Most of the more detailed Aboriginal history is no longer taught. These changes were made under John Howard, after the 1996 election.

We used to cover the number of languages extinguished after Europeans came to Australia, but now few kids are taught that Aboriginal people spoke more than one language. The stolen generation is now dumbed down, to be less horrific. The situation of current residents of the original isolation camps is never discussed. Many Australian young people now believe that all Aboriginal people are born to the same conditions we are, running water, sewerage, power, education and a health system, and that any poverty or health problems are self-inflicted. It’s a far cry from reality.

Books that should be read on Aboriginal history are: Wandering Girl – Glenyse Ward (an autobiography from the stolen generation), My Place – Sally Morgan (multiple generations) and anything written before 1996.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Wars

We pretty much got the gory story though. Fighting, stolen children, attempts at assimilation. Even discussed the more current Aboriginal deaths in custody business.
We also discussed the justification used at the time for all of this behavior too. I did complain however that in 2 years of Australian history they didn’t really bother much with pre-federation history let alone pre-european Australian history.

If you’re interested in having a look at what they’re teaching kids then just drop into a bookstore which carries textbooks and have a browse through year nine/ten history books. They’re set exactly to the current curriculum.

Publishers are constantly rewriting or making literature more “politically correct.” I work in the education publishing industry, I design scholastic textbooks mostly for the US market, and I’m constantly amazed at the crud they feed kids these days. It started all out mostly harmless, changing references of “Indians” to “Native Americans” and “Blacks” to “African Amercians,” etc. Then it progressed to a whole slew of “rules” for writing in the new world of textbooks… At one time we weren’t allowed to use the word “God” in textbooks, or “Satan”, “he and she” became “she and he.” If we showed photos of doctors and nurses, the doctors had to be female. If we showed someone in a technology job, like computer programmer, they couldn’t be Oriental… and so on. Really stupid things that the publishers claimed “continued the stereotype.”

What really finished it for me was when editors started telling us that we couldn’t use the colours pink or purple in books because pink reminded people of girls or flesh and that gave kids the wrong idea, and we couldn’t use purple because purple was supposed to represent homosexuality. Er…What? How does a colour represent someone’s sexual orientation? And how are school-aged kids supposed to pick this up from seeing a colour in a book? Is homosexuality so easily “caught” like a disease?

Another nail in the coffin was when an editor, writing about a famous American-Indian war changed the text from something like “thousands of Indians were slaughtered” to “several American soldiers were injured.”

It’s almost amusing, isn’t it? Imagine what kids will be learning years from now… by then it’ll be down to “The Americans and Natives met over a nice cup of tea and the Natives shook hands and said ‘Yes, you can have our land, we weren’t using it anyway.’”