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Studying colonisation and Aboriginal resistance to be mandatory in NSW high schools (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This sounds like a positive change, definitely a much better grounding in Australian history than I received at that age. It is pretty wild that you can live in a colonial country without ever being taught what colonisation means for indigenous peoples but that is the world we've been living in until recently.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Odd? We covered a bunch of this in the 90s in my state.

Shit it’s even embedded into our early years framework, so even 0 year olds are being introduced to these topics.

Why is NSW just doing it now?

The second world war has also become a standalone mandatory topic, with more in-depth content on the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials and the creation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Eughhh. This is covered in history every year from primary to secondary, it does not need to be a seperate topic. If anything it’s importance needs to be decreased so we can stop having such a Eurocentric knowledge of history.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Never covered in my state in the 90s. At least not in my schools

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I find it odd too, i went to a shit hole of a school in a smaller town and this stuff was all just part of the curriculum. Including all the bad things that happened to the indiginious people. So it feeld weird its called out now.

Im pretty sure watching rabbit proof fence is like a mandatory movie at some point too https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0252444/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Which state did you attend school in? I went through high school in South Australia during the 2000s and in this age bracket Australian history was focused on stuff like Gallipoli, famous "explorers", etc. Earlier education was the same. Any references to Indigenous Australians were whitewashed examinations of culture, like traditional hunting.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I studied abroad in Australia for a semester (from the United States) and took an Aboriginal Studies course and was incredibly glad I did. It was crazy to see the parallels to how the Native Americans were treated/colonized here in the Americas. Truly barbaric stuff. They’ve got something called the Lost Generation where pretty much all of the children born during a certain time period were forcibly taken from their families and forced to become “civilized”.

It was really cool learning about how the aboriginals would do these “prescribed burns” where they would purposefully start small wildfires to burn away the undergrowth, which would in turn enrich the soil with lots of carbon. Really neat stuff