The NSW Education Standards Authority has announced that teaching of the Aboriginal past prior to European arrival will be excluded from the Year 7–10 syllabus as of 2027. Since 2012, the topic “Ancient Australia” has been taught nationally in Year 7 as part of the Australian Curriculum . In 2022, a new topic called the “deep time history of Australia” was introduced to provide a more detailed study of 65,000 years of First Nations’ occupation of the continent.
However, New South Wales has surprisingly dropped this topic from its new syllabus, which will be rolled out in 2027. Instead, students will only learn First Nations’ history following European colonisation in 1788. This directly undermines the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration of 2020 .
This is a national agreement, signed by education ministers from all jurisdictions, which states: We recognise the more than 60,000 years [sic] of continual connection by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as a key part of the nation’s history, present and future. If the planned change to the syllabus goes through, the only Aboriginal history taught to NSW students would be that which reflects the destruction of traditional Aboriginal society. It also means Aboriginal students in NSW will be denied a chance to learn about their deep ancestral past.
The significance of Australia’s deep time past Bruce Pascoe’s groundbreaking 2014 book Dark Emu (which sold more than 500,000 copies), and the ass.