This paper asks to what extent Australian school from 1900 to 1950 constructed Australia as a European space, in which Australian children might understand themselves as Europeans, and to what extent this was changing.

It focuses particularly on school magazines, produced by state departments of education, circulated to all schools and their pupils, as a source of both curricular and extra curricular reading, with particular relevance to English and History/Geography/Social Studies/Civics.

The analysis is situated in several theoretical and substantive contexts.

Theoretically, it is situated within the broad framework of globalisation and spatial theory, and of a Hunterian version of a Foucaultian understanding of the role of schooling in subjectification.

With significantly different emphases and political and theoretical assumptions, Brenner (1999), Hoogvelt (2001), Pickles, (1999) and Sassen (2001), for example, each suggest that one dimension of globalisation is the representation or discursive construction of social, cultural and political and economic relations in ways that transcend or subsume a preoccupation with national characteristics and focus on their construction across national boundaries, and at a global level. Such an understanding of  the significance of spatial representations for mapping the world and locating various actors within it supplies a useful framework for analysing curricular constructions of Australia and its ‘place’ in the world.

Hunter (1988), argues that central modern schooling was the adoption of a pedagogical approach which involved students in ethical self-interrogation a specific form of subjectification. This argument is extended to the subjects of English, Civics and History in Australian schooling in the first half of the twentieth century (Patterson 2002; Green et al DATE Meredyth & .Thomas DATE) in ways that suggest that English and the social subjects which were the principal curricular areas addressed in the school magazines, were central to development of students’ identities.

Substantively, it is situated in the context of cultural change in Australia, and of the role of representations of Australia’s engagement in and experience of war in the national imaginary. It examines their significance in the cultural construction of Australia in relation to Europe. Vick and Halbert (2008) argue that between 1900 and 1950 there was a significant shift in curriculum constructions away from an identification with Europe towards a more nationally focused identification (c.f. Kwan 1982), associated with a growing sense of Australia as ‘home’  and (an enduring ‘cultural cringe’ notwithstanding) an upsurge of cultural as well as political nationalism.

Feminist historians in particular have noted the extent to which Australia’s participation in wars, specifically the Boer War and WWI were central top the particular national imaginary into which students were being inducted (‘enculturated’) and which would, according to the Hunterian theorisation, be critical to the formation of students’ identities (Lake 1992; Curthoys 1998).

These accounts provide a context within which to understand and further examine the constructions of Australia’s relation to Europe through representations of its participation in war in school magazines from 1900 to 1950.

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