Abstract
This article examines debates over teaching Australian history in schools and notes a pervasive anxiety about what "our children" should know. The article sketches some of these debates, and while noting the politics of history teaching both in Australia and abroad, argues that its heavily politicized discourse has been further intensified by an increasingly pedagogical invocation. As a sense of investment and ownership in the teaching of Australian history in school becomes more widespread, the contest over the past, paradoxically, has focused increasingly upon the image of the child as a generic symbol of the future. (Contains 12 notes.)