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Unless history strives for truth it is nothing more than propaganda. There is nothing intrinsically educational about a statue, memorial or place name
Submitted by Paul Daley on
26 January always was and always will be Invasion Day. Melbourne’s Yarra council is right to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on this day
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.
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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
There are many Indigenous Australias, multiple nations whose immediate country is as diverse as the tongues in which they speak.
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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”.
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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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Words likening Australia’s dead ‘Johnnies’ to Ottoman ‘Mehmets’ disappear as 1985 Gallipoli monument is restored
The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has removed from a revered Anzac Cove memorial the familiar words attributed to Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, likening Australia’s dead “Johnnies” to Ottoman “Mehmets” and welcoming them to rest in his country’s soil.
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James Cook was instructed to take possession of country ‘with the Consent of the Natives’. So who told him: ‘Sure, Captain – take it all’?
A quarter of a century to the day since the high court overturned the proposition of terra nullius in the Mabo case, it’s worth contemplating just how laughable was the British assertion that this land belonged to no one when Captain Cook sailed in.
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Featuring 30 early- to mid-career artists, Defying Empire is a compelling, unsettling rumination on the Indigenous experience
Defiance is a word which characterises Indigenous Australia better than any other.
It’s a defiance of wildly divergent land and seascapes, by vastly different peoples, which have proven fatal for others. And since 1788 it’s a cultural, physical and political defiance of violence, oppression, assimilation and the intent – and attempt – to vanish a people from this continent.
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Politicians are hoping for a consensus to come from the constitutional recognition conference this week. It’s unlikely to happen – here’s why
Australia’s federal political leadership wants a momentous thing from this week’s big meeting of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates about constitutional “recognition” at Uluru.
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Indigenous Australian artists are frequently exploited and underpaid: now an ethical online gallery is connecting community art centres with collectors
For many decades now Indigenous Australian art has adorned boardroom and salon walls from Double Bay to New York City and from Berlin to London.