Articles

Amid the false history over 26 January, it pays to consider what Australia was really built on | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

Trolls and Indigenous-baiters got a gift from the PM this year, but in the midst of all the stories you’ll hear today it is real history that matters most

As the Australian summer yawns into late January and the first hint of russet kisses the treetops, languor quickly gives way to pain and anger as that day comes around. You could set your calendar by that fusillade of incendiary, hurtful words that inevitably comes in defence of marking a national day on the date that ushered in Indigenous dispossession.

WHO worries that Melbourne University’s links to arms industry will threaten joint medical research

Submitted by Paul Daley on

The World Health Organization has ethical concerns about the university’s collaboration with nuclear weapons maker Lockheed Martin

The University of Melbourne’s links with nuclear weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin are compromising collaborations between the institution’s global-leading infectious disease researchers and the World Health Organization.

The bedrock of our hope in 2021 and beyond must be political engagement | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

We must go into the new year impelled by hope, because to dwell on 2020 and all its terrors and anxieties is to surrender to darkness

Those whose rhythms align with the Gregorian calendar are counting down the last weeks and days of December and putting pen, actual or figurative, to next year’s planner.

My life’s paper trail was longer than I’d imagined. Culling it is no small challenge | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

It had sat, a perpetual fire hazard I’m sure, in seven or eight boxes in our roof. What to keep? Why?

In the end I couldn’t toss out my mother’s old exercise books filled with her adolescent writing about spirituality, Romantic poetry and the great 18th and 19th century novelists.

This morning I rescued them from the garbage bag where I put them yesterday during the beginning of an ongoing cull of my personal archive.

The strange case of the weapons maker and the Australian children's charity | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

An anti-war group accused BAE Systems Australia of trying to sanitise its reputation through its ‘partnership’ with The Smith Family

Many are the ways a multinational arms manufacturer, whose products are responsible for the deaths of countless humans including children, may seek reputational enhancement.

Merchants of death may fund a range of cash-strapped tertiary institutions for Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs, as happens in Australia now.

Discovery and survival: an 1872 Cape York expedition revisited – and the Girramay man who saved it

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William Hann’s exploration to north Queensland has been largely forgotten. But unlike others, he survived, thanks to his resourceful, multilingual guide, Jerry

In 1872 six white men led by William Hann, a pastoralist from the Kennedy district of the new British colony of Queensland, set out to determine the mineral and agricultural potential of the supposedly “empty” Cape York peninsula.

It's high time to question Australia's culture of military hero-worship | Paul Daley

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Australia has prostrated itself for too long at the altar of Anzac mythology at the expense of other national foundation truths

As the wheels of justice begin a glacial grind along the dusty tracks of Australia’s alleged Special Air Service war criminals, it is time to stop, to look inwards as a nation, and to contemplate just how the hell it has come to this.

Australia's war memorial provides worthless 'hot takes' of our Afghan war – a true history must now be written | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

The Brereton report highlights the folly of exhibiting on contemporary and current combat operations while the dust of battle is lingering

Three years ago the Australian War Memorial launched its exhibition about this country’s special forces, the Special Air Service and Commando regiments.

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