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Articles on Australia Day

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Two heroes of the Thai cave rescue, Craig Challen and Richard Harris, are joint Australian of the Year for 2019. AAP/Mick Tsikas

Cave rescue heroes share Australian of the Year

A retired vet and an anaesthetist from Western Australia share the honour for 2019 after they used their medical and cave-diving skills to rescue 12 boys and their coach from a Thai cave in 2018.
It may be that the fortnight or so surrounding Australia Day is evolving into an annual season in which some of the deepest paradoxes of Australian identity play out in public. AAP/Glenn Campbell

New research reveals our complex attitudes to Australia Day

As the debate around celebrating Australia Day on January 26 continues, new research shows Australians have mixed views of it as a national day.
The Morrison government has committed $50million to celebrate next year’s 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing at Kurnell on April 29, 1770. AAP/Marc McCormack

Rough seas ahead: why the government’s James Cook infatuation may further divide the nation

The government’s investment in a celebration of 250 years since James Cook’s voyage to and along Australia, if not done properly, will further inflame the history wars in Australia.
Native title - the legal recognition of Indigenous Australian land rights - is determined under domestic law, not international law. AAP/Tracey Nearmy

FactCheck: can native title ‘only exist if Australia was settled, not invaded’?

In an article published in the lead up to Australia Day, WA Liberal Party policy committee chairman Sherry Sufi said “native title can only exist if Australia was settled, not invaded”. Is that right?
Conversations about Australia Day feel so polarised. David Moir/AAP

How to have a better conversation about Australia Day

Debates around changing the date of Australia Day tend to run afoul of our sense of social identity, but there are ways to cut through and have a good conversation.
Dorothea MacKellar’s My Country, with its paen to a sunburnt landscape, excoriated Australians for their nostalgic love of English ‘grey-blue’ countryside and English weather. Mark Wassell/flickr

Anthems, ‘ranthems’, and otherwise loves: nationalism in Australian poetry

There’s a fine tradition of Australian poetry harnessing the corrective power of insult. In doing so, it prompts us to face hard questions about our history and identity.
The painting Group of Natives of Tasmania, 1859, by Robert Dowling. Wikimedia

Explainer: the evidence for the Tasmanian genocide

That colonial wars were fought in Tasmania is irrefutable. More controversially, surviving evidence suggests the British enacted genocidal policies against the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

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