Articles

The Australian War Memorial's expansion money would be better spent on traumatised veterans | Paul Daley

The statistics about veterans with post-traumatic stress are disturbing. Helping them would be worth spending $500m on

Perhaps the most emotive justification for the planned $500m expansion of the Australian War Memorial came from the man behind the plan, the revered institution’s former director Brendan Nelson.

Julian Assange indictment fails to mention WikiLeaks video that exposed US 'war crimes' in Iraq

‘Shameful’ Collateral Murder footage shows Apache helicopter mowing down 11 civilians – including two Reuters journalists – in Baghdad

US prosecutors have failed to include one of WikiLeaks’ most shocking video revelations in the indictment against Julian Assange, a move that has brought accusations the US doesn’t want its “war crimes” exposed in public.

'All lies': how the US military covered up gunning down two journalists in Iraq

Former Reuters journalist Dean Yates was in charge of the bureau in Baghdad when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed. A WikiLeaks video called Collateral Murder later revealed details of their death

For all the countless words from the United States military about its killing of the Iraqi Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, their colleague Dean Yates has two of his own: “All lies.”

The toppling of statues overseas might give Australia pause to reconsider who we celebrate | Paul Daley

Across the country are university buildings and monuments dedicated to killers of Indigenous people

Indigenous Australians and their supporters have for over a century been perplexed about some statues and place names that make false assertions about white European achievement and celebrate the murderers and murder of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Scott Morrison should use Cook's 250th anniversary to insist Britain return the Gweagal shield | Paul Daley

The artefact, held by the British Museum, is a symbol Indigenous survival, resistance and endurance

Depending on where you stand, an upside of Australia’s coronavirus lockdown has been the abandonment of some of the more public and political elements of national celebrations to commemorate the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival.

Hope, love and fear: why Moby-Dick is the perfect novel for our times | Paul Daley

I’d read it before but this time I found Captain Ahab more disturbed – and disturbing

Many readers have expanded their ambitions in these times of social isolation, disappearing into books that have previously beaten them.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is mentioned often, along with Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.

Great beasts and American exceptionalism: the world through the eyes of a mammoth

In an ambitious, hilarious, clever beast of a novel, Chris Flynn excavates the strange fascination powerful men have for big pets

A story of man’s self-destructive impulse to conquer nature and about American exceptionalism, with detours through Napoleonic France and the end of the Irish rebellion in 1801 … narrated by a 13,000-year-old fossilised mammoth?

Work after coronavirus: how will it change when the lockdown is over?

Entrenched unemployment? A permanent embrace of work from home? Several orthodoxies have emerged about the near future of employment

This is the first in our series on Life after lockdown, which looks at how the Covid-19 pandemic could change Australia for good

As Australia surveys the labour market wreckage of almost two months of pandemic-inspired physical isolation, several orthodoxies have emerged about the way we will work when the restrictions are eventually lifted.

Commemorating Captain James Cook’s arrival, Australia should not omit his role in the suffering that followed | Paul Daley

He arguably paved the way for the terrible experiences of generations of Indigenous people

James Cook’s critics can relish the irony that a global pandemic has diminished the planned lavish commemorations of his east coast Australian arrival 250 years ago today.

Many Indigenous people and supporters of their causes and sensibilities rightly view the lieutenant as the doorman for so many ills that followed, including the smallpox epidemic of 1789 that killed as many as seven in 10 Aboriginal people of the new colony for which Cook’s arrival paved the way.

Politicians, take note this Anzac Day: coronavirus is a pandemic. It is not a war | Paul Daley

Stand by for speeches conflating the Australian experience at Gallipoli with the mitigation of a health and economic threat

Our politicians have been insisting this Anzac Day will be “unlike any other”.

Yes, isolation will prevent most from attending traditional services. Commemoration, as with so much else today, will be largely virtual – a matter of mind over place, imagination over reality.

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