British Journal of Sociology of Education

ISSN: 0142-5692 (Print) 1465-3346 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbse20

‘I don’t think you’re going to have any aborigines in

your world’: Minecraft ing terra nullius

Ligia (Licho) López López, Lars de Wildt & Nikki Moodie

To cite this article: Ligia (Licho) López López, Lars de Wildt & Nikki Moodie (2019): ‘I don’t think
you’re going to have any aborigines in your world’: Minecraft ing terra�nullius, British Journal of
Sociology of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2019.1640596

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Published online: 12 Aug 2019.

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British Journal of Sociology of Education
https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2019.1640596

‘I don’t think you’re going to have any aborigines in your

world’: Minecraft ing terra nullius
Ligia (Licho) López Lópeza, Lars de Wildtb and Nikki Moodiec
a
Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; bInstitute for Media
Studies, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; cSchool of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, University of
Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The myth that justified the takeover of a continent lives on both in Received 4 July 2018
classrooms and in popular media. Drawing from classroom observations Accepted 12 June 2019
in an urban primary school in Australia, this article enters the technology
in education conversation, more specifically through the use of videog- KEYWORDS
ames for learning. Based on classroom exchanges between teachers Aboriginal; Indigenous;
and students, we interrogate how the school’s use of Minecraft, a curriculum; Minecraft; terra
best-selling commercial videogame, continues to reproduce myths of nullius; settler colonialism
settler colonialism in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the curricu-
lum mobilizes structures inherent to both Minecraft and modern
Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous populations. That is, both class-
room and videogame interactions reproduced the myth of terra nullius:
the doctrine which determined that land, prior to colonization, was
empty and unowned, and therefore available for settlement by the
colonizer. We conclude that within videogames and classrooms, stu-
dents’ voices manage to interrogate the curriculum, resisting the repro-
duction of erasive coloniality in school.

Introduction
They all arrived at the classroom to take possession of the virtual land. Minecraft is terra
nullius. The six groups of mixed aged co-educational Year 5/6 students congregate to receive
instructions. As they all sit on the floor, most of the class roars with excitement to the sound
of Minecraft. Some of the students’ faces show dissent. Gaming the curriculum seems to
do the trick for a historically boring subject: history. The students tell me the ‘Inquiry’
subject is the least exciting of all. This is the fourth out of six lessons in this unit entitled
‘Eureka’. The gold rush, migration, and settlement chart the territory of this unit of inquiry.
After some general announcements by the teachers, the full immersion in rehearsing colo-
nial settlement begins. First were two pictures projected on the smart board. With the two
images of landscapes the students are expected to sharpen their gaze in order to decide
what territory is worth colonizing. Through a lively exchange about the images, the students
and the teacher contribute multiple observations for what would constitute an apt

CONTACT Ligia (Licho) López López lllopez@unimelb.edu.au

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 L. LÓPEZ LÓPEZ ET AL.

Figure 1. .

environment to establish a colony. They debate the geographical/geological features,1 as

stated in the success criteria, necessary to establish a colony. The exercise trains the students’
retina while exploring and seeking the best land and natural resources. Second was Google
and the establishment of Australian capital cities. The teachers instruct the students to
research the facts about the how, when, and by whom of the establishment. Through Google
Images, the students learn the visualities of Australia’s capital cities. Insisting on the visu-
al-scape of the land-scape with a particular focus on resources, the students have now been
fully trained before embarking on the colonial journey through the virtual world. Third
was the ultimate task: build a Minecraft world. ‘In this great land down under’, says the
teacher instructing the learners, ‘imagine you are captain Cook.’ ‘You are going to set up a
colony.’ A student interrupts. Taking the name of the subject to task, the student enquires
into the Aboriginal’s presence. But that is not in the learning objectives and success criteria
of today’s lesson.
A transcript of the classroom exchange follows, but before moving further it is important
to mention that we understand the teachers in this account as key performers of the cur-
riculum. By performer we mean those enacting the curriculum within particular historical
and onto-epistemological traditions that make such performance possible. The teach-
er-as-individual matters only when embedded within such traditions and not as an indi-
vidual subject susceptible to judgement. Therefore, we refer to the curriculum as enacted
by teachers, and the curriculum is the field of interrogation that hosts our inquiry:
The teacher as curriculum performer: Your challenge is to create Minecraft ah world that
would represent a colony in Australia.

Garry Smith (Grade 5 student): What’s it called again … the Aboriginals’ homes that had like –
[incomprehensible. Describing to classmates using hands.]
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 3

Teacher: Build a Minecraft world that represents a certain colony established in Australia […].
[Students laugh]. Not in the US of A, in New Zealand, or in Hobart. Garry, we have sort of
discussed when the settlers came the impact they had on the aborigines [sic], how they were
[…] where they were, how they introduced things like the common cold, so now we are here
to focus on the features and characteristics of setting up an establishment, so I don’t think
you’re going to have any aborigines [sic] in your world.

