If there is ever a day that I don’t feel Australian, it would be on Australia Day. My mother is a fifth-generation Australian of English and Irish heritage and my father is Munanjahli and an Australian-born…
The unfinished Crazy Horse memorial in Custer County, South Dakota.
Bernd00/Wikimedia Commons
More than a century after he died, the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, who famously fought General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn, is thought of as transcendent force – attuned to the universe in a…
Aboriginal stories say Fitzroy Island on the Great Barrier Reef was connected to the mainland. It was, at least 10,000 years ago.
Felix Dziekan/Flickr
In the beginning, as far back as we remember, our home islands were not islands at all as they are today. They were part of a peninsula that jutted out from the mainland and we roamed freely throughout…
Some Indigenous paintings have lasted thousands of years … so what is it about the pigments that make them so long-lasting?
Carolien Coenen/Flickr
Andrew Thorn, International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property
Indigenous Australian practices, honed over thousands of years, weave science with storytelling. In this Indigenous science series, we look at different aspects of First Australians’ traditional life and…
In an otherwise fraught policy landscape, ‘cheapness’ has been one of the cold hard facts of Indigenous affairs.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
Prime Minister Tony Abbott made a bold move in September when he ran the country for four days from a tent at Gulkula in far northeast Arnhem Land in remote Australia. While there, he observed that although…
The breastplate given to ‘U. Robert King of the Big River and Big Leather Tribes’ by an unknown settler at Goonal station.
Photo Dragi Markovic, National Museum of Australia
The flood of coverage of the centenary of Gallipoli and the first world war profoundly shapes the way we think of Australia’s history; but we suppress other violent events in our own country that also…
Many threats – the lower paintings at this site at Malarrak in Arnhem Land are being removed by feral animals rubbing against the wall.
Paul Tacon
Australian rock art is under threat from both natural and cultural forces impacting on sites. But what saddens me the most is that there is so much government lethargy in Australia when it comes to documenting…
Nicholas Clements’ The Black War sheds new light on the long and bloody war between colonists and Aboriginal people in Tasmania in the early 19th century.
Crop of Governor Davey's Proclamation to the Aborigines, Wikimedia Commons
Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (2014, University of Queensland Press). In the heat of commemoration of Australians’ involvement in the first world war, it’s timely…
Black Diggers tells the stories of young Indigenous soldiers who fought in the first world war. How did their stories get forgotten?
Jamie Williams/Sydney Festival
In August 2012, I was invited by the Sydney Festival to work with Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director of Queensland Theatre Company, to assist in developing Black Diggers, currently playing as part of the…