Submitted by Paul Daley on
Fifty years on, the second book in the Meredith trilogy is an evocation from afar by an author lost among his own people
Fifty years after Clean Straw for Nothing won the prodigal Australian writer George Johnston a second Miles Franklin award, the novel has aged as a rich critique of social change, cultural complacency and the rise of smug nationalism in Menzies-era Australia.
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The war memorial’s council lacks a professional historian and critics say it’s like a hospital being run by homeopaths not doctors
The appointment of the former prime minister Tony Abbott to the Australian War Memorial council has further distanced the popular institution from the public it supposedly serves and, critics insist, still leaves the board without the critical advice of a professional historian.
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British and Australian regret over Cook’s treatment of Indigenous people would go a long way to enhancing understanding of the continent’s shared history
The British government has issued an oh-so-carefully worded expression of “regret” for the killing of Māori in Aotearoa, today’s New Zealand, at the point of first contact during Lieutenant James Cook’s “voyage of discovery” 250 years ago.
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History implicates the Hann brothers in terrible frontier violence. No highway should be named in their honour
Frank and William Hann are legends in the annals of North Queensland’s white colonial pastoral and settler history.
About 1862, having originally landed in Victoria from Wiltshire, England, the brothers moved to the Burdekin River district of Queensland, the new frontier of pastoral expansion and violent dispossession of Indigenous landowners.
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The Coalition’s $500m expansion plans deviate from the memorial’s mission, undermining what should be a space for quiet reflection
Brendon Kelson is a former senior career commonwealth public servant whose many jobs included directing the Australian War Memorial from 1990 to 1994.
He turned 84 last week. When I last saw him, he was fit and feisty, smiling, and his eyes sparkling with wit. But he has been crook of late, in hospital with pneumonia; Canberra’s winters become tougher the older you get.
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Newly released diplomatic cables show the realpolitik behind the scenes as Indonesian militias prepared to torch Dili
Australia’s precise role in bringing independence to Timor-Leste two decades ago continues to simmer as unsettled business at the heart of modern Australian diplomatic and military history.
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Too many politicians opt for an uncomplicated For-We-Are-Young-and-Free narrative, but we can be so much more
Even before the Senate recently voted for an inquiry with wide-ranging terms of reference into “nationhood, national identity and democracy”, the word was out among progressive historians who’ve long wanted a public airing of how history informs our democracy.
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The voice is a hostage – perhaps now already a victim – of Coalition internal politics
The Indigenous people of this land are used to white lies.
History, if you don’t re-interpret it, as many have, to render the colonial experience of this continent benignly, tells us that.
Related: A $500m expansion of the war memorial is a reckless waste of money | 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.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
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.