Another teacher: The aborigines [sic] were more nomadic as well, which means they travelled
around.2 (Original emphases)

This article draws from the students’ inquiry to interrogate the curriculum. Students’
visual cultures – videogames in particular – are unconventionally employed in the class-
room to actualize governmental mandates for digital literacy and twenty-first-century
skills,3 while the coloniality (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 1995; Wynter 2003) of the
curriculum remains untroubled. By coloniality, in this case, we mean the perpetual his-
torical violence of negating ‘Indigenous’ peoples’ presence (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor
2015).4 This primary school lesson introduces the videogame Minecraft (https://minecraft.
net/en-us/) to teach what the school understands as the ‘core curriculum’ from the
Department of Education and Training in Victoria, Australia. In the first section, we engage
with Minecraft as it is summoned to make the technologically expert child a twen-
ty-first-century competent, competitive subject. In the second section, we draw from the
curriculum negation of ‘Aboriginal’ existence as the legal doctrine of terra nullius. We
address the principles that performatively (Butler 1990) dispossess ‘Aboriginal’ people
from Australia and its colonial curriculum. With terra nullius as a practice of erasure and
invasion, in the third section we return to the classroom performance to expand the limits
of a technologically mandated curriculum and its reluctance to participate in inquiry. In
the fourth section, instead of a conclusion we open up the article to the possibilities of
curriculum that amplify an inquiry of interrogating and youth-curated curricula already
existing in classroom corners and beyond schools’ consent.
Responsive to the students’ interrogation of the curriculum, and addressing the curric-
ulum’s objectives to learn the materialities of settlement through geographical/geological
features, this article draws conceptually from Wiradjuri writer Jeanine Leane’s (2018) Piece
of Australia. Piece is a radical performance that questions the rehearsal of invasion and
dispossession, and interrogates the found-ness and founded-ness of Australia – a historical
rehearsal of terra nullius, of massacre, genocide, and ‘Aboriginal’ resistance. Piece teaches
the reader to learn the geography/geology of colonizing. Naming and re-counting the pieces
of rebellion, confrontation, and resistance, Piece interrogates the historical landscape and
instructs on ‘Aboriginal’ existence and resistance:

Piece of Australia
history conference, 2014
In the first twenty-first century settlers still say:
Australia is a nation found
And founded in peace!
But what piece?
4 L. LÓPEZ LÓPEZ ET AL.

Port Jackson, Botany Bay, Parramatta, Hawkesbury, Rushcutters Bay, Windsor, Georges River,
Port Phillip, Risdon Cove, Derwent River, Hunter Valley, Illawarra, Riverina, Brindabellas,
Moreton Bay, Dawson River, Atherton Tablelands, Bathurst, Adelaide, Swan River Perth,
Darwin, Macleay, Clearance River, the Kimberley.

Which piece?
Black Wars, Myall Creek, Massacre Island, Blood Hole, Murdering Gully, Mistake Creek,
Conniston Station, Umbali, Battle of Pinjarra, Black Line, Slaughterhouse Creek, Bushwhack,
Tarrone, Kilcoy, Kalkadoon, Maralinga, Arabanoo, Pemulwuy, Tedbury, Jandamarra,
Carnabyagal, Windradyne, Yagan.

In what suburban backyard, rural block, museum,

university or science laboratory do these bones lie?
we’re still looking for pieces of us in Australia,
each matters. (Leane 2018; original emphases)

Research settings and methods

The findings reported here emerge from a study into the place of popular moving images
in primary education (López forthcoming). One key concern that animates the project
relates to the visuals of difference and diversity that young people engage with when watch-
ing popular cartoons and movies, and when playing videogames. Set in the settler colonies
of the United States and Australia, particularly in Ho Chunk (currently Wisconsin) and
Wurundjeri land (currently in Melbourne), the study pays close attention to matters of
‘Aboriginality’ and ‘Indigeneity’. This is a study that relies on anthropological practices of
observation and ‘Aboriginal’ resistance to those very same practices. Instead of entering a
culture quietly (Menezes de Souza 2007), sitting in a corner of the classroom to extract
knowledge and essentialize ontologies, we enter the classroom with suspicion, asking ques-
tions of routines, interrogating educational traditions, and speaking up with youth whose
presence in schools is increasingly registered as manageable bodies, as profitable commod-
ities (Dumas 2016; Henig 1994; Wolfe 2003).
The classroom research took place between 2016 and 2018 in Grades 1–6, in seven
classrooms across both countries. The data include classroom video and voice recordings,
still images, popular cartoons, movies, and videogames. The findings presented here are
from a government/public primary school on Wurundjeri land. Queen’s e-Primary is located
in an eastern suburb of Melbourne, invaded in 1856 by two siblings from the County of
Northamptonshire, England who arrived in the new colony aboard the ship Roxburgh Castle.
These details are relevant to historically locate the context in which settler colonial curric-
ulum performance takes place. Queen’s e-Primary’s philosophy is invested in laying the
‘Foundations for Success’. Funded through the Federal Government Building Education
Revolution, the school purports to ‘design a curriculum that meets the needs of the 21st
Century Learner’. The classrooms are 1–1 Mac/PC for students to participate in an increas-
ingly virtually connected world. The school proclaims to want student empowerment
through ‘student voice and choice’.5
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 5

