Recently, The Guardian revealed its links to slavery and the cane fields – but less well-known is The Sydney Morning Herald’s links to sugar and the slave trade.
Camels on Nullabor (at bottom right) supplied by State Library of South Australia B-7953. Other images are family photographs, supplied by author.
Sabah Rind’s great-grandparents, a Baloch-Afghan cameleer and a Muslim Badimiya Yamitji woman, had to battle the White Australia policy and the Aborigines Act 1905 in the course of their daily lives.
A slide by Gordon H. Woodhouse to accompany a 1901 lecture by his father Clarence entitled ‘exploration and development of Australia’.
State Library of Victoria
Exclusion has been central to utopian ideas of Australia since before Federation. It still lingers. To progress in this climate-challenged century, Australia’s foundational wrongs must be righted.
Mrs Chan Harr, Marjorie Wong Yee, Annie Kwok, Norma Wong Yee, Ida Kwok, and Patty Wong Yee on their arrival in Sydney from Hong Kong on the SS Changte, 8 March 1938.
ACP Magazines Ltd Photographic Archive, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (ON 388/Box 043/Item 035)
In 1901, there were almost 30,000 Chinese men in Australia but fewer than 500 women. Despite their small numbers, emerging research reveals surprising stories of Chinese Australian women’s lives.
A Chinese community dinner in Sydney, some time in the 1930s.
City of Sydney Archives
From Cantonese sausage on the goldfields, to mid-century sweet and sour pork, to today’s delicate xiao long bao, Chinese food in Australia has come a long way.
Originally made with curry powders imported by British colonialists, Australia’s understanding of curry has come a long way.
Japanese internees starting to leave the train which brought them from Hay on their way to the Loveday Internment Camp Group in the Barmera area (1943, Renmark, South Australia).
Australian War Memorial/Photo: Hedley Keith Cullen
Reflecting on the wartime treatment of two Japanese Australians (or Nikkei) raises the spectre of our racist past - and can prompt us to consider the vulnerabilities of Asian Australians today.
Australia is becoming more diverse, but these charts show we are still predominantly an Anglo society with strained relations with other cultures, particularly Indigenous and Muslim Australians.
By Wednesday morning condemnation was raining down on Anning from almost everywhere.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
In our frequently depressing and often toxic political climate, Wednesday’s bipartisanship was a small but significant and encouraging moment of unity on what we stand for as a nation.
The ‘White Australia’ ideology was commercialised and used to sell things from soaps and games to pineapple slices.
Multicultural Research Library
Australia’s history of dealing with asylum seekers has been a long and chequered one, paving the way for the hardline bipartisanship we see today.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott watches the signing of the free trade agreement with China, which he now accuses Labor of opposing for ‘racist’ reasons.
Reuters/Lukas Coch
Charges of racism against Labor for querying aspects of the free trade deal with China are a mark of how much Australian attitudes have changed and how adversarial politics fuels hyperbolic attacks.
Australian veterans of the Pacific theatre in WWII attend a VJ Day memorial.
AAP
Sometimes an historian will challenge one of the key ideological myths of Australian capitalism. Henry Reynolds does it in his work on the colonial treatment of Aborigines, a treatment some go so far as…
Refugees fled the Crusades. This is a detail from St Dominic and the Albigenses by Pedro Berruguete.
Flickr/derechoaleer
Given the often hysterical media coverage of the refugee debate you could be forgiven for thinking that people seeking refuge in other countries is a new phenomenon. Not so. Refugees have been around since…