Articles

US museum under fire over display of skull of Australian soldier

Australian authorities ask museum in Philadelphia to remove images of skull from website as Anzac’s identity believed to be confirmed

Australian authorities have intervened swiftly to have removed from public view the skull of an Australian Anzac soldier killed in action on the western front in 1917, whose head was removed after death and made into an American museum “specimen”.

The Anzac skull that tells a shocking and tragic story of battlefield violence | Paul Daley

The skull of an Australian soldier who was killed 100 years ago this week is on display in an American museum. But who is he, and why is he there?

Australia likes to refer to its battlefield dead, especially in the first and second world wars, as “the fallen” whose bodies, if found, were “laid to rest” in picturesque, peaceful cemeteries of blonde statuary and rosemary bush.

Songlines at the NMA: a breathtaking triumph of 21st century museology

The National Museum, itself situated on an ancient corroboree ground, is telling an Indigenous story which words have failed

​The shortcomings of the English language are never more apparent than when it is used to translate Indigenous Australian beliefs, customs and culture​. So it follows ​that English-style museums – which is to say, most Australian ones – also often fall short​.

Museums of bricks and mortar are largely antithetical to Aboriginal repositories of material and lived culture – community, country, story (in every form) and memory.

The story of Yagan’s head is a shameful reminder of colonialism’s legacy | Paul Daley

The return of Yagan’s head to his Noongar descendents was overshadowed 20 years ago by the death of Princess Diana. But the moment had added poignancy for the Noongar, writes Paul Daley, for whom Yagan was a warrior-prince

Exactly two decades ago Britain officially handed over to a delegation of Western Australian Noongar people the head of Yagan, an Aboriginal warrior murdered on the Swan River near Perth in 1833.

Turnbull is wrong - Australia Day and its history aren’t ‘complex’ for Indigenous people | Paul Daley

26 January always was and always will be Invasion Day. Melbourne’s Yarra council is right to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on this day

  • Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist

Each year as the country emerges from its summer slumber with the festival of jingoistic self-congratulation that is Australia Day, the Indigenous protests and vigils marking the 26 January anniversary of British invasion become bigger and louder.

Politicians must face the truth: Indigenous Australia doesn’t accept symbolic recognition | Paul Daley

White leaders have always sought to simplify Indigenous responses to top-down propositions. Perhaps that’s why they don’t understand the Referendum Council’s recommendations for a voice in parliament

  • Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist

There are many Indigenous Australias, multiple nations whose immediate country is as diverse as the tongues in which they speak.

Red dots spatter wall of 'great Australian silence' over black/white frontier violence | Paul Daley

A truth and justice commission that digs honestly and methodically into the murders of Indigenous people will take more than money. It’ll take guts

After the rejection at Uluru of politically mainstream “constitutional recognition”, a pivotal next step in conciliation between First Peoples and non-Indigenous Australia rests with “truth and justice”.

The legacy reverberates: how a repulsive image reminds us of our ugly past | Paul Daley

Photographs of Indigenous men and boys in chains give testament to a system of brutal slavery in the early 1900s. They are yet another symbol of continued oppression

When you’ve ventured into Australia’s dark historical corners for long enough it’s possible to become inured to the discomfiting truths lurking there.

Related: What’s in a name? Quite a bit when we’re commemorating both murders and murderers | Paul Daley

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