Cross-curricular priorities in the ACARA History Curriculum: Sustainability

This post is intended as an example for students enrolled in the CR181 Introduction to History & Geography unit at CHC. 

My students are asked to write entries that utilize ICT technologies and that illustrate the cross-curriculum priorities of the Australian Curriculum as they are reflected in this course.

The key words are 'illustrate'  and 'reflected in this course'.

This means that students need to take specific examples and case studies from the course.  The course mirrors and identifies the ACARA curriculum as its basis – therefore, anything mentioned in the ACARA curriculum for History is fair game as well.  You then need to analyse the case study for the evidence of how it would help you teach the cross-curriculum priority you have identified.

Please be aware that this is NOT a general discussion of these priorities but are to be specific and explicit examples of HOW these priorities can be evidenced within the course.  As the use of primary documentation is fundamental to the teaching of history, I would advise that your case studies be built around primary document(s).  So, with that in mind, here goes......

-------------------------------------------------

I came across the following image several years ago in the book A Nation for a Continent: the history of Australia, 1901-1975 by Russell Ward (1977).  Called 'The Nigger and the Woodpile', it was originally published by Melbourne Punch, 14 May, 1925.

The caption beneath the cartoon reads: 'The Last of the Tribe: "My word, pretty soon no place in Australia for us Aussies!"'

As a cartoon, it is quite confronting, especially in a period in which as Australians, we are much more aware of the negative experiences of the Indigenous populations of this land during European settlement.  We are also living in a period which John Keane, Professor of Politics at University of Sydney, describes as a greening of democratic politics.  

The ACARA History Curriculum describes sustainability education as 

futures-oriented, focusing on protecting environments and creating a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action. Actions that support more sustainable patterns of living require consideration of environmental, social, cultural and economic systems and their interdependence.

To this end, the cartoon can be quite valuable in outlining issues of the cross-curricular priority of sustainability in the ACARA History Curriculum with students.

The Australian Aboriginal sits folornly in ragged clothing (reinforcing the negative stereotypes of indigenous people of the period) on a rocky outcrop overlooking a deforested landscape.  Not a tree is left standing.  It is an example of clear felling, a process which lays claim by the unidentified settler to the landscape.  Connected to this image is the lament that there will be 'no place ... for us Aussies!'  Here we are clearly being positioned to feel some sympathy for the Aboriginal but only because he has 'lucked out' and has been pushed to the social periphery, an outcome which was not necessarily perceived as a negative in this period.  Indeed, approximately 40 years later, in 1959, Professor JA La Nauze of ANU wrote that

Unlike the Maori, the American Indian or the South African Bantu, the Australian aboriginal is noticed in our history only in a melancholy anthropological footnote (quoted in H Reynolds, ‘History’ in R Nile (ed), Australian Civilisation, Oxford University Press: Melbourne, p. 25.)

What is distinctly interesting in this particular cartoon is how it emphasises the notion of terra nullius and attitudes of imperialism and colonialism that was a distintive part of the ideological framework of the colonial and early twentieth-century Australia.  The landscape is there for the taking, the resources are to be utilised in a fashion that that clearly has no thought for the aridity of the landscape and potential soil degradation that could follow.  The farming practices evidenced here are part of the 'large and properous class of yeoman farmers' that Richard Waterhouse shows is significant in our history of poor farming practices.

As a document, it clearly asks us to consider how the attitudes to the natural landscape, European-influenced farming practices and attitudes to the Indigenous peoples of this country are a necessary part of sustainability education.  We are being directly challenged to reflect on how attitudes of the past were not futures-oriented in a way that considered the vagaries of the natural Australian landscape. Likewise the ecological impact has a direct effect on the socially just outcomes for indigenous peoples.  The attitudes towards the landscape are directly connected with attitudes that push Indigenous people to the periphery of society.

Not long after this cartoon was originally published, the last Tasmanian Tiger died in a captivity (1936) in a Hobart Zoo.

It too was a victim of the same attitudes exhibitied in this cartoon as recent research by the University of Adelaide has confirmed.  The animal was seen as a pest by farmers in Tasmania and so the Tasmanian Government offered a bounty between 1886 and 1909.   Consequently, human attittudes that had not been trained by sustainability education as we understand it today, are a key contributory factor in the extinction of the Thylacine.

Between the clear-felled trees, marginalised Aboriginal and destroyed Thylacine, we can see how historical documentation can assist us in developing sustainable patterns of living that meet both the needs of the present and of future generations.