VCE Australian History

The history of Australia from the earliest Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies to the present is studied as a story of continuity and change. A historian asks what stayed the same, what altered, how far, how fast and for whom, and the answers depend on whose experience is placed in the centre. The same event can look like a turning point for one group and an unbroken pattern for another.

Continuity and change

Change is a difference between one time and another; continuity is something that persists across it. Most periods contain both, so a useful argument says which is stronger and why. The 1967 referendum, for example, changed the Constitution, but many everyday forms of discrimination against Aboriginal people continued for years afterwards.

Historians describe change by several features.

• Pace: whether it came suddenly, as with the gold rushes of the early 1850s, or slowly, as with the shift in attitudes towards homosexuality over several decades.
• Direction: whether it moved towards wider rights and inclusion, or towards restriction, as White Australia policies did after 1901.
• Depth: whether it altered the way people lived or only the law and the language used about them.
• Extent: how many people were affected, and whether some groups were left out.

A turning point is an event after which the direction or pace of change was different from before. Naming one is an argument. The Eureka Stockade of 1854 is sometimes called a turning point for democracy, but other historians point out that the reforms that followed were already under discussion, so the stockade may have hurried change rather than started it.

Causes and consequences

Causes are long-term (underlying conditions that built up over decades) or short-term (triggers, such as a particular incident or decision). They can be social, political, economic, cultural, environmental or technological. Consequences are intended or unintended, and short-term or long-term. The Defence Act 1909 was meant to prepare Australia for defence but, with the outbreak of war in 1914, it also created a trained pool of men for enlistment. The gold rushes were set off by a few discoveries in 1851, but they brought a migration so large that it changed the colony of Victoria's politics, its towns and its landscape, which the discoverers had not intended.

Perspectives

A perspective is the view of a person or group, shaped by their position, beliefs and interests. Australian history has always had competing perspectives: squatters and free selectors disagreed about who should have the land; employers and unions about the conditions of work; supporters and opponents of conscription about what loyalty required; and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and colonists about whose land it was. Perspectives also change. Many Australians who supported assimilation in the 1950s had come to support self-determination by the 1970s, while others held their view unchanged.

Sources show perspectives. A primary source comes from the time (a speech, a poster, a letter, a law, a photograph, a cartoon) and reflects the purpose, audience and position of its maker. A cartoon in a newspaper that backed conscription is evidence of what that paper wanted readers to think, and its value as evidence depends on the question asked of it. Booster literature and letters home, which encouraged migration to the colonies, show what migrants were told and hoped, and may overstate wages and underplay hardship.

Historical interpretations

An interpretation is a historian's argument about the past, built from evidence. Historians who read the same sources reach different conclusions because they ask different questions, give different weight to causes and sometimes carry different assumptions about the nation. A student can compare interpretations by asking what each emphasises, what evidence it relies on and what it leaves out.

Several debates run through the whole of Australian history.

The silence about Aboriginal history and the history wars

In the 1960s the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner described a widespread "great Australian silence" about Aboriginal people in the writing of Australian history, in which they were left out of the national story. From the 1970s and 1980s, historians such as Henry Reynolds drew on records from the frontier to argue that Aboriginal people had resisted dispossession and that the colonial frontier had been violent. This work changed how the colonial period was taught.

From the late 1990s the writing of Australian history became bitterly public in what are called the history wars. Some commentators, among them the historian Keith Windschuttle, disputed the scale of frontier violence and the evidence used for it, and argued that earlier historians had exaggerated. Most historians in the field answered that the records of killing are extensive and that the disputed estimates rest on sound methods, though the figures remain uncertain because many events went unrecorded. The same arguments extended to the Stolen Generations, the meaning of the Bringing Them Home report, and how national days and anniversaries should be remembered.

Nation, empire and region

Early interpretations of Australia's history often stressed a nation made by British settlers, with democratic and egalitarian values and a distinctive character shaped by the bush and by war. Later historians have questioned each of these: who was left out of the egalitarian story (Aboriginal people, Chinese and Pacific Islander workers, and often women), how far Australian democracy was a product of its own conditions or of British ideas, and how far Australia's connections with Asia and the Pacific, rather than only with Britain, shaped it.

Who benefits from the story

Many historical arguments in the course are arguments about memory. Anzac Day, the Eureka flag, the Whitlam dismissal and the 1967 referendum are all remembered in ways that carry present-day meaning, and historians disagree about whether popular memory matches what happened. Reading a claim about the past should include asking who is making it and what they want people to conclude.

Significance

Historical significance means how much an event, person or idea mattered, and it is judged by criteria such as how many people were affected, how deeply, for how long and whether it shaped later events. The same event can score differently on each. The Mabo decision of 1992 affected the law of the whole country and changed the way land rights were understood, though in the years after it fewer Aboriginal communities gained land through native title than many had hoped.

Studying continuity and change across an investigation

Each of the four investigations (the environment, race and migration, power and democracy, and war) covers a long period. To judge the extent of change over that period, it helps to compare the starting point with the finishing point and then to look for the moments when direction altered. A fair argument names both continuities and changes, gives evidence for each and then says which was the more powerful and why. Where a source is used, the argument says what the source shows, who made it and what it cannot show.