The Nakba is ongoing. However, our story of dispossession is not unique, but rather forms part of the many stories of Indigenous populations being uprooted, murdered and having their lands destroyed by violent colonial regimes, including the land we live on.

While common-sense ideas of ‘Team Australia’ reached absurd proportions during the pandemic, the underlying logics aren’t new. They reinvigorate much older common sense discourses of settler colonial nationalism: triumph over adversity, unity in crisis, national identity forged in war time. And like most common sense ideas, they function to paper over the foundational contradictions that produce and sustain contemporary crises.

The new curriculum may perhaps disturb the historical amnesia that is a condition for the possibility of settler colonialism, but it doesn't go far enough to truly unsettle it. Achieving that is a different task altogether: it requires prying history from the realm of the discursive and putting it back firmly in the realm of the material.