Urgent moral reform: schools as a key site for Australian conservatives, 1970s-1980s 

Conference Abstract: AHA, 2022

Jessica Gerrard, Helen Proctor, Susan Goodwin

For both ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ social and policy reformers schools in the post-war period have been foundational social institution carrying the moral weight of educating the next generation. In this paper we examine how diverse conservative actors were animated by concerns about dangerous progressive influences in contemporary schooling in the 1970s and 1980s, forming a new conservative polity of the day. We demonstrate how these people created a sense of urgency for the need for conservative influence over schooling through claiming that they were on the outside of power, marginalised by a coalition of progressive forces including those within the state. We bring focus to groups and individuals hitherto relatively under examined in the field, including the network of conservative academics and public intellectuals involved in the newsletter of the Australian Council for Educational Standards and the Queensland anti-feminist morals campaigner Rona Joyner (see Gerrard & Proctor, 2021).

We situate these groups within a diverse field of new ‘conservative’ activism which was characterised by a commitment to public outreach through the founding of new periodical publications. By analysing such publications, we examine how conservative groups announced their politics and attempted to create a public movement to counter the so-called perils of progressivism: migrant rights, Indigenous rights, feminism, gay liberation and the emergence of ‘progressive’ school subjects such as social studies and the widening of the school curriculum. A core argument of – and impetus for – this paper is the need to better understand the concern over education and schooling as central to the articulation of conservative political interests (see e.g. Maddox, 2014) and how publics were created through the textual politics of newsletters (Warner, 2002). In so doing, we contribute to an emerging interest in Australian history to understand the history of conservatism and in particular grassroots conservatism (see Arrow, Barrett Meyering & Robinson, 2021).  

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