Minecraft’s expansion
To execute its philosophy of ‘laying the foundations for success’ and to ‘meet the needs of
the 21st century learner’, the curriculum at Queen’s e-Primary draws from videogames, and
Minecraft (the .edu version) in particular. With 144 million copies sold by 2017, Minecraft
is currently the second best-selling videogame ever (Hassler 2018). Thus, the game is a key
element of youth cultures in various societies across the globe. Its success led to a buy-out
by Microsoft at US$2.5 billion (Microsoft 2014), resulting in its further expansion into the
field of education (https://education.minecraft.net/), which has ‘aroused the attention of
teachers and researchers alike’ (Nebel, Schneider, and Rey 2016, 355; cf. Beavis, Muspratt,
and Thompson 2015; Mavoa, Carter, and Gibbs 2017). Minecraft’s expansion in and through
schooling is associated with discourses of ‘connected learning’, which are directly linked to
‘academic achievement’ and ‘career success’ (Ito et al. 2013, 42).
Minecraft’s appeal to classroom use is predicated upon the ‘freedom’ it affords the player
in its format as a ‘sandbox’ game, which means it is devoid of a pre-set narrative, and
specific goals or ways to win or end the game. Large groups of students can collaborate on
building projects and solving problems in the game. Teachers/adults can join students or,
in the education version, monitor students’ avatar locations and their activities using an
app. The game’s versatility allows for the teaching of multiple subjects such as geography
(List and Bryant 2014; Scarlett 2015), history (Zhu and Heun 2017), art (Overby and Jones
2015), and general scientific concepts (Short 2012). ‘Situated understanding’ and ‘experi-
ential learning’, rather than solely theoretical reproductions of knowledge, are celebrated
as key benefits in employing the game for instructional purposes (Kolb 2014; Gee 2003;
Perrotta et al. 2013). Individual learning (Lai 2017; Petrov 2014), learning as a fun activity
(Schifter and Cipollone 2013; Saito, Washizaki, and Fukazawa 2016), individual and col-
laborative learning, and enhancing technological literacy coupled with traditional teaching
methods (De Grove, Bourgonjon, and van Looy 2012; Faas and Lin 2017; Newcombe and
Brick 2017) are some of the game’s added benefits to schooling. Self-directed learning is
a crucial selling point, said to ‘rewrite the playbook for learning’, which ‘contribute[s] to
the culture of DIY creativity in Minecraft and [makes] kids feel empowered to make it
their own’ (Ito 2015, n.p.).

Figure 2. .
6 L. LÓPEZ LÓPEZ ET AL.

Minecraft: Education Edition, then, promises empowered self-responsible, self-actualiz-

ing, self-directed learning through play. As the promotional website for the Education
Edition tells us:
Minecraft: Education Edition is an open-world game that promotes creativity, collaboration,
and problem-solving in an immersive environment where the only limit is your imagination.
(education.minecraft.net 2018; emphasis added)

Minecraft’s rhetoric echoes a similar philanthropic neoliberalism as Microsoft’s broader

cultural influence – most notably, mirroring the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation
describes itself as a group of ‘impatient optimists working to reduce inequity’ and insists
that ‘all lives have equal value’ (gatesfoundation.org 2018, n.p.). Critics, however, have
accused the Foundation of ignoring the power and resource inequalities at the basis of the
disadvantaged groups whose problems it tries to solve through a technocratic, privatized,
and fundamentally neoliberal approach to philanthropy (Chan 2017; Curtis 2016; Damon
2007; Hursh 2010; McGoey 2015). Microsoft’s acquisition of Minecraft, and its development
into an educational tool, expands the myth of neoliberal self-actualization. As if, in a way,
all citizens have an equal shot at greatness – whether they take up their tools in any of the
randomly generated worlds of Minecraft anywhere on the world – regardless of who they
are, ‘where the only limit is their imagination’ (education.minecraft.net (2018), n.p.).
Indeed, in contrast to Microsoft’s, Ito’s, and others’ enthusiasm about the so-called empow-
ering nature of games such as Minecraft, critics oppose such globalist, neoliberal readings
of games as universally empowering (Ames and Burrell 2017; Anderson et al. 2017; Byrd
2016). Jodi Byrd argues that, in the case of exploration games, ‘[they] offer important
insights into how the sovereign nomos of the new world event continues to inflect the
imperial logics of late colonialism’ (2016, 434). Such game structures ‘demonstrate[s] the
accuracy of Patrick Wolfe’s assessment that “invasion is a structure, not an event”’ (2016,
434; Wolfe 2006), while their narratives ‘continue to capture structures away from the
intimate violences of encounter’ (Byrd 2016, 434–435) – a narrative all too often of literal
colonization, as has been noted by several authors on games of ‘Empire’ including Age of
Empire, Minecraft, Colonization, and Civilization (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter 2009;
Friedman 1999; Lammes 2010; Mukherjee 2017, 2018).
At the heart of Minecraft lies a cycle of extraction, exploitation, and expansion. In
‘Survival’ mode, the only one in which players can receive ‘achievements’ recognizing their
deeds, newly starting players chop wood, create tools, and mine ore (from where the name
of the game derives). Mined ore will produce stronger materials, leading to stronger tools,
and eventually even better materials for players to build and embellish their constructions.
Players find as many blocks as they need to build elaborate structures in a world that is
practically infinite and infinitely empty; ready for grabbing. The game’s ‘Creative’ mode
focuses on settling and building without the need to extract ore and survive. This mode
removes the possibility of death and allows players to freely use all of the resources needed
to build their worlds without any resistance from any pre-existing inhabitants.
Although starting isolated, the player soon encounters non-speaking, subaltern pres-
ences. These presences include, most frequently, night-time enemies from which to protect
your settlement and who can be destroyed; as well as occasional peaceful villagers to either
trade with (‘friends’ as some young people perceive them) or remove. Both of these groups
do not speak, do not ‘progress’, and primarily exist to be exploited, domesticated, ignored,
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 7

