Today, many Australian urbanites see rivers as little more than picturesque places for a paddle. But in the colonial era, rivers served as highways, drinking sources, sewers, and routes to discovery.
S.T. Gill, Kangaroo Hunting, The Death, from his Australian Sketchbook (1865). Colonial hunting clubs were established across Australia in the 1830s and 1840s.
National Library of Australia
In the mid 19th century, kangaroo hunting was a sport. Colonial hunting clubs were established across Australia and everyone from Charles Darwin to Anthony Trollope tried their hand at shooting roos.
A view of Sydney Cove, New South Wale, 1804.
State Library of Victoria
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.
Detail from Julie Shiels’ 1954 poster White on black: The annihilation of Aboriginal people and their culture cannot be separated from the destruction of nature.
State Library of Victoria
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?
A new Parramatta is emerging out of the rubble of history.
Artist's impression of the new North Parramatta development/URBANGROWTH NSW/AAP
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.
Ivy Emms with the man she married, Jack Bent, on a music catalogue for the song Just a Ray of Sunlight. After performing patriotic songs as a child in popular pantomimes, Emms later worked as a choreographer at Melbourne’s Tivoli Theatre.
NLA
More than 100,000 records of live performance are on a database of our theatre history. They tell of corroborees, the first play staged by white settlers, and long-gone gracious theatres.
Male-dominated sex ratios in Australia’s history still affect attitudes today.
Wikimedia
Australia’s convict past and male-dominated sex ratios have long-lasting effects on attitudes, impacting women’s working lives.
Guy Pearce as the Chandleresque private investigator Jack Irish: in the early years of Australian crime fiction, convicts and bushrangers featured prominently.
Lachlan Moore
Australia’s rich tradition of crime fiction is little known – early tales told of bushrangers and convicts, one hero was a mining engineer turned amateur detective – but it reveals a range of national myths and fantasies.
Melbourne in 1846: a view from Collingwood. T. E. Prout.
State Library of Victoria
Ngár-go (Fitzroy), Quo-yung (Richmond), Yálla-birr-ang (Collingwood), and Bulleke-bek (Brunswick), are just some of the Woiwurrung names uncovered in the notebooks of a 19th century anthropologist.
Ring trees were made by binding young branches of young trees with reeds. As the tree grew, it formed a ring.
Tim Church/Timmy Church Films.
Thousands of Australian women took flight to the US in the early 20th century, escaping sexism at home for success overseas. They included architects, artists, dentists and an economist who advised JFK.
The statue of Captain Cook in St Kilda, Melbourne, was painted pink on January 25 2018.
DAVID CROSLING
The federal government will spend nearly $50 million over four years to commemorate Captain Cook’s first landing. But some have questioned the spend.
In the 1980s, Australian geographer Maurice Daly exposed the urban planning system as a policy toolkit developers could capitalise on to drive subdivision and speculation – an insight that remains true even today.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Essays On Air: Australia’s property boom and bust cycle stretches back to colonial days
The Conversation, CC BY58,7 MB(download)
Australia's property market is slowing and many are contemplating a possible bust. But today's episode of Essays On Air reminds us that since colonial days, Australia's property market has had its ups and downs.
Participants in A Tasmanian Requiem, a musical performance addressing Tasmania’s Black War.
Alastair Bett
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.
A depiction of Fook Shing in Melbourne Illustrated, November 13 1880.
State Library of Victoria
Fook Shing spent 20 years as a Melbourne gumshoe. He policed the thriving Chinese community – claiming opium as an expense – but was never promoted above his entry rank of detective third class.
The familiar images of high-rise development, looking north here from Surfers Paradise, tell only one part of the story of the Gold Coast.
Andrew Leach
Behind the built-up glitz of Surfers Paradise lies a deep history that has been written and overwritten in successive layers that have become thinner and thinner as time goes on.
Thylacine joey, from the collections of the Natural History Museum, London.
Penny Edmonds
Lisa Reihana’s video installation Emissaries combines Indigenous actors and performance techniques to reenact Captain Cook’s encounters across the Pacific.
Detail from William Barak, Figures in possum skin cloaks, 1898, pencil, wash, charcoal solution, gouache and earth pigments on paper, 57.0 x 88.8 cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1962