Like the teaching of history, the teaching of literature in Australian secondary schools – the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ – has, for the last twenty years or so, been a topic of intermittent controversy in the media; to a much lesser extent, one gathers, in the schools themselves where a majority of English teachers seem either happy or resigned to be singing from the same songbook, with only occasional peeps of protest at the inexorable displacement of traditional literary studies by cultural studies, with the various losses that entails. A comprehensive history of the treatment of literature in Australian schools would therefore be very welcome as a way of placing some context around the recent changes.
This book is not that history, nor, to be fair, does it purport to be for one thing it only covers the period since 1945, and for another it does not deal…