Privileged Perspectives

Contributor Ra Blikslager outlines how Australian schools side-step Indigenous history. 

We see them in all the schools we attend, we hear them from the mouths of strangers in the streets, feel them in the expectations from our families; all around us are these slogans and chants—‘your future is so bright you have to wear shades’—about being a part of the bright new world. But is the bright future so achievable?

Can we as young Australians sit here and say with full-belly confidence that we are actively working towards a better future? Some would argue that our breath, our life, our instinct to survive and keep going is proof that we are. Others would add that proof is found within the efforts of others moulding us into critical thinkers, good people driven with purpose, and the strength to hold onto personal beliefs and keep fighting. I’d however argue, like so many thinkers before me, that despite all this ‘proof’, there is a big systemic hole in our nations and its peoples’ bright future.

We as a nation, as a generation and as individuals cannot build a better tomorrow until we finally acknowledge the fractured foundations of our countries yesterday—a yesterday that has lasted for decades. A past built by the broken and bleeding backs of minorities. Of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who were shackled, beheaded, raped, and poisoned, because the ‘white’ man thought of them as animals; of the Africans who were stacked liked logs and given price tags for the slave drivers who wouldn’t show them peace; of the women who had no choice but to carry the children of men who would beat them until bones broke or hearts stopped. Every inch of our country, every grain of dirt, every breeze of air, every drop of rain, it was all once touched tenderly by the hands of those who endured pain so horrifically inhumane that the contemporary world neglects to speak of it, too scared to talk about anything more than the numbers.

Our futures are not just defined by our history; they are shaped by it. We are not what was, but now we need to be what wasn’t. The bright future so many expect us to create will not come from the continuation of neglecting to teach the real monstrous truth of our “great nation”. Many of us know or think we know the real history, the one written in blood and suffering. We learnt it from our families, friends, communities and experiences; but it is really an error of the Australian education system that there are still too many Australians that do not recognise the nation's past wrongdoings—because no matter the teacher, the subject, or the classroom, the curriculum always prioritises the privileged perspective and half-truths of ‘White’ Australia.

That is to say, like it has time and time before, that without a call-out and a repairment in the Australian education system as a whole, it cannot be genuinely said that schools are equipping future world-changers with the ability to learn from past mistakes, unless the country’s biggest mistakes in mistreating and murdering minorities are acknowledged.