Celebrating the 2024 Annual Conference!

What an enriching two days of professional learning shared with over 360 attendees across two conference days. Thank you to all the History teachers, presenters, exhibitors, sponsors, volunteers, HTAV directors and staff for making the conference what it is – valued support for our History teaching community.

We’ve captured here some of the great moments during Thursday 1 and Friday 2 August 2024.

Welcomes


HTAV Patron Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM	HTAV Executive Officer Dr Deb Hull

Workshops

Keynotes

Day One: ‘We Won, You Lost. Get Over It!’ Moving Beyond Truth-telling to Justice in the Australian History Classroom
Dr Aleryk Fricker, Deakin University

The process of truth-telling in the History classroom has become more prominent in recent times. This has largely been driven by History teachers from a revisionist perspective, seeking to explore the untold histories of the forgotten people as a direct response to the ‘great men of history’ mentality that has dominated History classrooms for much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Australian context, this has contributed to an increase in the amount of First Nations content but also the troubling nature of the content being covered. Truth-telling has undoubtably had an impact on the History classroom, but possibly not in the ways it was hoped. This keynote explores the process of truth-telling and reconciliation, its limitations, and how the History classroom can move beyond historical truth-telling and into just History.

Dr Aleryk (Al) Fricker is a proud Dja Dja Wurrung academic based at the NIKERI Institute at Deakin University. A former History teacher, he now coordinates the Indigenous Education units across all the undergraduate education programs at Deakin. Al’s research focuses on Indigenous education and decolonising education in Australia so that all students can benefit from engaging with the oldest teaching pedagogies and knowledges in the world.

Day Two: Making Australian History
Professor Anna Clark, University of Technology Sydney

I’ve studied the ‘history wars’ for 20 years, so I know how Australian history has been revised and reinterpreted by successive generations. Each iteration of Australia’s national story reveals not only the past in question, but also the guiding concerns and perceptions of each generation of history makers. Surprisingly, when I wrote Making Australian History there had been no account of the ways it has changed, who makes history, and how. That was my starting point for the book.

But when it came to writing, it seemed there were more questions than answers: Where does Australian history even begin? With Deep Time? With those early colonial accounts of New Holland? And who are Australia’s historians?

History making has taken place in what we now call Australia for thousands of generations, but the History discipline has also been part of the architecture of its colonisation, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. We also know that history can play a vital role in truth-telling and reconciliation, as the Uluru Statement from the Heart has advocated. I wrote this book because I wanted to tell the story of ‘Australian history’—with all its messiness and possibility.

Professor Anna Clark is an award-winning historian, author and public commentator. An internationally recognised scholar in Australian history, History education and the role of history in everyday life, Anna’s most recent books are The Catch: Australia’s Love Affair with Fishing (2023) and Making Australian History (2022). She is currently Professor of History at the University of Technology Sydney.