White, male, British authors still dominate school reading lists
Is Australia's literature curriculum still beholden to its colonial past? New research says it is, with a focus on class and privilege
Published 20 March 2025
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We all know the adage that you are what you eat. The same is true of literature: you are what you read.
The books we read expose us to ideas, values and perspectives on the world we live in. These ideas and values often become our own, intertwining with our sense of self.
As two secondary English teachers and researchers, we wanted to take a look at the texts – including novels, plays, poems, short stories and memoirs – students are asked to study in Senior English and Literature.
In Victoria, the state curriculum authority sets a large text list, and then schools or teachers choose from that list. Few students have much of a formal say, if any, in the texts they spend two years studying.
To see if the set texts listed have changed over time in terms of their characteristics, we analysed the last 25 years of texts set for the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) Literature subject.
We coded all of the texts for their characteristics relating to character demographics, time and geographical setting, genre, publication date and more. We also documented demographic information for the more than 160 authors who contributed the texts.
It’s perhaps unsurprising for English Literature that English-speaking countries contribute the most texts, with one in three set texts British, one in four Australian and one in six American.
But in an increasingly globalised world and diverse Australian classroom, this does mean western, colonial voices and worldviews are perhaps the loudest.
Looking at the overall text list for the examined period, almost 65 per cent of the texts’ authors were male, and 90 per cent were white.
Just over half of the texts are from high socioeconomic status (SES) authors, just under half from middle SES. Though just over 20 per cent of the characters in the texts were of low SES backgrounds, only one per cent of the authors could be characterised as low SES.
Two-thirds of all the texts that have been on the list have white protagonist characters; only around 10 per cent are people of colour.
And not all texts have characters that are relevant for classification – think poetry and memoirs.
Over time, more female authors and authors of colour have joined the list, but white, male, British authors have had their texts listed for the most years, and subsequently granted more exposure and prominence.
Put simply, they have dominated the worldview being presented in our Literature classrooms.
Each text usually stays on the list for four years before it is rotated off. On average, William Shakespeare has two texts on the list every year.
Jane Austen has had the equivalent of 20 years on the syllabus, and Euripides and Anton Chekov fifteen years.
Shakespeare, Euripides and Charles Dickens are key players on the English text list too – each with more than ten years on the list.
Knowing all too well it’s difficult for teachers to properly select texts for their students without reading all of them first, we wanted to generate a dataset that could be used by English Literature teachers when they’re making choices about which texts on the list to teach.
We are working with the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform and English Department Heads in Victorian schools to make a functional database that allows students and teachers to access this information.
When choosing what to teach our kids, it has been said that texts should serve as mirrors to see themselves, windows to understand others and sliding glass doors to allow them to explore new worlds.
And our project reveals trends: revealing the predominant voices and worldviews present in them as a collective.
In Victorian Government schools, 47 per cent of students are female, two to three per cent have an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background, and 68 per cent of government school students speak mainly Mandarin, Punjabi, Arabic or Vietnamese at home.
Having an awareness of representation in texts may affect the way English-Literature teachers select them and engage in a conversation with their students about them.
Our pilot study for Victoria begs a number of questions.
Is Australia still beholden to its British colonial history? Does this warrant a national examination of state and territory Literature text lists?
And in a decolonised and postmodern world, whose texts are said to be ‘literary’?