Teaching The Australian Wars

How do we teach the Frontier Wars with honesty, care, and confidence?

You'll hear from filmmaker Rachel Perkins, leading academic and advocate Professor Marcia Langton, Culture is Life CEO Belinda Duarte, senior secondary history teacher Bill Lewis, and Professor Melitta Hogarth of Ngarrngga at Melbourne University.

Together they dig into the questions many teachers are sitting with:

• What does truth-telling actually look like in practice?
• How do we teach histories of colonial violence with care?
• How can non-Indigenous teachers approach this work without fear of getting it wrong?

We're sharing a recording generously provided by Culture is Life and Ngarrngga, two organisations working at the intersection of First Nations knowledge, education, and advocacy.

Culture is Life is an Aboriginal-led not-for-profit amplifying the voices of First Nations young people and championing education as a pathway to justice and truth-telling.

Ngarrngga is committed to ensuring all educators have access to Indigenous knowledge systems and the tools to embed them meaningfully in their teaching. Both organisations produce practical, curriculum-aligned resources to support teachers in this work.

Resources

• The Australian Wars website
• Watch The Australian Wars on SBS on Demand
• SBS Learn Understanding the Frontier Wars: clips with discussion questions and other classroom resources
• The Australian Wars book by Rachel Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Henry Reynolds
• Ngarrngga: free, high-quality curriculum resources and professional development modules, spanning all subject areas from Foundation to 10. A collaboration between the Faculty of Education, Indigenous Studies Unit and Indigenous Knowledge Institute at the University of Melbourne
• Culture is Life: Free resources including The Australian Wars, Welcome to Country, First weapons, Stolen Generations, and The Australian Dream with Adam Goodes.
• Watch a video of the original panel https://www.ngarrngga.org/stories-news/teaching-the-australian-wars-panel

Voices

Panellists: Rachel Perkins, Arrernte/Kalkadoon (The Australian Wars filmmaker); Marcia Langton, Yiman/Bidjara (academic and cultural leader); Belinda Duarte, Wotjobaluk/Dja Dja Wurrung (CEO, Culture is Life); Bill Lewis (History Teacher, Haileybury College); and Professor Melitta Hogarth, Kamilaroi (Director, Ngarrngga, The University of Melbourne).

Episode host: Professor Anna Clark

Credits

• Hey History Teacher! is supported by the History Teachers Association of NSW.
• Executive Producer is Professor Anna Clark.
• Producer is Jane Curtis at UTS Impact Studios.
• Sound engineering by John Jacobs.
• Made on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia.