we can't be beaten

You will remember this old Rose Tattoo anthem, with Angry Anderson and the late Pete Wells ripping it up - a paean to suburban strength. "If you want to be in my gang, stand up with me, We'll start a revolution, and make the streets free."

It's as simple as that. Well, not really, but the Tatts were great and whatever they meant in this, it was a song, eh?

It's not so simple when it's other people intent on "making the streets free", in this case, the 'hard men of the right' making the street free for their view of Australian history. This, from today's Crikey:

Bishop a reluctant soldier in the history wars

Guy Rundle writes:

What’s behind education minister Julie Bishop’s recent blundering interventions in various debates? Having played the good cop in the recent history summit, Bishop then name-checked (and then removed) a reference to Chairman Mao in a speech on curriculum, and then wandered into a fight about teaching Jerry Springer in Victorian English classes.

Word is that Bishop has been told to toughen up in her conduct of the current culture wars, after what the hard men on the Right see as a stuff-up in the conduct of the history summit in August. The summit was intended as a pseudo-pluralist stack of the curriculum development process – hence the exclusion of every A-list, publicly left-identified historian.

However the pseudo-pluralist bit got out of control. Greg Melleuish’s paper on a "normative view" of history teaching had plenty of prescriptive dictates that would exclude alternative points of view (Captain Cook’s voyages would have to be taught in the context of "the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment" for example – rather than as, say, a part of the expansion of a military/commercial empire) but as far as the right was concerned it overemphasised the multiply interpretive nature of history, with the idea of
looking at historical "snapshots" and "everyday life" in a manner pretty similar to the way the subject is taught now.

The cultural warriors don’t have the slightest interest in reintroducing narrative history, only to have leftie teachers suggesting that it is a 200 year process of social struggle. They want the damned thing nailed down, and Bishop has been told this in no uncertain terms. This sort of stuff-up has happened before – when academic John Carroll was brought in to do a job on the National Museum, and ended up writing a crtical but far more balanced report than was required.

The summit and all the hoo-ha surrounding it has been pure balloon juice. The real fight will come in March next year, when a more elaborate draft curriculum is released. That will undoubtably have a narrow and specific programme for presenting Australia as a consensual, enlightenment-era society fundamentally grouped by religion – rather than as a place shaped by conflicts between class, race and irreconcilable ideas.

As I’ve said before, the reintroduction of narrative history is something that the left (ie materialists) have wanted for a long time – how else to show people that collective action makes sense if you can’t show how the strikes of the 1890s ultimately led to Australian social democracy? So, at the point when the new programme is released it will simply come down to an entrenched fight between those – led by teachers on the ground – who believe that pluralism should hold sway in teaching, and a government determined to dictate an official version of who we are and how we got here.

Now, who gets a bit snakey forever being belted around the ears by our dominant, omniscient masters that Labor is 'beholden to the unions'? 'Thirtysix faceless men' - it still resonates.

So what's the difference between that and Bishop being told to get her act into gear by the 'hard men of the right'. Who are these 'hard men' and by what right are they imposing their particular view of how the world should work? Surely there's some grist in this for the bright young apparatchiks - yes, the irony is intentional - of Labor.

Meanwhile, in a parallel galaxy, the 'mums and dads' are being belted around the ears with the supposed wonders of T3 ("that's Telstra isn't it") in a series of advertisments meant to make them feel like they're part of the big bad world of major corporate finance. "Have you heard about T3?" "Yes, there's a special offer."

There is indeed a special offer, for nongs (like your 'umble correspondent, a T2 casualty). Yes, must differentiate T3 from T2. So you end up with a share offer that's part MegaBank and part Harvey Norman. All around the country, husbands are calling wives, mothers are phoning daughters, "Have you heard about T3?" "F**k off, Australian Idol's on."