Understanding history to break cycle of ignorance

Tanya Plibersek’s Australia Day call to patriotism, including a proposal for the teaching of the citizenship pledge in schools, sparked a miserable backlash. For self-loathing progressives, quick to mock and slow to serve, love of country is akin to white supremacy. As the opposition education spokeswoman said in her address, patriotism is not about exclusion but an “ongoing commitment to your country — and an ongoing commitment to the people with whom you share it”. Part of that, of course, has to be deep knowledge of our history, culture, geography, laws and civics. Not because our ways are superior to those of other lands but because a proper understanding of ourselves — both good and ill — promotes solidarity, binding us in times of national need, such as the current bushfire crisis. Some of that shared knowledge is under threat, partly due to neglect, as in the dwindling number of chairs in Australian literature. But it’s largely because of fads in schools and universities, and research incentives that discourage local scholarship.

Take the case of Captain James Cook, whose ship the Endeavour landed at Botany Bay in April 1770. Fifty years ago, when the 200th anniversary of the landing took place, every school student knew something of his voyage through the South Pacific and beyond. As Geoffrey Blainey explained in Inquirer on Saturday, that anniversary, a year after the Apollo moon landing, saw Cook celebrated as “a kind of astronaut who arrived by sea”. Yet his story of courage and adventure has been subsumed in the culture and history wars. As the 250th anniversary comes into view, Cook is being honoured — and condemned — often simply due to social media tribalism.

Professor Blainey notes the public’s response reflects the tensions and hopes around indigenous affairs. Our most eminent historian says opposing arguments about Cook, in moderation, are legitimate. Cook was a giant of the sea. “To deprive him, his scientists and his crew of high praise would be mean-spirited and would mock history,” Professor Blainey argues. On the other hand, Aboriginal peoples will rightly insist that they, or people close to them in kinship, were the first discoverers of Australia. “In the early history of the land they discovered and settled they have a proud role,” Professor Blainey writes.

Australians should be able to properly appreciate the three strands of our inheritance, each intrinsic to our rich identity: Australia’s first peoples; the British settlers who followed tens of thousands of years later in 1788; and the subsequent waves and ripples of migrants from around the globe. The credulous reception of Bruce Pascoe’s bestselling book Dark Emu is an object lesson in historical illiteracy. His narrative implies that the achievement of the Aborigines has been sold short as a primitive hunter-gatherer society, and evidence of technology, such as fish traps, suppressed. But celebration of Aboriginal prehistory in all its richness stretches back to the 1960s. Today’s schoolteachers need to rediscover Professor Blainey’s 1975 book Triumph of the Nomads. We live in an age of laziness, mischief and forgetting.

Writing in our pages on Monday, Education Minister Dan Tehan called for a better understanding of “who we are, where we have come from and the events that have shaped us”. Rather than people telling us what to think, we need the knowledge, tools and the curiosity to help us join the dots about our past. “Knowledge of our history will help us break the cycle of Australia Day antagonism,” Mr Tehan argued. “Reconciliation will not come from ignorance.” The minister proposes to spend $12m to fund 40 individual projects to focus on Australian studies. Between 2011 and 2020, only 3 per cent of taxpayer-funded grants under our main competitive grant scheme — the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Grants — were in the areas of Australian society, history or culture.

This carve-out of funds to dig deeper into ourselves, to question and critique, to explore and to preserve, is welcome. As this newspaper has reported over several years, some of our best minds have lost their bearings — as has the ARC process. Mr Tehan’s predecessor vetoed $4.1m of ARC-approved university research grants covering exotic topics such as a history of men’s dress, gender norms in China and “post-orientalist arts in the Strait of ­Gibraltar”. Nice work, if you have tenure. That decision fed outrage among those in the ivory trough but also led to a national interest test for future grants, another layer of messy bureaucracy to de-silly the academy. We do not believe governments should decide on the merit of research but should step in when common sense fails or the structure is out of whack.

The cultural cringe is alive and kicking. University chiefs are chasing global rankings. One of the key ways universities receive recognition is from the quality and quantity of research published in prestigious international journals. As Mr Tehan noted, this incentivises local academics to study topics with a global bent likely to appeal to an international editor; inquiry into uniquely Australian topics is viewed as second-class. Fewer teachers, students and institutions are drawn to the field, leading to “a downward spiral” in the area, argues the minister. The special research initiative is an important signal, a move that will swing the pendulum back to the scholarship that underpins our unity, tolerance, respect and resilience. We must keep telling our stories to keep them honest and alive. As we deepen our understanding of the past, we strengthen the bonds we share and rely on to thrive.