As one who has written a series of three books on WA history since the first official Swan River landing, it was very difficult to avoid showing too much sympathy for Aborigines who were shot or treated harshly in official reports, and in today's language virtually regarded as terrorists because they refused to give in to white domination.

One particular character in mind was Midgerecoo, who was father of Yagan, the youngster who after escaping from Carnac Island out from Fremantle, where he was held for not obeying the new law of the land, but was never captured again and finally shot by a farm lad.

However, while on Carnac, with two other native prisoners and a military guard, they were also accompanied by Robert Lyon, an enigmatic figure in early colonial history, who while Yagan was almost a year on the run, wrote an article about the young native, praising him to the point for his appearance, his friendliness and his ability to learn English, that Dr CT Stannage in his New history of Western Australia writes how Yagan achieved lasting fame as an outlaw and patriot.

There is a very different story about Yagan's father, Midgericoo, who was shot outside the gates of the Perth military barracks before what is said to have been an audience of both whites and blacks. Midgericoo was executed as the leader of a group who had ambushed and killed two white settlers as a reprisal for the death of Yagan's brother Domjun who was shot while breaking into a Fremantle store.

Now as the books were written under supervision for an elective as part of a post-grad in Social Science, and expected to be read by a public, there were parts of the thesis which had to be toned down. And it is so interesting as other historians will agree, that the tendency while writing, is to treat whom we might call the invaders more harshly than the invaded.

Were the truth lies, as Socrates might say, it lies deep down in our thoughts, or in our consciences.

I am not a historian just a parent with school age children. What I see my daughter in Y10 studying for Australian History really scares me. The views presented as so biased and one sided it makes me worry about how future generations will ever be able to see the world in a clear and objective manner. For example the Stage 5 Australian History textbook my daughter uses talks about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a couple of paragraphs. They are made to learn about how difficult WWII was for the Aussies soldiers and yet no mention was make of the fire bombings of Tokyo during this same period during which tens of thousands of civilians were killed. It seems to me that the last ten years has seen a complete rewriting of some of our history. War - in particular the ANZAC tradition has been glorified and backed up by both state and federal parliaments to the extent we have seen a huge increase in the number of young people believing the myths that are being put to us. History is being taught piecemeal under the current system giving a distorted view of the world. My daughter for example said they did not study the Crusades or the Industrial revolution but are now learning about Germaine Greer and rock and roll. It is madness. What we want is a balanced and factual view of history. Unfortunately there is already a generation who have missed out.