June 2019

What’s behind the AFL’s sudden insistence that the game has Indigenous beginnings? | Paul Daley

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We should allow for the possibility of a shared history but the timing of this changed position looks opportunistic

Debate over whether Australian football has its beginnings in Indigenous Marn Grook, a ball game with an ancient continental past, is intensifying after the AFL’s sudden insistence that the Aboriginal pastime has apparently influenced the earliest official Aussie Rules code.

Regardless of whether the Wentworth statue stands or falls, it's a conversation worth having | Paul Daley

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Here’s the reality check: Wentworth was indeed a racist who saw the demise of Indigenous people as inevitable and desirous

Predictable outrage from the usual dreary quarters has greeted the call by supposedly “radical” University of Sydney students to tear down a statue of their institution’s founder, William Wentworth, because of his racist approach to Indigenous people.

Tony Birch on The White Girl: ‘No Aboriginal person I know is intact’

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Birch’s new novel is an allegory of good, evil and the legacy of Australia’s colonial past – with strong black women at its core

Other writers may cringe to learn that Tony Birch wrote the first draft of his new novel, The White Girl, in about eight weeks.

Looking into the abyss: Don Watson on facing his mortality

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One of Australia’s great writers talks to Paul Daley about death, faith, Australian character and surviving a leukaemia diagnosis

Don Watson decided to go for a few medical tests after attending the funeral of his old friend Michael Gordon, the loved and respected journalist who died far too young early last year.