Howard adopted narrative history as part of his political program in a speech on Australia Day 2006, when he attacked the current practice of history teaching in schools. He wanted students to be offered a "structured narrative" instead of "a fragmented stew of themes and issues", and for Australia's "objective record of achievement" to be acknowledged instead of being questioned and repudiated.

I was sympathetic to much of his critique. A thematic treatment does not have to lead to fragmentation and incoherence, but as practised by teachers it frequently does. Except in New South Wales, the curriculum documents that are to guide teachers do not closely prescribe content. Their emphasis is much more on the development of historical skills. So students are expected to assess evidence and come to understand that there can be a variety of interpretations of an historical event. Well and good. Students are presented with one event for special study, say Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, but they learn nothing of Australia's part in the two World Wars. Or they examine the role of women in World War II and learn nothing of Hitler and Stalin or Tobruk or the Kokoda Track. Teachers are not worried by these lacunae because the students have had a good learning experience as they grapple with an issue in some depth. It is true that students learn better if they have had a chance to explore an issue for themselves, but it cannot be said that students under these methods are gaining a general understanding of the course of Australian history.

Howard was also correct in referring to the undervaluing of the Australian achievement. It is sadly true that in schools and universities Australian society of the past is frequently examined by the categories of class, race and gender and by today's standards shown to be unjust. This is history not as an effort to think our way into a society whose assumptions were different from our own, but as a species of consciousness-raising. The history that results does deserve the label that Howard gave it, "black armband", a term that he borrowed from Geoffrey Blainey.

Howard's mistake was to think that narrative would necessarily give him the history that he wanted. He assumes that if historians record events chronologically, they will not intrude their own values and the true story will unfold itself. But a narrative chooses its events (from the infinite number available) and its themes. In his Australia Day address Howard said he wanted a history that included Australia's debt to the "great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation" and especially to the Enlightenment. But the standard textbook narratives of Australia that progress through Aborigines, convicts, squatters, gold and wheat to federation constitute the Australian nation without any reference to its cultural and intellectual origins in Europe. And "black armband" history can be rendered in narrative. Watch:

British settlers, greedy, arrogant and aggressive, spread across the land, pushing its indigenous inhabitants aside and killing them when they got in the way. They told themselves they were "developing the resources of the country". In fact they were destroying the country and the people who had successfully inhabited it for thousands of years.