Carnivalesque canons: “Professors” and text selection in secondary English syllabuses in Western Australia, 1945–1975

In Australia during the 1940s and 1950s, Professors of English shaped the direction of their disciplines and subjects, in part through the prescription of their own textbooks on tertiary and secondary syllabus lists. This enabled them to disseminate the ideas contained within their textbooks as well as their personal literary interests. The conspicuous inclusion of professors’ books over the three decades since 1945 highlights the intimacy and intricacy of many curriculum decisions made in the teaching of English at both the tertiary and secondary levels of education. In this chapter I tell a story of English in Western Australia, 1945–75, using the ALIAS database to examine common perceptions about professorial authority for the purpose of more closely scrutinising curricular control in senior secondary English.