Articles

Coronavirus shutdown has left a hollowness in the life of this AFL fan | Paul Daley

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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.

We face a pandemic of mental health disorders. Those who do it hardest need our support | Paul Daley

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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.

Truganini's story has always been told as tragedy. She was so much more than that | Paul Daley

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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.

How Spanish flu nearly ripped apart Australia's fledgling federation | Paul Daley

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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.

Captain Cook's cottage – the place he didn't ever call home | Paul Daley

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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”.

Flinders (and his cat) get statues – so why not the Aboriginal man who sailed with them? | Paul Daley

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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.

An unthinkable loss stops us cold – and then shocks us with love | Paul Daley

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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.

Australia is despairing this Invasion Day – fire and carbon are what we should be reflecting on

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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

Leah Purcell on reinventing The Drover's Wife three times: 'I borrowed and stole from each'

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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.

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