Context and Implications Document for: Who is Australian? National belonging and exclusion in Australian history textbooks

Abstract

The broad context for this article is the recognition that, in the current era, racial inequality is largely maintained via subtle or implicit means, often without conscious intent. The education system is a key site of cultural reproduction, with textbooks a crucial medium for reiterating or disrupting racial ‘truths’. My analysis implicates secondary school textbooks in maintaining the white solipsism which enables the Australian nation to be imagined as white, thereby creating categories of national belonging and exclusion. It is important to understand these practices so that textbooks can be decolonised. White people remain largely unaware of their role in reproducing racial inequality. This article exposes normative assumptions in Australian history narratives as a prompt to textbook producers to begin to recognise unexamined racial hierarchies, produced via their own enculturation. Decolonising textbooks can help prevent another generation of children being enculturated in whiteness, with its concomitant disregard for other racial groups, thereby supporting a more racially just society.