The 1991 Royal Commission into deaths in custody was preceded by an 1850 inquiry, which recommended that Aboriginal people be released should their health deteriorate in gaol.
Jo McDonald, The University of Western Australia et Peter Veth, The University of Western Australia
They were looking to study rock art at a remote desert site but what they found showed people had been using the place almost since the first people arrived in Australia.
For 60 years, native police were deployed in Queensland to ‘disperse’ Aboriginal communities (a euphemism for systematic killing). Unearthing their camps is a key part of reckoning with the violence of those times.
Australia still hasn’t answered how Aboriginal people became protected by British law and lost all their land at the same time. If it can’t be resolved here, it might be time for international courts to weigh in.
Sap from one tree collected in hollows in the bark, and natural yeast fermented the liquid to an alcoholic drink used by Aboriginal people. Europeans called the tree a cider gum because of the taste.
The planets we can see in the sky were known to the ancient Greeks as ‘wandering stars’. But they appeared much earlier in the stories and traditions of Australia’s Indigenous people.
Aboriginal Australians have effectively been on their country for as long as modern human populations have been outside of Africa. We have a limit as to how long ago that was: around 50,000 years.
It is 50 years since anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures in which he coined the phrase ‘the great Australian silence’. How far have we come since?
Sydney’s Parramatta is developing fast, building over a rich archaeological history. Finding ways to retain it can help visitors and residents feel a sense of physical connection with those who came before.
The first people to make it to Australia could have navigated their way by sea crossing, reaching the north-west coastline of the island continent more than 50,000 years ago.
While planning policies and practices have contributed to marginalising Indigenous people, planners can now work with them to ensure they have their rightful say in shaping Australian communities.
A Tasmanian Requiem brings together Western and Aboriginal voices to confront the violence of the state’s Black War. It shows what a historical reckoning, and reconciliation, might look and sound like.
In the early days of colonial Tasmania, the British used threatening picture boards to communicate with Aboriginal people, giving them a choice between conciliation and death.
When did Australia’s human history begin?
The Conversation, CC BY16,6 Mo(download)
Today's episode of Essays On Air, the audio version of our Friday essay series, seeks to move beyond the view of ancient Australia as a timeless and traditional foundation story.
Aboriginal missions were notorious for their austerity, but Christmas was a brief time of joy. While celebrations had a sinister assimilationist edge, Aboriginal people often adopted traditions into their own culture.
Old stories from around the world tell of drowned islands, volcanic eruptions and upheavals to the land around them. Increasingly we are realising these tales preserve actual memory, often from thousands of years ago.