Smoke and Mirrors: 2021 Garth Boomer Address and Reflection

The power of the coloniser within colonial Australia is clear when we consider how central to the teaching and learning and schooling in Australia is the privileging of Standard Australian English. Prior to 1788, the peoples and the lands of this country were abound with languages. That was until the coloniser exerted their power and insisted on a supposedly monolingual society despite being an amalgamation of various Englishes. Quintessential to maintaining the status quo and assumed power of the coloniser is subject English. I want to query the privileged positioning of subject English and its role in privileging the dominant norm. The subject content, the privileging of the coloniser's language, the silencing of Indigenous voices, even the naming of the subject -- all work to maintain the status quo. In a world where technology auto-corrects and predicts our writings, where 'new' ways of communicating such as emojis are becoming prevalent, where the written word is reduced to memos, text messages and emails, where the evolution of language is studied and yet, the consistent message is that you must excel in Standard Australian English. There has never been a 'pure' English nor a standard Australian English in colonial Australia. Our curriculum makes this explicit when we ask students to explore the evolution of language. In this paper, I share the script from my Garth Boomer address provided in 2021 where I wanted to extend the provocation, I raised in 2019 -- why is Standard Australian English the only means of communication privileged in the Australian Curriculum? And be so bold to ask: could (or should) subject English be renamed? Why not Languages, literacy and communication as found in the Welsh Curriculum or how about, simply, Language Arts?