Stan Grant’s new book, The Queen is Dead, is revealing in terms of his decision to step down from public life. ‘I have been reminded what it is to come from the other side of history,’ he writes.
Portrait of De Lacy Evans and his wife (1870)
State Library Victoria
In the 19th century there was no formal or medical process for gender transition. When people crossed gender categories, they did so socially, sometimes for their entire lifetimes.
Across Australia, there are memorials to white people ‘killed by Natives’. But there is a silence about what led to these attacks, or the reprisal massacres that typically followed.
The sad reality is that if the demands of these early activists had been met nearly a century ago, we would not be suffering the severe disadvantage that hovers over Aboriginal lives still today.
Clockwise from left: Curramulka Community Club, St Francis House, book cover (ABC Books), Flinders University, State Library of New South Wales.
Vince Copley lived a long, impressive life, helping to make a better world for Aboriginal people. Born on a mission in 1936, he died aged 85, just after finishing his memoir, on 10 January 2022.
Neighbours from Tla’amin, K’omoks, Qualicum and Tsimshian Nations gather around the newly.
erected plaque on Xwe’etay honoring the ancestral Indigenous people of the island.
(Kathy Schulz)
One project on a small island in B.C. is demonstrating how archaeology can bring communities together and serve as a basis for reconciliation.
Tracker Nat, holding his hat on the far left, with Paul Hasluck standing next to him, holding Nat’s shield in this picture from 1958.
National Archives of Australia. NAA: A1200, L28199.
The Kakadu region has gone through immense transformation throughout history. How can archaeological food scraps tell us about how the First Australians adapted?
Breastplate, of metal, engraved ‘McIntyre King of Mannilla’, c.1860–1874. ‘King’ McIntyre (c.1814–74) . Donated by A.W. Wilkins to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 1930.
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
The Ancestral Remains of Aboriginal people still lie in British museums or in graves, marked and unmarked.
Afrofuturist’s work is rooted in the desire to transform the present for Black people. Here actor Mouna Traoré in ‘Brown Girl Begins’ (2017) directed by Sharon Lewis set in a post-apocalyptic version of Toronto.
Urbansoul Inc
Afrofuturist’s work is rooted in the desire to transform the present for Black people. To do so, they imagine a reality in which Black people are the agents of their own story, countering histories that discount and dismiss them.
Wybalenna, Flinders Island: the Aboriginal settlement 1847.
Courtesy of Libraries Tasmania
Smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, syphilis … a new book describes how recurring epidemics nearly wiped out Australia’s First Peoples.
An aerial view of an Aboriginal stone arrangement in the Channel Country of Central Australia. Such arrangements may be associated with initiation ceremonies and exchange of marriage partners, as well as trade. The main structure is around 30 metres long.
Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation
We have found 140 quarry sites, where rock was excavated to make seed grinding stones, in the Channel Country of Central Australia. It’s part of a major project testing Bruce Pascoe’s hypothesis.
What happens when the distant frontier takes up residence in the family home? How are we to remember our flawed ancestors? A new book grapples with these questions.
The widespread conflict that accompanied Australian life for 140 years was arguably our most important war. We need a museum telling this story, funded on a par with The Australian War Memorial.
Jacob Junior Nayinggul (left) and Simon Baker in High Ground (2020).
Maxo, Bunya Productions, Savage Films
In depicting brutal massacres and mission life, this film gets a lot right. And the model for its central protagonist may well be a young man called Narlim, exiled from his country in the late 1930s.
Darug women Leanne Watson, Rhiannon Wright and Jasmine Seymour at Dorumbolooa.
Avryl Whitnall
It was once thought the Aboriginal names for the Hawkesbury had been lost forever. But after a remarkable find in the Mitchell Library, almost 100 place names will be restored to Dyarubbin Country.
A travel guide to some of our most beautiful Country highlights the complexity of Aboriginal cultures and white Australia’s historic ambivalence towards them.
Cahokia’s mound-building culture flourished a millennium ago near modern-day St. Louis.
JByard/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Five centuries before Columbus arrived, migrants were spreading across North America, carrying their culture with them and mixing with those they encountered in new places.
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University