There’s no end to the Woke, cultural-left pushing ‘Yes’ to the Indigenous Voice in the nation’s classrooms. The left-leaning Australian Education Union fully supports the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and argues Truth-Telling should be taught ‘in schools through and in the curriculum and in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers’.

Schools across Australia are teaching Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu to students; a book criticised by Peter O’Brien as well as Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe as misleading and inaccurate in its depiction of Aboriginal history and culture as sophisticated.

In Victoria, the Minister for Education Natalie Hutchins, who subsequently tried to walk back on the comment, states that ‘the Voice referendum will be a defining moment in our nation’s history’ and it should be dealt with in schools as students need to understand ‘Victoria’s journey to the Treaty’.

Not surprisingly, a poetry anthology set for Victoria’s Year 12 English titled False Claims Of Colonial Thieves by Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella is yet another disturbing example of the school curriculum being used to indoctrinate vulnerable students regarding Aboriginal exploitation and oppression.

According to the reviewer at the Sydney Arts Guide the poetry anthology is ‘a pin prickling polemic’ where the poems are ‘flinty and unflinching’ and act like ‘depth charges of various C-bombs – Colonisation, Capitalism, Culture, and Country’. The reviewer lauds the two authors for exposing the ‘genocide, rape, and apartheid’ inflicted as a result of European settlement.

Bruce Pascoe, made famous by his assertion Aborigines were highly civilised at the time of the First Fleet, also recommends the anthology. Pascoe writes the poets ‘take no prisoners’ and that it is not for the light-hearted as it depicts the ‘darkness’ at the heart of Australia.

The historian Geoffrey Blainey uses the expression the ‘black armband’ view to describe those guilty of painting the nation’s history as violent, oppressive, racist, and Eurocentric. Often ignored is that Blainey also condemns the ‘three cheers’ view.

The Year 12 anthology provides multiple examples of the black armband view. One poem talks about ‘past injustices, cultural cruelty, cultural genocide’ while another begins with the lines ‘the State is killing our souls, the State has murdered the people’.

A third poem titled Always Thieves argues those who arrived as a result of 1788, including ‘colonial officers, convicts, settlers, free man’ are all thieves and that the injustice and theft continues to this day involving ‘mining companies, politicians, governments’ with ‘dirty hands coated with traces of blood’.

A fourth poem called Don’t mine me leaves students in no doubt as to who deserves to be condemned when the poets write: ‘Don’t mind me Australia… While you are busy… Sticking explosives everywhere… Getting a hard-on blowing up land… Pumping chemicals deep into mother… Drip feeding our waters with poison.’

Drawing on post-colonial theory and the Black Lives Matter movement where the assumption is societies like Australia are structurally racist, the anthology tells students Indigenous voices are always silenced when they write, ‘You don’t want me to talk about… The concept and construct of whiteness.’

It’s ironic, at the same time the two poets in the prologue argue mining companies are guilty of inflicting propaganda on schools about the value and importance of mining they appear unaware that students being made to study their poetry is guilty of the same sin.

One of the exercises related to the False Claims of Colonial Thieves anthology, after adopting the persona of an exploited Aboriginal community, asks students to write to mining companies like BHP telling them to stop exploiting Aboriginal land and destroying the environment.

Even worse, as argued by Mark Lopez in School Sucks and who tutors Year 12 students in Victoria, the reality is the poetry anthology is just one of many chosen texts that ‘are overwhelmingly politically correct and left-wing’.

While students across Australia are presented with a jaundiced and one-sided view of Indigenous affairs and the impact of European settlement ignored are the facts, compared to the Uyghurs in China and the Kurds in the Middle East, Aborigines have achieved equality and the sins of the past long since been addressed.

Aborigines are Australian citizens, have equal rights, and at just over 3 per cent of the population receive approximately $30 billion a year in federal government support and benefits. As a result of the High Court Mabo decision, they also have extensive land rights to over 54 per cent of Australia’s land mass.

Instead of schools presenting students with an objective and impartial account of controversial issues like the Voice to Parliament the sad fact is the cultural-left has long succeeded in using the school curriculum to advance its ideology. Worse still, this has happened under both left-leaning and conservative governments, state and commonwealth.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a conservative commentator and author of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March

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