Dickens may be out, but I’d be thrilled to teach these HSC texts

Warning: This story contains the name of a deceased Indigenous person.

For HSC English in 1991, I studied Henry IV, Part I, the poems of Seamus Heaney and W H Auden, and novels by Michael Ondaatje and J M Coetzee. I still think about Hal and Hotspur’s boyish rivalry, Falstaff’s fading charms, and the rambling, brilliant opening of In Praise of Limestone: “If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones / Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly / Because it dissolves in water”.

I read these books in one of the most intense periods of my life, coming out of adolescence and entering young adulthood. They helped make some of my most foundational beliefs about the world. This is why HSC English matters.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit: Simon Letch

The NSW Department of Education has just released a new list of texts set for HSC English study, to start in 2026. George Orwell’s 1984 is out; Oodgeroo Noonuccal and other First Nations poets are in. Almost half (49 per cent) of the texts are by women. Headlines and online comments have expressed the obligatory outrage about Orwell’s demotion, Dickens’ absence, and the (admittedly puzzling) decision to lose Sylvia Plath but keep Ted Hughes.

But what the clickbait headlines miss is that the new syllabus is a micro-history of precisely what makes it important to keep fighting about books and changing syllabi.

Clashing voices, colliding points of view and everyone saying confusing things that don’t quite make sense is how literature works and always has. This is what makes English such a crucial high school and university subject. It trains young people to tolerate contradictions, difficult realities and uncertainties; it attunes us to other people’s minds and inner lives. In short, it teaches us to be human.

Books and their readers make communities of unlike voices and characters who ended up together because of time and history. John Keats sounds different when you have Tim Winton in your head at the same time you’re reading Ode on a Grecian Urn.

There isn’t a single text on this new list I wouldn’t be thrilled to teach, from the poems of Ali Cobby Eckermann, Gwen Harwood and Rosemary Dobson to the brilliant “textual conversation” pairings set in English advanced. One of these is between the contemporary Polish writer-activist Olga Tokarczuk and 18th-century poet and activist William Blake; another is between Hamlet and Emily Dickinson; yet another between Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Machiavelli’s The Prince.

I’m overjoyed to see Pride and Prejudice back on the podium, which means a chance to teach Jane Austen’s stealth radicalism and sneaky abolitionist leanings. I have to give a shout-out to the person who put Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall on English extension – the underperforming Bronte sister breaks back.

I especially love the surprising combinations and juxtapositions of Australian, British and American texts, books and films, poems and prose. Histories of literature are histories of encounters between old and new: sometimes amicable influence, other times violent clashing and erasures. New voices change older texts.

In 2026, a syllabus with Shakespeare, Langston Hughes and Asian Australian short stories will reveal new connections between these writers and the personal histories of students reading them in classrooms across NSW.Credit: Michelle Mossop

Some time ago now, a newfangled upstart named William Shakespeare had the audacity and temerity to rewrite Geoffrey Chaucer. In 2026, a syllabus with Shakespeare, Langston Hughes and Asian Australian short stories will reveal new connections between these writers and the personal histories of students reading them in classrooms across NSW.

On Thursday, Arts Minister John Graham and State Librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon launched the State Library of NSW’s new 2025 program. The event started with the incredible experience of hearing William Barton play the didgeridoo and finished with the enlightenment virtuosity of the Australian Hayden Ensemble. Noises in a library! First Nations breathing alongside the music of European imperialism. Most HSC students in 2026 will go into the NSW libraries to study and meet friends, but libraries are living testimonies to the importance of revisiting classics of the past through voices of the present.

When I look at the possibilities in this new English syllabus, I feel that classrooms have never been more important in shaping a generation. It’s a thrilling but daunting list of texts, and teachers and students will need support and encouragement in taking them on. Those of us involved in education and the arts can, and indeed must, lend a hand with teaching resources, rigorous conversations and practical expertise.

With a big syllabus overhaul, we have the chance to see our cultural values not just reiterated but challenged and transformed. Syllabi are mini-canons: groups of works reflecting the cultural and historical profile of an epoch. A lot of students, parents and bystanders will hear about the new English syllabus and ask “who’s out, who’s in?” I think the most interesting question we can ask is: what company are our children and grandchildren and students keeping when they read these books? What new kinds of stories and histories will these books write alongside a new generation of Australian readers? Auden (who’s back in!) said it like this: “Follow, poet, follow right / To the bottom of the night / With your unconstraining voice / Still persuade us to rejoice.”

Sophie Gee is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney, Associate Professor of English at Princeton, and co-host of a classic books podcast, The Secret Life of Books.