Interpreting Australia's Aboriginal History

National identity is fluid, it changes over time due to political and social reformations.

Due to Australia’s heavily multicultural past, historians have been faced with the

daunting task of accurately depicting Australia’s history. On the one hand, Australia’s

Aboriginal history dates back 20,000 years, on the other, you have European settlement

that goes back roughly two centuries. Which is the correct version? National Identity is

constantly evolving in the sense that curriculums are constantly being revised to include

new information. Historians are now mindful of the way in which they represent specific

indigenous/ethnic groups so as not to appear Eurocentric. The exclusion of women in frontier

life in Australian history
Take historian John Hirst for example, Hirst was approached by the Howard government to

produce a pamplet that was to be used by migrant workers to study for the Australian citizenship

test. The problem that Hirst later discovered was the restrictions on how history and certain

groups were to be presented. Indigenous peoples get very little background information, while

certain groups, such as women frontiersmen got very little if any recognition in the final publication. History is a pliable subject depending on who is writing it, it’s the story of origins

and how those origins affect the people we are today. The representation of history is often times

subject to the writer, what are the social and political components that effect what gets published

and what is merely swept under the carpet? Aboriginal rights movements and contemporary

feminist movements have effected the way in which certain groups are represented in the

textbooks. Historians have taken new approaches to try and not be exclusive of certain subgroups

realizing the damage it can cause to someone’s sense of national