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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…