Howard's End: a narrative memoir of political contrivance, neoconservative ideology and the Australian history curriculum

Abstract

In August 2006, Australia's conservative prime minister John Howard convened a history summit in Canberra. The purported goal of the summit was the framing of a nationally‐acceptable curriculum in Australian history. However, as this article suggests, Howard's hidden intention was to use the summit as a device for introducing a narrowly traditionalist syllabus that would be personally pleasing to the prime minister. As it happened, Howard's plan encountered resistance from members of the history education community and, after several diversions and alarms, was discarded when the conservative coalition government was defeated in the general election of November 2007. The author was closely involved in these proceedings and this article constitutes a contextualisd memoir of events.