The Victorian State School readers for grades one to eight, used as a literacy text and teaching tool, were virtually unchanged from the late 1920s the early 1960s. One of the benefits of using the same text year after year was that they could be handed down from sibling to sibling, or continually recycled in other ways. One of the costs was educational stagnation.
The stories and poems I read at school (predominantly British and occasionally Australian) were the same as those my mother had read during the depression. The rare mention of Aboriginals in standard readers was patronising to say the least, and there was no mention of any “current events”.
The supplementary ‘School Paper’ used in the 1960s – the school equivalent of a newspaper – was more current, but similarly patronising. Regular issues provided a promising and sanitised impression of Aboriginal progress, and contentment with reserve or mission life. In short, they contained a lot of what we might now call “propaganda”.
A sample from another of my old school books shows that it was still widely accepted in the early 1960s that ‘full-blood’ Aboriginals would soon disappear from the face of the earth.
The sample Arithmetic page shown here is from an earlier edition than the one I used at school, as farthings (quarter pennies) were no longer in circulation. Nonetheless, the layout of these books was consistent from one generation to the next. The picture and story of the boys going to a fair is content obviously imported from England. (Australians don’t go to ‘fairs’ – we go to fetes, carnivals or shows.)
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