November 2015

Encounters exhibition: a stunning but troubling collection of colonial plunder

Submitted by Paul Daley on

The National Museum of Australia’s show of Indigenous Australian objects is a museological minefield, raising questions about why they cannot stay in the country from which they were taken

The National Museum of Australia’s exhibition, Encounters, is drawn from the vast and rarely seen Australian Indigenous collection of the British Museum, a repository of booty from all corners of an empire under constant erosion.

'He should have died': the Vietnam veteran who never really returned

Submitted by Paul Daley on

In what he says may be his last – and most personal – book, historian Michael McKernan explores the story of his brother-in-law Joe Stawyskyj, drafted to Vietnam, the horrific injuries he suffered, and the life that followed

Most people measure their lives, how long they’ve lived and might have left, in time. Years. Months. Days. Hours.

But writers measure it in books, as in, for example: “I reckon I’ve got five or six books left in me.”

The little-known story of the Indigenous man at the heart of the Menzies government

Submitted by Paul Daley on

Driver, personal assistant and cabinet officer, Alf Stafford is testimony to a strong Indigenous presence in Australian government in the 20th century

Sir Robert Menzies was busy.

So, when the Australian portrait artist William Dargie came to Canberra to paint Australia’s longest-serving prime minister in 1963, Menzies asked his close friend and confidant Alf Stafford to sit in for him.

Australia's lavish spending on Anzac memorials cloaks a more distasteful reality

Submitted by Paul Daley on

The government has put $552m towards the first world war centenary. As we pause for Remembrance Day, isn’t it time to stop spending millions on the dead and focus on living veterans?

Remembrance Day, commemorated annually on 11 November since 1919 to honour all Commonwealth war dead, has arrived again.

Long to reign over Aus? Prince Charles and Australia go way back

Submitted by Paul Daley on

The Prince of Wales’s popularity in Australia has, like the monarchy as a whole, waxed and waned over the decades. Now he’s returning for a five-day tour and a meeting with a new prime minister who wants his country to be a republic

In 1901, when the future King George V visited the imperial outstation of Melbourne as the Duke of Cornwall to open the new federation’s first national parliament, an official diarist recorded the anticipation in the then Australian capital.