or destroyed (Dooghan 2016). Players defend their colonies through illumination and for-
tification. Settlements must be lit because hostiles do not appear in well-lit areas; and those
must be fortified for protection, which promotes constant extraction and expansion of
territory. When a territory has been successfully settled against its silent, nomadic, and
scarce inhabitants, the rest of the world looms: empty and yours to settle.
This progression follows the same kind of protestant ethic of Robinson Crusoe’s epony-
mous protagonist, as suggested earlier by Dooghan (2016, 68). Much like Defoe’s Crusoe,
the player is presented with an empty island to be made meaningful by rewarding self-­
directed ‘labor that rationalizes racial, imperial mythologies as good and necessary’ (2016, 2)
– a glorification of work that echoes Defoe’s eighteenth-century enlightenment Calvinism
as much as it echoes Weber’s ([1905] 2013) twentieth-century analysis of how such a prot-
estant work ethic transformed into the spirit of capitalism.
Similar to the game’s fantasy of entrepreneurial success through hard work, the narrative
surrounding the production and success of the game itself has its own singular pioneering
hero – mythologized in books, biographies, and feature articles (for example, Cornell 2016;
Goldberg and Larsson 2015; Hansegard and Grundberg 2014). Swedish programmer
Markus ‘Notch’ Persson is credited with the game’s creation. However, since the game’s
worlds are ‘procedurally generated’, it needs few human workers to design it. Nonetheless,
Minecraft’s production process drew heavily on free, anonymous labour from online com-
munities. That is, the game was partly made possible through free labour both in the shape
of user-made modifications incorporated into the game through occasionally dubious legal
practices (Schlinsog 2013), and through a process of community co-contribution called
‘agile software development’, which relies on mostly uncompensated customer collaboration
(Agile Alliance 2001; Duncan 2011). The game would be difficult to imagine without these
forms of labour, which Persson, the main beneficiary of Minecraft’s profits, celebrated for
years on the game’s main page, stating ‘long live agile!’ (Mojang 2011).
In its production, content, and (classroom) consumption, then, Minecraft presents a
fictional terra nullius. As Dooghan suggests, Minecraft positions its players as ‘technolog-
ically empowered conqueror[s]’ that rehearse mythical processes of imperial colonization
and domination (2016, 81). It encourages players and students to indulge in an actualization
of an illusory frontier while conveniently erasing its previous inhabitants.

Terra nullius
It is the universal opinion of all who have seen them […], that it is possible to find men and
women sunk lower in the scale of human society. With regard to their manners and customs,
they are little better than the beasts (Reverend Joseph Orton 1836, 3 as quoted in Banner
2005, 109).
To the cultivation of the ground they are utter strangers (Marine Watkin Tench 1789 as
quoted in Banner 2005, 107).
They are too ignorant to think of cultivating any plant whatever (From an English chil-
dren’s book; Sinnet 1849, 41 as quoted in Banner 2005, 107).
The natives do not appear to be numerous […] neither do they seem to live in larger
bodies but dispers’d in small parties along the water side (Captain Cook (1770[2017] as
quoted in Banner 2005, 99).
8 L. LÓPEZ LÓPEZ ET AL.

