Bell sounds in Australia's history wars
Prime Minister John Howard reckons the former interpretation is the truth and decries the later as a sorry part of a politically correct 'black armband' view of Australia's history that has taken hold since the 1970s.
Howard wants a return to his own schooldays when Cook was a flat-out hero and the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour in 1788 was a reason for rejoicing.
Education Minister Julie Bishop, who is to open the government-organized conference Thursday, insisted that what brought Cook to the wide brown land was science, not conquest.
'There is too much indoctrination,' she complained. 'Every schoolchild should know why James Cook sailed along the east coast of Australia, why the British transported convicts to Australia, who was Australia's first prime minister.'
The Canberra conference is setting up to be a fiery affair. While schools are federally funded, they are run by the states, all of them now opposition Labor Party-controlled and seen by Howard of the ruling Liberal Party as wedded to left-wing orthodoxy that sees colonization as universally bad.
Labor's Kim Beazley, leader of the opposition in the federal parliament, has dismissed the gathering and the focus on history teaching as an 'elite preoccupation.'
Yet Bishop has found a friend in the Labor Party's Bob Carr, the former premier of New South Wales. He's coming to the conference and agrees with Howard that history should be about what happened and when rather than a melange of yarns about dispossession and victimhood.
'We've got to be careful of any attempt to romanticize Aboriginal life before 1788,' Carr said. 'History shouldn't be an uplifting civic narrative - it should have controversy and confusion and argument and bloodshed.'
The Canberra bash is another round in Howard's 10-year fight to expunge political correctness and roll back the rights agenda espoused by many Aboriginal activists.