New Zealand’s history lesson needs extending

At least New Zealand has the Waitangi treaty (Children will soon study our country’s brutal history, Opinion, 12 November). Here in Australia, without a treaty of any kind, our equally brutal frontier history is still in the too-hard basket for most educational and community organisations. “Settler colonialism” should be recast as “colonial settlerism”, as its murderous toll continues to be paid by Indigenous peoples worldwide.

Pauline Bunce Claremont, Western Australia

• Isn’t it “about time” for British schools to be teaching our “brutal history”? About the conditions of the working class during the industrial revolution, partly financed by the profits from the trade in enslaved Africans and from the plantations in the Americas/West Indies? About the long struggle for women to get equal rights with men? About the effect on the Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas/West Indies? About the effects of the wars fought with British guns by Africans against each other? Then about the Europeans dividing up Africa at a conference in Berlin, and completely ignoring the existing boundaries between empires, kingdoms, smaller states?

Marika Sherwood Oare, England, UK