Over a month has passed since Australia Day, and Aboriginal affairs are once again receding into the horizon. The Closing the Gap Report attracted little popular attention, despite demonstrating that progress towards equality between white and black Australia remains stuck in the mud in five out of seven areas, including life expectancy.

One of the key tenets of historical studies is that memory is political. What and how we remember certain events speaks volumes not only about those events, but also about the sociohistorical spaces in which those events played out, as well as the spaces in which the events are remembered. I am most interested in the way that the Beaumont children’s disappearance has been framed as symbolic of national innocence lost.

It’s January in Australia and I’m hot and bothered.

It’s true I think, as Adam Phillips remarked in one of his later essays, that we continually speak each other’s unspoken thoughts. We are not as discrete as we appear to be. There are many things in our lives that get spoken over and over, that we can’t stop speaking of, that are, in a […]

On Australia Day night the moon rose very late. On nights like that the sky is revealed as an event that the word ‘spectacular’ doesn’t do justice. The Milky Way with the Magellanic Clouds hanging off it gives the sky a profound depth. In daylight the farthest you can see is three-and-a-half minutes no matter […]