasmania. The last being Truganini, who died in 1876.

We were taught a lie; a series of lies. We were purposefully and conveniently distracted from our local history. We were taught to be ignorant. We were taught not to question. It was a racist curriculum and my generation matured to perpetuate these lies.

Postscript

I visited my old school recently, and noticed the use of palawa kani on the school sign. Upon entry to the main car park the dual language sign now sits proudly to welcome visitors in both English and the reconstructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Credit where it is due, and 40 years too late for me, the school has made some positive steps toward acknowledging the history of the place prior to 1804.