Submitted by Paul Daley on
When I think of Dad, it’s his awful death my mind fixes on. That’s why I’m so glad Andrew Denton has started a new conversation about death and dying in Australia
It is eight years almost to the minute, as I write, since my father died.
By middle age, most of us have had at least one parent die. We’re lucky if we haven’t lost both or, indeed, a sibling or too many friends.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
The writer and former Wallaby is a shameless networker and has brought fresh energy to the campaign to ditch the monarchy in Australia. But the debate on any replacement – even among republicans – has a long and dangerous road ahead
A French visitor with whom I was talking Australian history recently asked: “What will Australia be when it grows up?”
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The impact of this latest round of cuts to the National Museum of Australia and five other national cultural institutions should not be underestimated
What price do we put on a nation’s memory? And what should that memory recall?
These questions are central to a crisis that is facing a number of Australia’s national cultural institutions as a federal government so-called “efficiency dividend” bites.
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Exclusive: Artefacts sacred to Victoria’s Dja Dja Wurrung people could be exhibited next year in Australia – a move activists hope could one day lead to their permanent return
The British Museum, long intransigent on repatriating treasures such as the Parthenon marbles to their original owners, has entered detailed negotiations with a Victorian Aboriginal clan about potentially returning its sacred artefacts from London.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
Every year it’s the same story: some minor improvements in the lives of Australia’s first peoples. The big picture doesn’t change though: dismal failure
It’s Close the Gap time again.
On Wednesday federal parliament will respond to the eighth annual Closing the Gap report on this country’s attempt to narrow the appalling disparities between the quality and duration of Indigenous lives and those of other Australians.
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Today is an annual festival of barbecues and slabs, and fetishisation of a flag that, with its Union Jack, symbolises violence and oppression to Indigenous people
Every year Australia Day gets bigger, more ostentatious and increasingly imbued with a brazen “kiss the flag”, “love us or leave us” territorial ugliness that eclipses a discomforting truth at the heart of our nationhood.
And that is: for the vast majority of Australians, this is someone else’s land. Always was. Always will be.
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The Museum of Australian Democracy is marking Bonner’s contribution to public life with a painting that traces his journey from a humpy on the Tweed to the Senate
It would be untrue to say the moderate Aboriginal activist Neville Bonner became the first of his people elected to federal parliament because he took the opportunities the Australian federal political system afforded him.
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He’s the foremost spiritual keeper of the yirdaki in Arnhem Land, but Djalu’s true gift to the Yolngu and the worlds beyond has been as a cultural ambassador
It’s almost seven years now since the London-based Australian filmmaker Ben Strunin began researching the life and times of one of northern Australia’s most compelling characters, Djalu Gurruwiwi.
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The ugly outpouring of anti-Muslim hatred seen in the beach riots of 2005 could easily be repeated again today anywhere in Australia
A decade ago a toxic brew of anti-Muslim hatred, alcohol, social media foment, threats to the mono-cultural beach scene of the Sutherland Shire and the noxious shock jock-ery of, among others, Alan Jones, manifested in the Cronulla riots.
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There are plenty of Indigenous people who could argue the case against a new constitutional settlement instead of a white, rightwing columnist
So, the ABC is turning the complex, divisive issue of constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians into a reality TV show featuring Andrew Bolt.