Many Australian historians share a commitment to including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories in university curricula in meaningful ways, and a desire to produce history graduates who understand the ways in which Australian Indigenous history disrupts conventional narratives of the nation’s past. This paper considers five years of data collected from students studying a first year Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history course at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne to explore the complexities of challenging a metanarrative of Australian national history which, for many first-year students, forms an implicit part of their knowledge base but which they cannot independently articulate. It explores how our experiences have led us to using microhistories as a core framework for the unit to facilitate student engagement with the humanity of people in the past, and reflects on the value of this in countering the common perception that the unit is a compulsory part of the history sequence as a result of the university pushing a ‘politically correct’ agenda.