Articles

Anthony Martin Fernando: the Aboriginal activist who took his people's fight to London

Submitted by Paul Daley on

A century ago, Fernando travelled to Europe in self-imposed exile to protest the massacres of Indigenous people in Australia. Once there he was interned and deported to Britain – where he took the fight to the streets

It is the London winter of 1928. Fog blankets the city.

Pedestrians and commuters along one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares are arrested at the spectacle directly outside the Edwardian baroque marble facade of Australia House on the corner of the Strand and Aldwych.

This is all that Australia has left of my people

Antony Hegarty, the Martu and the mine: land custodians fight corporate might

Submitted by Paul Daley on

The New York avant garde transgender singer joins the Martu people of Parnngurr in Western Australia to oppose a uranium mine 80km away

• Antony Hegarty condems genocide of indigenous peoples in Australia and US

When an international mining company surveys the Australian land for minerals it sees few physical impediments.

The Secret River review – have we really moved on?

Submitted by Paul Daley on

‘Important and confronting’ ABC TV drama on hostile early Sydney settlement shows how precisely the past aligns with the present

The Secret River is a two-part ABC television drama that tackles the chilling fundamentals of Australian white settlement: Europeans invaded, slaughtered the first peoples and stole their land.

It is excellent. It is important. It is courageous, confronting television.

Renouncing Australia: a dozen people to follow Murrumu by taking Yidindji citizenship

Submitted by Paul Daley on

Move may cause headache for Queensland police if those taking pledge insist on using documents issued by Indigenous nation

Queensland police may have regarded it as a rather bizarre, one-off incident when they recently arrested Murrumu Walubara Yidindji while he was driving with a licence and a car registration issued in the name of his north Queensland Indigenous nation.

Myall Creek: here, in 1838, a crime that would not be forgotten took place

Submitted by Paul Daley on

This weekend people from all over Australia, black and white, will converge on Myall Creek. The massacre of unarmed men, women and children there has become totemic of the national silence over the frontier wars

Remembering is central to healing the pain of injustice and atrocity.

Indigenous Australians have a way of remembering, the good and the bad, through oral history and art that passes memories down through the generations.

It's old and it's fragile but rock art from the 'stone country' lives to tell its tales

Submitted by Paul Daley on

In Canberra’s Nishi gallery photographs of precious rock art from west Arnhem Land tell an extraordinary story of first contact between the Bininj people and white explorers, hunters and miners

Warddeken ranger Terrah Guymala wards off the cold with a thick fleece and beanie while he walks around Canberra’s Nishi gallery, its walls adorned with photographs of precious rock art from his place, the “stone country” of west Arnhem Land.

When two old foes opened Pandora's box, it unleashed an unlikely reconciliation

Submitted by Paul Daley on

In 1972, Department of Aboriginal Affairs chief Barrie Dexter sacked his activist employee Gary Foley and urged Asio to spy on him. More than 40 years on, as Foley edited his old nemesis’ memoir, the pair forged an unlikely bond

William Wentworth had a clear priority when, in February 1968, he became the first federal minister with responsibility for “Aboriginal affairs”.

Toilets.

It is disgusting that Aborigines are defecating all over the Northern Territory

I’ll see you on Saturday mate. Rest up eh? We’ve been waiting a long time for this

Australian War Memorial: the remarkable rise and rise of the nation's secular shrine

Submitted by Paul Daley on

Director Brendan Nelson talks about the Gallipoli centenary, being in charge of the world’s 17th most popular landmark and why victims of the frontier wars will have to wait for recognition

Canberra was never meant to have an Australian war memorial.

In 1912 when Walter Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin, won the international competition to design the capital of newly federated Australia, their plan included a casino where the monument to this country’s 102,000 war dead now stands instead.

If I can’t have an impact within two years I’ve failed

Anzac Day should be quarantined from politicians – a solemn moment to reflect on the agony of war | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on

Politicians use the Gallipoli landings to justify wars, past and present. They also use them to conveniently define our national history. But this isn’t what the centenary should be about

Time eventually heals old battlefields. A gentle, grassy furrow might indicate where men once hacked a trench and the verdant expanse beyond where they eviscerated each other with bayonets.

But what happened a long time ago is rarely evident on the surface of old war grounds.

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