The fabrication of settler legitimacy: managing colonial violence and wars in Australian school textbooks from the 1870s to the present

Abstract

ABSTRACTThere has been a lot of discussion among historians and politicians about how Australians have been, and are, taught about Australia’s colonial history at school. However, no scholar has undertaken a long-term analysis of Australian school textbooks to address this question. This article provides the first long-term analysis of Australian school history textbooks and explores the ways in which colonial violence and colonial wars have been presented in those texts. This article combines a quantitative analysis of textbook content about colonial violence and wars with a discursive analysis of such material. The findings from the research call for a more complex understanding of the ‘great Australian silence’ theory. My research shows that colonial violence and wars are mentioned throughout the period in almost all textbooks in the sample. More importantly, this research illuminates the ways in which colonial violence has been managed in these historical texts to sustain settler legitimacy. Such a contribution provides a more precise understanding of settler-colonial power at work in the production of historical knowledge and in the maintenance of its hegemony.