Gurindji ranger Ursula Chubb pays her respects to ancestors killed in the early 1900s at Blackfella Creek, where children were tied with wire and dragged by horses, and adults were shot as they fled. They were buried under rocks where they fell.
Brenda L Croft, from Yijarni
The Gurindji people of the Northern Territory made history 50 years ago by standing up for their rights to land and better pay. But a new book reveals the deeper story behind the Wave Hill Walk-Off.
What are the criteria for a Prime Minister intervening in these awards? Literary reasons? Personal reasons? ‘History war’ reasons?
Michael Tapp
They should be our pre-eminent national writing prizes. Instead, these awards bob on the vast sea of daily politics, occasionally getting dumped by a breaker.
No progress will be made on asylum policy until the major parties move to a positive bipartisanship.
shutterstock
The early goldrush was a topsy-turvy time for rebellious women, such as the globetrotting dancer Lola Montez. An exhibition showcasing goldfields jewellery spotlights this era when penniless immigrants could dress like queens.
The regulation of drinking has helped create precisely the violent, misogynistic and law-breaking culture that it was intended to control.
John Brack/Wikimedia Commons
Since the earliest days of British colonisation, authorities have sought to limit the problems associated with alcohol by licensing its sale and limiting the times and places where it is drunk.
Printer George Howe shows the first edition of the Sydney Gazette to Governor Philip Gidley King, in a feature window at the Mitchell Library.
Reproduced with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Digital Order Number: a6509002
What science issues did Australia’s first newspaper - edited by a convict - discuss in its letter pages? The same ones we talk about today: the environment, education and health.
A picture of strength: lifelong activist Bonita Mabo OA in front of her portrait as a young woman, which features in her granddaughter Boneta-Marie Mabo’s first solo exhibition.
Josef Ruckli, courtesy of the State Library of Queensland
Boneta-Marie Mabo’s art responds to a colonial past in which Aboriginal women were fetishised as “black velvet”. But it also celebrates strong women, including her activist grandmother Bonita Mabo.
Australians are some of the worst wasters in the developed world.
Waste image from www.shutterstock.com
Australia still rests too heavily on its luck, and not enough on its brains.
Australia’s Aboriginal welfare problem of the 60s enabled widespread theft from Indigenous artists – including designs for the one dollar note.
Reserve Bank of Australia.
Australia’s original $1 note featured artwork taken without permission from Aboriginal artist, David Malangi. He was later given $1000, a medallion and a fishing kit, but archival evidence sheds new light on the affair.
Australia has a lesson to learn from Germany when it comes to reconciling with a shameful past. Artists are taking the lead in ‘When silence falls’, a formidable exhibition.
John Curtin and Ben Chifley were successful in expanding the power of the Commonwealth – and thus that of the prime minister.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Alfred Deakin and his contemporaries invented the Australian prime ministership. But it was not settled as a platform for national leadership until John Curtin and Ben Chifley’s time.
View of Port Jackson, Fort Macquarie and part of Sydney Cove, in 1836.
Govett, William Romaine/National Library
Tom D.C. Roberts has crafted a book full of remarkable insights into a central figure in Australian corporate and political history, a figure hitherto enveloped in family mythology: Keith Murdoch.
Gough Whitlam, pictured here in 2008, looks at the original letter that dismissed him from office in 1975.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Sir John Kerr probably made his own decision to dismiss the Whitlam government much earlier than he acknowledged publicly while alive – but he came to this conclusion in discussion with others.
Contemporary circus and circus-infused physical theatre are amongst Australia’s most innovative and in-demand cultural exports. It’s a performance craft with a proud history behind it.
The Australian Border Force’s creation was no simple re-shuffling of departmental units.
AAP/Lukas Coch
In our era of 24-hour news, outrage and hyperbole seem to be par for the course. But as Sr John Madden’s 1909 “gravest peril” speech illustrates, overblown moral panic, to fit an agenda, is nothing new.
The Constitution has been very successful in setting out how Australian federalism will work.
Museum of Australian Democracy
The problem with constitutional recognition lies in the way in which it changes the nature of the constitution away from a procedural document by introducing issues of identity into it.
Martha Rendell was the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia, in 1909. Depicted here as imagined by newspapers in the 1980s.
Wikimedia Commons
Iconic murderers such as Martha Rendell electrify our imaginations and passions. The turn of the century case demonstrates why fiction can be such an effective vessel for history.
Kate Grenville, with The Secret River, found herself in the middle of a debate at the heart of history.
Chris Boland/Flickr
‘History and fiction journey together and separately into the past; they are a tag team, sometimes taking turns, sometimes working in tandem.’ Enjoy the second part of our series, Writing History.