To Howard on History

The problem with Howard’s replacement of an ideologically-driven social studies curriculum with a ‘facts and figures’ approach to canonical Australian history is that there is – as the past half-century of historiography has laboured to prove – no such thing as history divorced from ideology. Howard’s insistence on a positive tradition of Australian values is equally ideological, and equally determined to inculcate a narrow, prejudiced view of the cultural provenance of the mainstream.