About the speaker

Our speaker today is Dr Anna Clark

Anna is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in public history at the University of Technology, Sydney. She co-authored the History Wars along with Australian Historian Stuart Macintyre in 2003, which was awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Australian History and the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Best Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate.

Anna’s PhD thesis, “Teaching the Nation” was published by Melbourne University Press in 2006 and examines debates about teaching Australian history in schools. She has also written two history books for children, “Convicted!” and “Explored!”. Her latest work, “History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom” was published by the University of New South Wales Press in 2008, uses interviews with 250 history teachers, students and curriculum officials from around Australia.

Her current project uses interviews with 100 Australians from around the country to explore their thoughts on history and national identity. She holds a Bachelor Arts with honours from the University of Sydney and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Melbourne.

It gives me great pleasure to invite Dr Anna Clark to deliver the occasional address.

Speech

Thank you so much for the invitation to speak today. As is customary at ceremonial occasions such as these, I’d first like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land.

Like most of the university staff and guests here today I’m slightly in awe of the range and depth of the postgraduate degrees and theses described just now. From investigations into management systems and educational approaches, to questions of sustainability. From research into practice and theory in finance to the creative arts. It is indeed an impressive collection of knowledge and expertise.

My own postgraduate degree started in rather less inspiring circumstances, when I ran into an old school friend at a pub in Newtown, just weeks before I was due to move to Melbourne to start my PhD in History. ‘What are you up to?’, he asked. I explained my plans—to examine debates over Australian history teaching—and he looked at me as if I had two heads. ‘What are you doing that for?’ he queried, and went on to suggest that probably nothing could be more boring.

Given the desperate dullness of the subject in school, maybe he had a point. Our early Australian history education had consisted of painting cardboard postage tubes in Indigenous motifs as well as several visits to now defunct Old Sydney Town on the Central Coast to watch convict actors being ‘flogged’ with Cat-O-nine-tails dipped in tomato sauce for extra effect. In amongst that, we were expected to learn the name of the first Prime Minister and the forces for Federation. It was hardly riveting stuff.

But in embarking on this PhD I had a hunch that there was a great paradox of Australian history: while teachers desperately struggled to get kids enthused in the classroom, a volatile, highly politicised and fascinating debate over the Australian story raged outside it.

And a few months into my research I came across a couple of curriculum documents from Victoria in the 1990s that provided my first ‘Eureka moment’—those bites we devour in our journey to assemble ideas and arguments. The first document was from a unit on Indigenous history that had been produced by a newly elected Labor government in 1991; the second was a revised curriculum, produced by the subsequent conservative government after its election only two years later.

The editing was clear. The words ‘European invasion’ to describe the colonisation of Australia in the first document had been replaced by ‘British settlement’ in the second.

It was all so Orwellian. Each presiding government was actually trying to control what version of the past was taught schools—the irony that such prescriptive interventions might turn students further off the subject was evidently lost on the powers that be.

Because in my reading as a historian, Australia wasn’t invaded or settled, but both. And that political debate over competing versions of the past represented a grave misunderstanding of the capacity of ordinary people (including schoolchildren) to make up their own minds about the world around them.

Yet these simplistic contests endure. That struggle over the representation of the national story in our curriculum is replayed over museum exhibits, history textbooks, and—as we saw only a couple of weeks ago—over the meaning of national commemorations such as Anzac Day. What’s more, these debates aren’t restricted to Australia, either: there are persistent discussions about how Germany and Japan should recognise their roles in WWII, or how the US commemorates the history of slavery, or how New Zealand remembers the Treaty of Waitangi.

This isn’t supposed to be a talk about the problems of the past—history is my particular obsession, but in all likelihood it isn’t yours. Instead, it's about the opportunity to think critically about the world around us. To have the skills to understand the complexity of our pasts and our futures, and to contribute to a vibrant and diverse public discussion.

Because that’s what is missing from these contests the past, and it isn’t only history. Just think about the debates over climate change, or refugees: they’re played out along narrow and simplistic lines that have no capacity for nuance or complexity. They’re dominated by headlines designed to grab attention and shock, polarising blogs by public commentators, and slogans of politicians—it’s very difficult to develop and maintain a constructive discussion about the public issues facing Australia today.

This is where you come in.

No doubt many of you are thinking about what to do next. Some of you will go on to careers in film-making, journalism, writing or maybe teaching. Some of you will begin careers in the public service, or perhaps the corporate world in Australia and overseas.

But before you get too hung up on that, let’s think for a minute of where you’ve just been: you’re graduating from a young and dynamic institution that values critical and independent thinking above status and symbols; and you’re graduating with degrees that are interdisciplinary and international.

What brings you together today is a recognition of your ability to think outside conventional lines. You can think beyond your own backyards and contexts. Not only do you have knowledge of the world around you, but the capacity to cope with a changing world. And that means judging competing perspectives without losing your own moral sensibility, critically evaluating a diversity of information—in the media, public policy, and in the workplace—and taking part in discussions about who we are, and what we want to become as a community.

Postgraduate study is hard, and it’s a massive commitment—of finance, time, and intellectual energy. But the pay-off ‘up here’ is unquantifiable, because there probably won’t be another time in your lives when you’re constantly challenged and encouraged to think outside the box.

What’s more, that pay-off isn’t restricted to you, but all of us. We all get to reap the benefits from your investment in deeper, creative, critical thinking. And, in time, that will mean better government, better policy, better public debate and a better society.

And for that, I am most grateful. So thank you, and congratulations!