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.
Deep Saini speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in Australian politics.
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
It’s true the nationalistic rhetoric around the date has varied over the years but the notion of the date just “fading away” is surely ridiculous.
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
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.
The Australia Day debate will likely become more pronounced each year.
from shutterstock.com
Scott Morrison believes local councils are “playing politics” with Australia Day. But they’re simply reflecting the views of their community, and these views will only get stronger over time.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has proposed a separate day to celebrate Indigenous Australians.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
It was a week that saw the ABC’s managing director and the chair of its board go, with many questions still to be answered; meanwhile Scott Morrison gave the ongoing controversy over Australia Day a new lease of life.
Invasion Day protests have been growing in size and number across the country in recent years.
Glenn Hunt/AAP
An alternative holiday for Indigenous people doesn’t address the arguments against celebrating nationhood on a day that causes offence to some citizens.
Native title - the legal recognition of Indigenous Australian land rights - is determined under domestic law, not international law.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
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?
We must change the date of Australia Day again again if we want to achieve a national day that unifies all Australians.
Shutterstock
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
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.
Tim Rogers at the 2016 ARIA Awards.
AAP Image/Paul Miller
Tim Rogers has threatened to take legal action after one of his songs was included in Cory Bernardi’s conservative Australia Day playlist. Rogers’s case rests on obscure legal provisions known as moral rights.
Changing the date of Australia Day is the first tiny step for Australia to begin the reckoning with its origins.
AAP/Dan Peled
Reconciliation between the Settler and First Nations populations is a self-evident prerequisite for Australia cutting the ties of colonial dependency with Britain to stand on our own.
The Founding of Australia. By Capt. Arthur Phillip R.N. Sydney Cove, Jan. 26th 1788 (Algernon Talmadge R.A, 1937)
State Library of New South Wales
As it becomes ever more entangled in battles over the meaning of our history, Australia Day will find it difficult to foster common belonging and social cohesion.
Indigenous peoples’ claims to substantive political voice transcend the symbolic.
AAP/Joel Carrett
That colonial wars were fought in Tasmania is irrefutable. More controversially, surviving evidence suggests the British enacted genocidal policies against the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
“Remember, remember the fifth of November”…
Andy Wilkes/Flickr
A chemical found in products as diverse as fireworks and food packaging, perchlorate can interfere with thyroid function as well as foetal brain development.
January 26 is just one date that represents the dispossession of Australia’s First Nations.
AAP Image/Dan Peled
January 26 marks one of the greatest expropriations in modern history, which took place at Sydney Cove. Why do so many Australians want to commemorate an act of egregious injustice?
Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University