The Australian War Memorial’s pledge to recognise the frontier wars is an end to ‘black armband’ rhetoric. It should now investigate the Aboriginal resistance, and see it as a military operation.
Indigenous oral history is more than a methodology. It is living history, practised for thousands of millennia, intrinsically woven into Aboriginal people’s way of life and culture.
When Max Chandler-Mather rose to speak in question time, he was criticised for not wearing a tie. But Australian men have been going tie-less for decades.
Soldier atrocities are shaped by our society, culture, and political fabric. Preventing them will require a comprehensive rethinking of policies, attitudes, and approaches to war.
Tim Rowse concludes that Paul Daley’s new novel, inspired by true events in Arnhem Land, is fluent and skilfully paced – but doesn’t risk complicating the critical narrative of our colonial history.
The cost of the Australian biometric passport and the rigour involved in obtaining one can be traced to our participation in an international passport system that evolved over the last century.
In 1881, a Pacific Islander woman brought here to work on a sugar cane plantation ran away. She was violently retrieved by her employer. Her story sheds moving light on a dark history of exploitation.
In 1895 the Wynne Prize was proposed as an award for a ‘landscape painting of Australian scenery’. Today it is more likely to be given to an Indigenous artist’s explanation of Country.
The British atomic tests at Emu Field in South Australia pre-dated Maralinga by three years. Largely forgotten, they remind us the costs of harmful political decisions are borne by the most powerless.