Reading History Curriculum as Postcolonial Text: Towards a Curricular Response to the History Wars in Australia and Beyond ROBERT J. PARKES University of Newcastle Callaghan, NSW, Australia ABSTRACT This article is concerned with theorizing a curricular response to what has become known in Australia as the “history wars” (Macintyre & Clark, 2003). The central debate in the history wars is over the representation of the colonization of Australia. Because History curriculum serves as an apparatus for the social (re)production of national identities, the importance of school history as a battlefield in the “history wars” should not be underestimated (Clark, 2003). This article explores as a case study the emergence of and political backlash against a critical History curriculum in the state of New South Wales, Australia, during the decade prior to the millen- nium. The case, reflecting similar debates over History curricula in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, provides a useful starting point for recon- ceptualising critical approaches to History as curriculum. Reading History curricu- lum as a postcolonial text, it is argued that what have remained uncontested in the struggle for histories have been the representational practices of “history” itself, and that attending to representation opens new possibilities for school History as critical pedagogic practice. This article is concerned with theorizing a curricular response to what has become known in Australia as the “history wars” (Macintyre & Clark, 2003). The central debate in the history wars is over the representation of the colonization of Australia, particularly the re-visioning of frontier life (Clark, 2003; Davison, 2000). What is at stake in these history wars is not only “national identity” according to Christine Halse and Catherine Harris (2004), but also our conceivable future, because as Tony Bennett (1995) has argued, “more than history is at stake in how the past is represented. The shape of the thinkable future depends on how the past is portrayed and on how its relations to the present are depicted” (p. 162). History curriculum, as “a disciplining technology that directs how the individual is to act, feel, talk, and ‘see’ the world and ‘self’ ” (Popkewitz, 2001, p. 153), © 2007 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Curriculum Inquiry 37:4 (2007) Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK