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Chosen by:
Professor Mark Peel,
School of Historical Studies
The Australian children's pictorial social studies. (Sydney : Australian Visual Education, 1958) 25 vols.
It is important to find ways of encouraging students to use the amazing resources of the Rare Books Collection. The Collection is not something to which they find their way easily; most of our students, I think, would still see it as something used by “real researchers” rather than undergraduate essay writers. So a number of us in the School of Historical Studies have tried to finds ways of leading students into the Collection, both by recommending the exhibitions and displays and developing assessment tasks that bring them into contact with its holdings. Several years ago, when I taught a unit called “Imagining Australia’s Tomorrow”, I devised a range of essay topics that involved work in rare books. Some students worked in the medical history collection, and others on magazines, but the most popular topics were those asking students to examine school textbooks and children’s periodicals. There is always a significant group of students in history who are interested in teaching, and the resources that had been used in classrooms in the past particularly fascinated them.
These students used a variety of resources, but all had read some of the Australian Children’s Pictorial Social Studies, a series of twenty-five children’s history books published in 1958. They included In Search of the Great Southland, Eyre’s Dramatic Journey and The Story of Australian Wool; with titles like this, and the claim that these cartoon-like accounts would “increase the child’s understanding of the historical, geographical and social forces that have shaped Australia” while providing a “royal road to learning that can be as pleasurable as it is economical”, they seemed on first impression to represent all that might have been wrong with Australian history-telling in the middle of the last century. Certainly, that was how the students approached it.
Upon reading these sources, however, they were more confronted by their complexities and nuances than their simplifications. They found accounts of the Aboriginal past that were much more like their own than they had imagined. Indeed, what confronted them most was the way in which the Australia of the 1940s and 1950s had been presented to them, especially in secondary schools, as a xenophobic culture in which there had been neither debate nor significant change in regard to the nature and consequences of British invasion and colonisation. While the children’s books presented an overly benign picture of that process, they were far more ready to acknowledge the presence, skills and proprietorship of Indigenous people than the students had predicted. They were also far from being enthusiasts for ‘white Australia’. Indeed, as one student argued, these books for schoolchildren were an excellent place in which to examine the undermining and unravelling of ‘white Australia’ in terms of attitudes to migrants and minorities.
A particularly insightful and intriguing examination involved the status of Anzacs in Australian culture. As one student argued, Australians in the middle of the twentieth century drew upon a far wider range of nation-building heroes, from explorers and inventors to federating politicians. The group also included a few women: Caroline Chisholm and Elizabeth Macarthur, for instance. While this student was careful to stress the limits of heroic and dramatic narratives as the measure of a society’s past, the contrasts between these books and the Anzac-saturated Australian history of her own schooling were very revealing. For her generation, she suggested, there was one national hero, and one founding national moment; she wondered what the historians of the future might make of that.
These cartoon histories, perhaps thirty or forty pages long, might seem to be ephemera, hardly worth saving. That’s the value of rare books collections, and it is a value particularly well realised at Monash. We need to save as much as we can, because it is not up to us to judge what will best reveal our time and place to the people of the future. We owe them a generous collection, as generous as we can make it.
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