Australian state EM defends current teaching of nation's European settlement

Victoria's Education Minister has defended the teaching of Australian colonization in the face of pressure to change the curriculum to refer to white settlement as an invasion.

James Merlino, a senior member of the Victorian state government, said it was unnecessary to overhaul the state's history syllabus regarding European settlement of Australia more than 200 years ago.

In March, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) caused widespread outrage after telling students to cite in their writings that Australia was "invaded" rather than settled.

"Victorian students are already taught about Australian history from a number of perspectives," Merlino told Fairfax Media on Thursday.

"It is important for students to understand the different historical interpretations and debates surrounding our nation's history."

Historians have acknowledged that aborigines lived in Australia for around 40,000 years before British explorer Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay (now a part of Sydney) in 1788 and claimed the land in the name of the British Crown.

At present, Year 9 secondary students in Victoria are taught to consider "the effects (unintended and intended) of contact" between European settlers and Aboriginal Australians.

Within the texts, students are made aware of the massacres carried out by white Europeans, the aborigines "killing their sheep" in retaliation and the Stolen Generation, where babies were sometimes forcibly removed from aboriginal families.

The Victorian curriculum never refers to the process as an invasion, only as "settlement" or "colonization".

Aboriginal advocates, on the other hand, have deemed the term settlement at best "passive" and at worse "incorrect."

Despite denying the curriculum needed to be amended, Merlino accepted UNSW's decision to use the divisive terminology.

"Look at the Daily Telegraph's page one assault on universities for having the temerity to state the obvious - that European settlement in Australia was, for Indigenous Australians, an invasion," Merlino said in a speech at a Melbourne University last month.