English education in Australia and restore(Y)ing the nation: Cultivating postcolonial possibilities through placestory

Schooling has long been identified as a tool for nation-building and cultural reproduction. In early post-Federation Australia, English and literacy education played a significant role in producing colonial subjects. Although Australia today is heralded as a successful multicultural nation with momentum growing for constitutional recognition of First Nations peoples, English education remains haunted by the legacies of colonisation. This paper, based on a workshop given at the 2022 AATE conference in Darwin, proposes placestory as an orientation in subject English aimed at encouraging more historically and culturally nuanced imaginings of being and belonging in Australia. The paper provides an account of the development of English education in Australia as a contextual rationale for reimagining English education as situated within postcolonial possibilities. The paper then discusses three possible orientations for placestory: Restore(y)ing place; becoming-with place; and place as being.