As a country, we might want to think of ourselves as many-degrees removed from the atrocities that occurred during the Frontier Wars, the women who sought to control their own bodies ,and members pf the LGTBIQ* group, whose activities and lifestyles still sit uncomfortably with many around the world. But like all Western, liberal nations, however, orthodox ideas, characters and themes become vapid, old and eventually deplored. What readers are then searching for is that kaleidoscope of new worlds, characters and voices that represent them, or people diametrically opposed to them. This was the mission of University of Melbourne academics Alex Bacalja and Lauren Bliss. As a seemingly ‘woke’ state, the research pair’s 10-year analysis of text lists from the Senior Victorian English Curriculum shocked me. After analysing 360 texts on the aforementioned jurisdiction’s texts list, the researchers could only find two print-based texts by Indigenous writers – one being Larissa Behrendt’s novel, Home. What about a collection from Ali Cobby Eckermann, a brilliant and poet who experiments with a range of form and meter? After moving through and analysing the English text lists, regardless of how you sliced it up, there were fewer women’s voices, Indigenous voices, LGTBIQ* voices and fewer migrant ones. A sensible question might be: Why do experienced teachers want to continue teaching texts that have gone back decades? For Bacalja, the issues of teacher familiarity and resource availability come into play, but they are peripheral issues if such a movement gained more momentum. The academic and experienced secondary school teacher says relying on a dusty school “cannon” of books cannot inspire students to reflect on people, situations and the world they encounter. Finally, Bacalja effortlessly explains how political and controversial education is. “Another backlash is when teachers try to introduce new, more challenging texts into the curriculum," he added,