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.

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.

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.

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.