Colonial texts on Aboriginal land: the dominance of the canon in Australian English classrooms

Abstract

From its conception in Australia, subject ‘English’ has been considered central to the curriculum. The English literature strand in the curriculum does not stipulate specific texts but is more explicit regarding what should be considered as an appropriate ‘literary text’. Curriculum documents emphasise the need for texts to have cultural and aesthetic value whilst suggesting that English teachers include texts that are chosen by students, texts from Asia, and texts by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors. Despite this, the influences of British colonisation manifests in Australian English teachers’ text selection as they continue to choose texts from the 'canon’. This paper is framed by Rigney’s principles of Indigenism and Indigenous Standpoint Theory (1999; 2017) and will draw on my own lived experience—as an Aboriginal student, English teacher, and now researcher—to examine the presence of colonialism in English and the consequent subordination of Indigenous perspectives. This paper will suggest some of the ramifications of prioritising colonial texts while teaching and learning on Aboriginal land and investigate how the construction of subject English could feel assimilative to Indigenous people. I will explore this by using my own experience of learning William Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ as a student and of teaching Doris Pilkington’s ‘Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence’ as a teacher as examples.

Queerying the Queensland senior English prescribed text list

“…Other studies in this area analyze different aspects of text selection, providing further information about how English educators already understand and signal to others ideas about importance and value in the texts we choose for study. Thomson's (2023) discussion of how Indigenous perspectives can be subordinated relative to colonial perspectives calls on English teachers to "examine their own standpoint and views on literature to disrupt lingering assimilatory ideas that come through colonial dominance in subject English" (p. 12). In research by Worrel (2022) into the influences on four teachers' text choices when including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives through texts, influences were heavily informed by local school contexts, and all scenarios reflected a continuing overreliance on non-Indigenous authored texts to mediate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives.…”

“…In our previous paper on this topic (McGraw & van Leent, 2018), we addressed the onus of responsibility for creators of authorized text lists to take issue with the persistence of heteronormativity in Australian Curriculum resources, by listing texts that represent diverse sexualities. In this paper, we turn our attention to "hetero-cisgender-normativity" and the most-used text list in the state of Queensland in the senior English curriculum: Prescribed text list: English/ EAL, analyzing texts appearing in the lists for (QCAA, 2018a and 2023-2025(QCAA, 2021a. For teachers, we hope this analysis provides an insight into the pervasiveness of hetero-cis-norms in the literature chosen for you and your students in schools, and that it provides an opportunity for reflexive practices for teachers of literature and critical literacy, school librarians, and those in power of text selection processes.…”