Articles

Marriage equality in Australia is a final step on a long march from 1788

Submitted by Paul Daley on

The battle fought for and by LGBTI couples is echoed in the struggles of former convicts and Indigenous people against state restrictions on marriage rights

Sarah and Lazarus desperately wanted to marry.

Born in Somerset in 1813, the English justice system transported the 22-year-old Sarah Copley to Van Diemen’s Land in 1835. For her crime of stealing a chicken (her sister Mary was transported too for cooking the chook) she was held in the Cascades Female Factory at the foot of Mount Wellington, Hobart, until reassigned to domestic servitude.

Encounters exhibition: a stunning but troubling collection of colonial plunder

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The National Museum of Australia’s show of Indigenous Australian objects is a museological minefield, raising questions about why they cannot stay in the country from which they were taken

The National Museum of Australia’s exhibition, Encounters, is drawn from the vast and rarely seen Australian Indigenous collection of the British Museum, a repository of booty from all corners of an empire under constant erosion.

'He should have died': the Vietnam veteran who never really returned

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In what he says may be his last – and most personal – book, historian Michael McKernan explores the story of his brother-in-law Joe Stawyskyj, drafted to Vietnam, the horrific injuries he suffered, and the life that followed

Most people measure their lives, how long they’ve lived and might have left, in time. Years. Months. Days. Hours.

But writers measure it in books, as in, for example: “I reckon I’ve got five or six books left in me.”

The little-known story of the Indigenous man at the heart of the Menzies government

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Driver, personal assistant and cabinet officer, Alf Stafford is testimony to a strong Indigenous presence in Australian government in the 20th century

Sir Robert Menzies was busy.

So, when the Australian portrait artist William Dargie came to Canberra to paint Australia’s longest-serving prime minister in 1963, Menzies asked his close friend and confidant Alf Stafford to sit in for him.

Australia's lavish spending on Anzac memorials cloaks a more distasteful reality

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The government has put $552m towards the first world war centenary. As we pause for Remembrance Day, isn’t it time to stop spending millions on the dead and focus on living veterans?

Remembrance Day, commemorated annually on 11 November since 1919 to honour all Commonwealth war dead, has arrived again.

Long to reign over Aus? Prince Charles and Australia go way back

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The Prince of Wales’s popularity in Australia has, like the monarchy as a whole, waxed and waned over the decades. Now he’s returning for a five-day tour and a meeting with a new prime minister who wants his country to be a republic

In 1901, when the future King George V visited the imperial outstation of Melbourne as the Duke of Cornwall to open the new federation’s first national parliament, an official diarist recorded the anticipation in the then Australian capital.

Gough Whitlam: 40 years on, the Dismissal's bastardry still intrigues | Paul Daley

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Had Twitter or mobile phones been around in 1975, Malcolm Fraser’s integral role in John Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam would have been known much earlier

On the afternoon of 11 November 1975, the steps of Canberra’s old Parliament House became the stage for the most immortal of so very many Gough Whitlam-isms.

“Well may we say ‘God save the Queen’ – because nothing will save the governor general.”

When the UN used Uluru's sacred space as an advertising space | Paul Daley

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Indigenous activists were outraged when the United Nations’ logo was projected on to the Aboriginal spiritual and cultural site

According to the Anangu, the traditional owners of Uluru in central Australia, it is not OK to climb the imposing red rock.

So why, then, was the United Nations permitted to illuminate what many Indigenous Australians – including the Anangu – rightly consider to be a most sacred Aboriginal spiritual and cultural site and to advertise its logo on its face?

From Butchers Creek to Berlin: did Douglas Grant see the body of an Indigenous relative in Germany?

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Paul Daley examines new evidence tracing the shared history of Ngadjon man Narcha, and Douglas Grant, the black Australian soldier and first world war one hero, who were both survivors of a Queensland massacre

Butchers Creek isn’t flowing today despite the rain that whips across the cane fields in drenching horizontal sheets.

Asio chief defied Gough Whitlam's order to cut ties with the CIA in 1974

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Latest volume of Asio’s official history sheds light on the lowest point of US-Australian relations in the turbulent years of the Whitlam government

The chief of Australia’s domestic spy agency, Asio, defied a direct order from then Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1974 to sever all ties with America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

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