June 2017

The legacy reverberates: how a repulsive image reminds us of our ugly past | Paul Daley

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Photographs of Indigenous men and boys in chains give testament to a system of brutal slavery in the early 1900s. They are yet another symbol of continued oppression

When you’ve ventured into Australia’s dark historical corners for long enough it’s possible to become inured to the discomfiting truths lurking there.

Related: What’s in a name? Quite a bit when we’re commemorating both murders and murderers | Paul Daley

Turkish Islamist push may be to blame for removal of Atatürk inscription at Anzac Cove

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Words likening Australia’s dead ‘Johnnies’ to Ottoman ‘Mehmets’ disappear as 1985 Gallipoli monument is restored

The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has removed from a revered Anzac Cove memorial the familiar words attributed to Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, likening Australia’s dead “Johnnies” to Ottoman “Mehmets” and welcoming them to rest in his country’s soil.

Mabo 25 years on: let's look at the vast, absurdist fiction this ruling toppled | Paul Daley

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James Cook was instructed to take possession of country ‘with the Consent of the Natives’. So who told him: ‘Sure, Captain – take it all’?

A quarter of a century to the day since the high court overturned the proposition of terra nullius in the Mabo case, it’s worth contemplating just how laughable was the British assertion that this land belonged to no one when Captain Cook sailed in.