September 2020

Australia's spy agency has dismissed its official historian. But why? | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

Terminating John Blaxland’s contract without any adequate public explanation is clearly not in the interests of transparency

A decision by Australia’s cyber spy agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, to change the author of its partially written official history raises questions about the organisation’s purported desire for greater transparency.

Australia has never been good at acknowledging its troops have been guilty of acts of inhumanity | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

Australia’s telling of the Pacific war story is correctly replete with Japanese atrocities. But crimes against Japanese prisoners do not feature prominently

Seventy-five years after the end of the second world war in the Pacific, the human suffering of millions of combatants and civilians is easily overlooked in a binary focus on allied victory and Japanese surrender.