Submitted by Paul Daley on
The most unlikely things have recently found a crevice in my consciousness
The old wooden oar had been in the water a long time. Its grip was almost rotted through. Little white barnacles had attached to the blade. Its rubber collar was corroded.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
Trips down memory lane help ease the pain but nostalgia can only fill so much of the void
Given how a week seems like a month in this sombre and over-eventful new epoch we find ourselves in, a footy season may well be a decade. Foregoing the rituals that underscore the cadence of our lives is one of the hardest things about now. For many, including me, a big loss is Australian rules football.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
Ironically, there has never been a time when we need to be – metaphorically – in tighter social embrace
Yes, this is a frightening, deadly viral pandemic. But another plague, one we are not hearing nearly enough about from our leaders, will arrive in a wave just behind it.
That is the pandemic of severe depression and anxiety that will sweep over the world as the unemployment rate pushes into previously unseen digits, families who’d prefer to be socially distant are thrust together and young people are denied the certainty and structure of school.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
A new biography does profound service to this remarkable First Nations woman, whose life is so often reduced to tropes
Too many prominent Indigenous figures are recalled in popular myth and history as supposedly having slipped between traditional and European worlds.
Even when historians began affording greater texture to the Indigenous experience in the mid-20th century (novelists and dramaturgs would follow), popular distorted myths about some of the most important Aboriginal people of colonial times nonetheless persisted.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
A nation supposedly forged in the hellfire of war almost crumbled in the face of a virulent threat at home
Newly federated Australia, with its population not yet 5 million, was still enduring shocking fatalities on the European western front when its authorities began paying attention to the virulent strain of pneumonic influenza sweeping Britain.
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We’re about to be subjected to the frenzy commemorating the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival. We should get a few facts right first
As a child I often spent Saturday mornings in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens.
A highlight was always visiting a curious, somewhat magical place called “Captain Cook’s cottage”.
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If we can spend $7m to commemorate a fictional Cook circumnavigation, Bungaree’s real one justifies a monument
Since 1996 a statue of a cat has perched on a ledge outside the Mitchell Library on Sydney’s Macquarie Street.
The cat, Trim, together with Bungaree, an Aboriginal man, sailed with navigator Matthew Flinders (whose statue stands before the cat’s outside the Mitchell) on his 1801-1803 circumnavigation of the continent he named Australia.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
In their grief, the parents of the killed children have shown the generosity of the human heart
At the fiery end of an Australian summer marred with fear, anxiety, and terrible human and property loss came the happening too dreadful to conceive of.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
We need to look way, way back and embrace the Indigenous antiquity of this land
Fire and carbon.
That’s what I’ll be reflecting on today, 26 January, Invasion Day to me and many I know, Australia Day officially.
Related: Indigenous groups tell Scott Morrison of 'deep sorrow' at bushfire devastation
Submitted by Paul Daley on
The actor, playwright and screenwriter’s first novel solidifies her take on Henry Lawson’s classic: first a play, now a book, soon a film
When Leah Purcell inverted Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife into an iconoclastic Indigenous tale of gender, identity, racial violence and domestic abuse, she was consciously tackling one of the shibboleths of white Australian foundation literature.