If you find the country uninhabited, take possession for his majesty (Government
instructions to Cook; Bennet and Casteles 1979, 253–254 as quoted in Banner 2005, 97).
This set of statements describes the doctrine of terra nullius. According to international
jurist Camille Piccioni, terra nullius is a ‘territory which still has no master’ (Fitzmaurice
2007, 4), ‘unowned land’ (Banner 2005, 95), or ‘waste lands and unoccupied […] taken and
held by massacre and by oppression and by continuing genocide [of “Aboriginal” Australians]’
(Foley, Schaap, and Howell 2013, 193). The 1992 Mabo v. Queensland High Court of Australia
decision6 appears in parts of the critical historical memory as the end of the legal doctrine
in operation since the colonial period in Australia (Banner 2005; Watson 2002). Yet in
overturning terra nullius, the High Court mandated that the ‘tide of history’ (among many
other colonial constructions) may formally erase native title and ‘Indigenous’ rights to
territory (Watson 2013). Terra nullius was partly constructed by anthropological observa-
tions and ethnographic accounts by government officials, explorers, and missionaries serv-
ing the interests of the British crown. Following Mabo, similar accounts now determine
whether native title can be granted by the courts, or if the ‘tide of history has washed away
any real acknowledgement of traditional law and any real observance of traditional customs’
(Mabo and Others v Queensland (No. 2) 1992, §66 as quoted in Buchan 2002).
‘The British’, in this context and for the purposes of this article, is the particular name
and form taken by the colonizer, the settler, the invader, the developer, and the curriculum.
‘British’ is an avatar of the West enacted in foundational principles such as Aristotelian
natural law, upholding that all things exist in potential, and Lockean determinism that
ownership of land depends on the exploitation of the land’s potential; for instance, for
cultivation, mining, and urban development. As a legal doctrine, terra nullius may have
technically ended with Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2); however, as with the qualification
created by the High Court’s ‘tide of history’ statement, culturally and as pedagogy it is
formidably alive. As British property law, terra nullius sometimes appears loudly and
sometimes surreptitiously to assert the erasure or inexistence of ‘Aboriginal’ people so ‘you
don’t have any aborigines [sic] in your world’.
Terra nullius was the legal technology employed to explain and sustain British settlement
and ‘Indigenous’ dispossession. The justification for such settlement was produced, as
Reverend Joseph Orton expressed, through the deplorable state in which ‘Aboriginal’ people
supposedly found themselves. Notice that ‘aborigines’ [sic] are ethnographically narrated
as men, women, and human. Their humanity is not denied and neither is their recognition
as men and women. Orton’s denunciation is rooted in their state of being; ‘so uncivilized
as to lack any system of laws’ (Foley, Schaap, and Howell 2013, 289). Through the anthro-
pological fiction of linear developmental progress, ‘natives’ are ranked at the lowest stage
and in the furthest most-backward stage of human form. The ‘aborigines’ [sic] were found
to be several stages prior to the British. Missionaries’ main business being civilizing missions
suggests Orton’s account is one seeking action upon these sunken almost-beast humans
who lack ingenuity. The ‘aborigines’ [sic] are even incapable of cultivating the ground,
alleged the British. Indeed, any other representation of land management strategies, food
production systems, or permanent villages would prove ownership (Pascoe 2014). According
to the British, a people unable to farm are a people unable to own land. Thus ‘aborigines’
[sic] were made-up as hunter-gatherers (first stage). They had allegedly not yet evolved to
the pastoral stage (second), the farming stage (third), and to become men of commerce
(fourth), as the British represented themselves (Banner 2005; Pascoe 2014). The ‘aborigines’
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 9

[sic] were therefore various stages behind the British in the British linear model of human
development, and thus such deficiencies became mathematically measurable. Such defi-
ciency was the necessary pretext to convince the self and others that settling was inevitable.
Not only were the ‘aborigines’ [sic] ignorant about cultivating the land, concluded the British
(and evidence of farming practices misrepresented and minimized), they were too few for
such a vast landmass. Again, the mathematical calculus of volume is fabricated to minoritize
and consequently ‘take possession for his majesty’ (as government instructions to Cook
earlier), take possession for themselves (Pascoe 2014), and take possession for their descen-
dants in school classrooms today.
Casted as ontologically inferior – sunken so low as to almost be imperceptible, too
ignorant to deserve particular recognition of presence, too incapable of land cultivation,
and exploitation thus unseeable, too few almost unnoticeable – ‘Aborigines’ are invisibilized
in colonial times and in twenty-first-century curriculum. In the following section we return
to the classroom to examine how terra nullius becomes traceable in school as young people
are silenced and taught to take possession/colonize (Maxwell, Lowe, and Salter 2018, 168).

‘I don’t think you’re going to have any aborigines in your world’

We do not think Captain Cook, Reverend Joseph Orton, Marine Watkin Tench, the authors
of the English children’s book, and the government officials who instructed Captain Cook,
and the many others that followed their legacy, imagined that 250 years later the ‘aborigines’
[sic] and ‘natives’ they found would still be in Australia today, writing poetry (Leane 2018),
suing the government (Torres Straight Islander and history-maker Koiki Mabo), and
reclaiming the land (Wurundjeri leader Larry Welsh). Like those British settlers for whom
‘under English property law, they did not exist’ (Banner 2005, 112), the instructions the
students receive in a twenty-first-century classroom insist on not seeing or even thinking
possible ‘Aboriginal’ existence in the virtual world.
However, in expressing ‘the impact they [settlers] had on the aborigines [sic], how they
were […] where they were, how they introduced things like the common cold’, the curric-
ulum acknowledges ‘aborigines’ [sic]. The topic of ‘aborigines’ [sic] in the curriculum ana-
lysed in this article is in fact cordoned off from the issue of colonization – thereby sanitizing
colonization as a logistical issue of rational choice and wit. The statement about the impact
on ‘aborigines’ [sic] recognizes their ontological and geopolitical location of presence.
Referencing the common cold, ‘aborigines’ [sic] are projected as the recipients of damage.
Focusing on the common cold frames the colonizer’s impact on ‘Indigenous’ people as
unavoidable, shifting the blame away from colonizers’ agency and towards that of unresisted
viral infection. The common cold was the least violent cause that led to the displacement/
eradication of ‘Indigenous’ people from settled land.
The ‘Aboriginal’ acknowledgement in the curriculum and in the teacher’s response
emerges from the increasing discourse in education and the general public to engage with
the painful past, the abduction of ‘Aboriginal’ children, and genocide. ‘Aboriginal’ recog-
nition in the curriculum follows Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology
to ‘Aboriginal’ Australians,7 and the British colonizers who, as early as the 1820s, opposed
terra nullius and the maltreatment of ‘aborigines’ [sic]. But recognition of their inhumane
condition and their ‘sunken’ state of existence did not and does not protect ‘Aboriginal’ life
10 L. LÓPEZ LÓPEZ ET AL.

