The old Queensland Social Studies book was probably fairly bland in comparison with, say, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or North Korea but came from a particularly Anglo-centric perspective. We got a fair slab of British history, and where Australia was concerned, history was largely a matter of Captain Cook, the First Fleet and the Explorers and not much else.
The narrative involving Cook, from what I recall, skipped past his early career, glossed over the observation of the transit of Venus and noted the circumnavigation of New Zealand before a lengthy account of the voyage along the east coast of Australia based largely around the geographic features Cook named, the near disaster at Cape Tribulation and the subsequent stay at the Endeavour River.
Once the flag had been hoisted on Possession Island subsequent voyages were glossed over until Cook’s death in Hawaii. Given the length of that first voyage, the fact that Cook managed to avoid deaths from among his crew from scurvy, something that was apparently sensational news when he returned to Britain, while noted was downplayed in comparison with the really important aspect of the voyage (which was, of course, the discovery of the east coast of Australia).
The role of Cook’s second and third voyages in finally consigning the myth of the Great Southern Continent to oblivion, of course, was not much more than a footnote, and the explorations of Dutch explorers downplayed on the grounds that they failed to find anything interesting.
The possibility that the Portuguese sailed along the same coast as Cook some two hundred and fifty years earlier? Not a mention.
Once the First Fleet had arrived, and Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson found their way over the Blue Mountains once you’d mentioned the heroic hardships endured by the rest of the explorers there wasn’t much else to Australian history, at least according to this reading, and the discovery that, actually, there was a whole lot more to it was a major element in the seventies rediscovery of the subject and the subsequent history wars of the nineties.
But while public education was an avenue through which cultural orthodoxy could be inculcated, it was more than that. For a start, public education required people to do the teaching, and education became a powerful avenue for social advancement.
Education as a career choice wasn’t the only such avenue. Once you’d passed your exams there were other possibilities in the public service and the worlds of banking and insurance, all of them with their own opportunities for advancement, but as far as teaching was concerned, the road to recognition involved a mixture of results and ratings.
In the age of the external public examination, of course, results were a straightforward matter. With a set curriculum covering defined content it was a matter of how the kids went on the day, and a teacher’s status within the school and the local community was largely dependent on how many students they managed to get through once they’d been deemed good enough to be entrusted with preparing students for the all-important exam.
On a systemic level, on the other hand, status was determined using more subjective criteria. Initially, with schools being set up across the countryside by a number of different, often community-based, bodies there was a need for some form of quality control to guarantee consistency and uniformity, and the quality control took the form of the itinerant Inspector of Schools, a figure who came to dominate the educational landscape through the fifties and sixties.
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