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Articles on Australian history

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West coast of Barrow Island, overlooking the submerged northwestern shelf. Kane Ditchfield

We have revealed a unique time capsule of Australia’s first coastal people from 50,000 years ago

Barrow Island off the coast of Western Australia holds a unique record of First Nations people. For millennia, they lived on vast plains that are now drowned by the sea.
Angharad Johnson. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Other images provided by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

Can more ethical histories be written about early colonial expeditions? A new project seeks to do just that

Truth-telling is at the heart of a new project re-examining an expedition in Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula. This research aims to address the absence of Aboriginal voices in this history.
US Geological Survey, Geoscience Australia

People once lived in a vast region in north-western Australia – and it had an inland sea

Our new study reveals a mosaic of habitable landscapes – now submerged by the ocean – once supported up to 500,000 people living in Australia’s northwest.
A portrait of Bennelong, pre 1806, attributed to George Charles Jenner and William Waterhouse and on right, Captain Arthur Phillip, 1786, painted by Francis Wheatley. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales/Wikimedia Commons

Bennelong and Phillip: wrestling with our historical assumptions through the entangled lives of two very different men

The heated debate around the Voice referendum demonstrated Australian history is still up for grabs. So Kate Fullagar’s new book, Bennelong and Phillip, is both critical and timely.

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