or their land. Quite the contrary, that reasoning has been deployed to enact terra nullius,
and to negate ‘Aboriginal’ people’s presence and ownership of their land. Humanity donated
by settlers in packages wrapped with apologies, speeches, and school inquiry lessons already
delivered are insufficient for ‘Aboriginal’ existence to be consequential in the course of this
lesson. This version of humanity reifies the lesson on ‘Indigenous’ extinction that the school
is teaching young people.
Strategies to make infantile and invisible ‘Indigenous’ people rationalize settler fantasies
of possession, and serve to negate ‘Indigenous survivance’ (G. R. Vizenor 1999; P. G. Vizenor
2008) and sovereignty over territories now deemed ‘Australia’. Wolfe called attention to this
logic of elimination that represents dispossession as – at once and more than – the ‘summary
liquidation of Indigenous people’ (2006, 388). Instead, Wolfe’s abiding analysis is one of
invasion as a structure, rather than an event delineated in time (Wolfe 2006; Byrd 2016).
As per Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism destroys to replace’ (2006, 388), and in the process of
replacement it contains a representation of ‘Indigenous’ people’s claims; rarely only a sym-
bolic representation, the repression of ‘Indigenous’ people continues to structure settler
colonial societies. In this classroom, ‘Aboriginal’ people are similarly represented as absent
and ‘nomadic’; statements that are both factually incorrect and brutally descriptive of the
settler fantasy of terra nullius.
Acknowledgement is the maximum Garry can get as an answer (see earlier transcript).
His question arrives from outside the scope of the day’s lesson and its objectives or ‘success
criteria’. The curriculum of this inquiry lesson is paradoxically driven not by inquiry from
critical curriculum traditions where what matters is wondering, questioning, and the open-
ended possibilities for inventing anything anew. Instead, the lesson is ruled by the ‘Tyler
Rationale’ where what matters is establishing purposes and objectives for learning rooted
in effectiveness (Kliebard 1975, 1995; Tyler 1949). In other words, the teacher as a performer
of the curriculum was doing their job of teaching according to the curriculum script pro-
duced, not necessarily in accordance with the ‘core curriculum’, or government mandates,
but through a particular curricular tradition noticeable in the United States in the 1940s.
The ‘core’ Australian Curriculum sets three Cross-curriculum Priorities (CCPs) devel-
oped as an extension of the 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young
Australians. As described on the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting
Authority (2018) website, the three CCPs include: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island his-
tories and cultures; Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia; and sustainability. Since
their introduction nearly a decade ago, the ‘Indigenous’ CCPs have enjoyed significant
scholarly attention (for example, Maxwell, Lowe, and Salter 2018; Lowe and Yunkaporta
2013; Nakata 2011). This body of work explores the deficit representation of ‘Indigenous’
learners, curriculum, and perspectives in the Australian Curriculum (Maxwell, Lowe, and
Salter 2018), and argues that the objectives of the CCPs have ‘patently not been achieved’
(Lowe and Yunkaporta 2013, 12).
The precarious nature of the ‘Indigenous’ CCPs cannot be overstated, with critics levelling
accusations of bias, irrelevance, and overcrowding (Ferrari 2014), with a major review
commissioned by the government (Donnelly and Wiltshire 2014) stating that the CCPs are
a distraction, distorted or irrelevant, tokenistic, and skewed. In response to ‘extreme’ claims
about the position of the CCPs, the President of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment
and Reporting Authority wrote a public defence stating they were ‘options, not orders’
(McGaw 2014). The Australian Curriculum, with respect to data collected in this study,
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 11

reveals the contested and partial implementation of the ‘Indigenous’ CCPs in the ways in
which ‘Indigenous curriculum content’ is compartmentalized in the classroom. The tem-
porality of the content – restricted to discrete times and locations in the classroom –signifies
how little the ‘Indigenous’ CCP matters in the curriculum.
Time is crucial in the response to Garry’s question. The ‘Aboriginal’ topic was already
discussed. Past tense. The lesson that could have admitted Garry’s question is past content.
‘Aboriginal’ people and their homes had no right to be part of the colonizable and
Minecraftable landscape, no right to be part of the success criteria for this lesson. They –
‘Aboriginal’ people, the questions, and the lesson – were the past. Where they were and how
they were is past. That content has already been covered. Or has it? Is it a past no longer in
need of further reckoning? The curriculum sustains that how and where of ‘aborigines’ [sic]
is not relevant for the now: ‘[N]ow we are here to focus on the features and characteristics
of setting up an establishment’. Now what matters is establishing and settling – colonizing.
Now what counts are the features, the land, and how to better exploit it in this anthropo-
centric times in which the anthropos whose lives count, in the most literal sense, is not
‘Aboriginal’ lives. ‘Aboriginal’ people are past content, an issue desirable to be out of focus
for the now, an inconvenience with which the curriculum cannot be bothered. For the sake
of the curriculum, of learning about landforms, for colonial possession, ‘Aboriginal’ people
are better left in the past again. That makes teaching and achieving the success criteria easier
and more efficient.
The past/present dynamic here is not only evidence of the content-centrism in school
instruction that creates the necessity for teachers to ‘cover content’ or ‘competencies’. The
past→present order also reproduces the same straight temporal regime that subjects
‘Aboriginal’ people to the past, as a ‘primitive species’, ignorant and incapable of working
the land, and upholds the settler in the present as the superior species, advanced men of
commerce, and ‘21st Century learners’ entitled to the ludic world of Minecraft, already
available for settlement, already terra nullius. The curriculum performs the myth of
Minecraft’s terra nullius through the curricular use of ‘creating’ and ‘building’ a world. That
is, not a world ‘encountered’, but rather a world to be ‘created’ by the settler through the act
of ‘establishing’ a colony. Thus, rather than stumbling upon something pre-inhabited, the
person creating it (e.g. Captain Cook, the Minecraft player, or another settler) is the first to
ever see and possess the world created.
The task of the curriculum is deliberately to shape the students’ settler colonial identity,
encouraging both practice and identity ‘as if ’ the land was empty and untended. Since
‘aborigines’ [sic] were ‘nomadic’, the land is legitimized as not being theirs in the first place.
That is, the act of building becomes the first and only act of legitimate land possession. In
certain terms, the second teacher adds that not only are there not going to be any ‘aborigines’
[sic], the ‘aborigines [sic] were more nomadic as well, thus they could not have owned the
land. After all, the original question posed by Garry and dismissed through the teachers’
statements was about ‘the aboriginals’ homes’ and what they were called. Whatever their
name, their ‘nation’, they do not seem to count.
By this reasoning, terra nullius ‘Australia’ was empty, unbuilt, and unowned, a myth that
the Minecraft’s classroom exercise rehearses yet again. Colonialism requires such represen-
tations of the native and their culture to delegitimize claims to territory: ‘If terra nullius
exists anywhere in our country, it was made by Europeans’ (Gammage 2011, 323). Often,
these representations explicitly frame the native as sick/dead and transient/wholly absent
12 L. LÓPEZ LÓPEZ ET AL.

to say ‘they’re not here, but even if they were, they wouldn’t be’. Having performed the logic
of elimination, the curriculum then moves to rescue settler futurity. Futurity, Baldwin (2012,
173) explains, is ‘the future rendered knowable [… intervening] upon the present through
three anticipatory logics (i.e. pre-caution, pre-emption, and preparedness)’.
The past/present dynamic in the teacher’s assertion of a settler future can be seen in the
very specific deployment of ‘US of A, New Zealand or faraway Hobart’. Hobart is not in fact
far away (around 600 kilometres). We suggest this instance of possible irony rather signals
another strategic erasure. The Black War in Tasmania is considered one of the most well-doc-
umented colonial frontier wars, yet reluctance on the part of many ‘non-Indigenous’
Australians to acknowledge that war remains a ‘microcosm of the wider debate about the
impact of settler colonialism on indigenous peoples and the humanity of the Tasmania
Aborigines [sic]’ (Ryan 2010, 48). Deploying the narrative of ‘Hobart’ signals the settler
fantasy of erasure and the often-told – and resisted (Thornley 2010) –Australian fabrication
of Tasmanian ‘Aboriginal’ annihilation. To paraphrase Thornley (2010, 264), the past is
present in absence. Allusions to ‘faraway Hobart’ in the context of settler colonial history
can signal a ‘forgetting’ of Tasmania in the imaginary of the Australian nation. However,
we suggest this ‘forgetting’ has potency as a symbol of terra nullius, a land not just empty
but emptied of ‘Indigenous’ people and ownership. As Gammage (2008, 252) states in his
analysis of pre-1788 Tasmanian land management practices: ‘There was no wilderness, no
terra nullius, in that sense no nature, because all was as people made it or allowed it to be’.
Garry’s question interrupts the lessons’ order, the straight temporality, and the protracted
violence of erasure of ‘Aboriginality’ in the settler curriculum as it conquers the new frontiers
of digital gaming in education. Asking about ‘Aboriginal’ forms of inhabitation, and account-
ing for them, did not ‘add value’ to the class (to employ the current neoliberal discursive
regime and Tylerist government that rules the pedagogy of this lesson) given that ‘Aboriginal’
homes, as was the case in the nineteenth century, failed to improve the landscape upon
which the ‘European’ style virtual settlement was to take place. Garry’s curiosity about
‘Aboriginal’ homes gets right to the core of terra nullius’ reasoning in which ‘Aboriginals’’
lack of housing was considered by the British as ‘proof of their primitiveness’ (Banner 2005,
107). The lack of permanent structure was key in the calculus that minoritized ‘Aboriginal’
people as too few to count/exist. As we will see in the following section, Garry’s interrogation
insisted in stopping terra nullius straightforwardly reproduced in the classroom. Instead,
Garry’s question is a critical inquiry into the colonial legal infrastructure, and into the
curriculum as established doctrine in need, through the lessons’ success criteria, of bolster-
ing its own jurisdiction and the land claims of the crown, the learning claims of public
schooling.

Interrogating inquiry beyond planning and school’s consent

To work in groups prior to worlding their colonies, the students spread out in the open
classroom with their tablets in order to train their retina to see what Australia’s capital cities
look like. Garry and his classmates transition to the task, but Garry’s inquiry remains:
Classmate: So Queensland yeah? What year did they come in?

Garry Smith (searching online): What happened during – what happened – what happened
to the Abo- Abo- Abo- how do you spell Aboriginals again? […] What happened to the
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 13

Aboriginals in Queensland? What happen to the Aboriginals in Queensland after the set-ttle-
ment? […] Oh Queensland must have got […] It says Queensland still opposes handing over
Aborigines’ unpaid wages [reading from computer]. That’s what I want.

Classmate: We know.

Garry Smith: [Reading] … stripped Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ children from
their families …

Classmate: We are not learning that, we are learning what the colonies looked like.

Garry Smith: Yeah, I’m just looking at what happened after […] the colony got built.

At a time when the ‘student voice’ has risen to become a priority of public education offer-
ings at state and school levels, it is these very student voices that must emerge clandestinely.
At the margins of the settler/settling curriculum, Garry’s voice, although unaware of its
‘priority’ in the Victorian curriculum, subverts the direct learning instructions laid out by
the curriculum in the teachers’ and classmates’ voices and pushes back against it. Enabled
by both the confidence in his familiarity with videogames, and Minecraft in particular, and
the mobile connected technologies afforded by this well-resourced classroom, Garry dis-
regards curricular consent and re-searches. His inquiry, beyond curriculum planning and
people planning, refuses the curriculum he is presented with. Even if at the margins and
even if temporarily, Garry seeks to know what the curriculum is reluctant to teach despite
the ‘Indigenous’ CCP, and government and teacher apologies.
We acknowledge the many and competing demands on teachers and their disciplinary
expertise. However, these data suggest there are classroom encounters amenable to the inclu-
sion of ‘Aboriginal’ issues but which result either in a missed opportunity for the sensitive
appreciation of ‘Indigenous’–settler relations or manifest as fertile ground for the reproduc-
tion of erasive coloniality. As our article suggests, there are currently few ways for young
people to challenge the discourses of the absence of ‘Indigenous’ people, in the curriculum
or in student–teacher interactions. ‘Aboriginal’ issues thus become optional, and despite
student resistance to this discursive erasure, such a curriculum still performs the colonial
strategies of acquisition, extraction, and denial. In contrast, students like Garry performing
an inquiry of interrogating have existed and exist in this group of Grade 5 and 6 students,
in other parts of Australia, and in other classrooms throughout the world. Their offerings
to perform student voices and recognize ‘Indigenous’ priorities are not in shortage. Their
generosity towards educating the curriculum knows no end. What fecund country would
have opened up to welcome emerging survivance had the curriculum allowed itself to be
curated by young people through their videogame player subjectivities and the historical
legacies that inform their interrogating inquiry, presence, and being in current classrooms?

Notes
1. Although these terms are significantly different, the teachers used them interchangeably in
the lesson.
2. All names are pseudonyms.
3. https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/Resource/LandingPage?ObjectId=927761ca-6a0c-
4adc-8b31-3a5db70e61c5&SearchScope=Teacher. Accessed 21-07-2019.
14 L. LÓPEZ LÓPEZ ET AL.

4. The quotations – around Aboriginal, Indigenous, and any other ways of drawing borders
around particular peoples and ways of being – signal their historical making as particular
kinds of people (López López 2018). In placing quotation marks around words that name
‘First Nations’ peoples in Australia, we seek to disrupt colonial nomenclature, recognizing
that ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Torres Strait Islander’ people represent over 250 language groups.
We also recognize that the production of language groups themselves operates is the mak-
ing and remaking up of ‘Indigenous’ peoples as human kinds which is an extension of
coloniality.
5. School quotations were noted from school displays, announcements, expressions, and written
notes.
6. Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) (1992) HCA 23; (1992) 175 CLR 1 (3 June 1992).
7. The entire speech can be found online: https://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-
country/our-people/apology-to-australias-indigenous-peoples. Accessed 21-07-2019.

Acknowledgements
The authors recognize and respect the Elders, families, and forebears of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin
Nation, who are the owners of the land through which this educational inquiry takes place. They
thank Jane Mavoa and Professor Mitra Sharafi for their comments on sections of this piece.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of
Melbourne [McKenzie Fellowship].

ORCID
Lars de Wildt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6901-6903
Nikki Moodie http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5238-8073

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