The sentiment is common, even if the frankness isn’t. Few Australians would be willing to admit their private thoughts on public television like Dawn Fraser did. Few could do it with the same irony too (Fraser’s father is from Scotland). But what’s more interesting than the sentiment, frankness or irony is the history underpinning the idea that those who aren’t performing the Australian identity should return to ‘where their parents came from’.

Australian sport is often talked about as the great equaliser: a sacred space where camaraderie can overcome intolerance and exclusion. Skin colour and surnames are irrelevant and athletic ability is the only measure of success – except when it isn’t.

Richard Holmes describes biography as a 'handshake across time', an 'act of human solidarity and in its own way an act of recognition and of love.' The RM books were motivated by a similar sentiment. Re-excavating the physical traces of labour history was, as we said in the introduction, an effort to 'provide a bridge between the struggles of the past and the people of the present'.

The Unforgiving Rope: Murder and Hanging on Australia’s Western Frontier Simon Adams UWAP Have you got one of those relatives, the kind who insists that the answer to all the world’s problems is to bring back hanging? You know who I mean. They usually live in a fantasy land called the Good Old Days. Yes? […]

The controversy over the burial of the dead of SIEV 221 still seems to have the aura of an event that everyone agrees not to speak of ever again. Some things in life, Scott Morrison’s outrage at the SIEV 221 funerals being one of them, are just too creepy to keep talking about. For a […]

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 […]

At this year’s Garma Festival a friend told me of a conversation she had with someone who used to work for the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). When she told this guy that she was from Alice Springs, he commented that some people in FaHCSIA are talking of moving to […]

Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (eds) UNSW Press Labelling something to be ‘in crisis’ can be a fraught activity; when the motivation is to create a rethinking of the issue at hand, it often leads to bandaid solutions to quickly fix the crisis. In this collection of […]

art + soul Hetti Perkins Pan Macmillan The first thing you notice about this book is that it is beautiful. The sleeve on the cover balances a contemporary Aboriginal painting across the top, with a lovely landscape shot along the bottom; standing in between is Hetti and the title. This beauty is continued throughout the […]

The first thing that sticks out about Garma are the tents. Rows and rows of them set up in designated areas: artists, volunteers, cultural tourists, paying attendees, academics, forum participants – all the way across the other side of the bungal ground to the Yolgnu camp. It’s a mini-city that exists for five days all […]

A weed by definition alone says a lot In his books The New Nature and Feral Future, Tim Low writes about the adaptability of weeds and introduced species to thrive and transform the natural environmental of Australia. Through the stories of explorers writing about the Harpy-like crows, the endangered bell frog living in the old […]

The Western Australian Government’s proposal to develop, along with Woodside Petroleum, a $30billion liquefied natural gas plant at Walmadany (James Price Point), north of Broome, is a startling example of how capitalism and colonialism can converge to ensure cultural and ecological destruction. Walmadany is no mere speck on the map. It is certainly no ‘unremarkable […]

I’m writing a PhD on Indigenous Australia and have been travelling the Top End researching for six months or so. The Melbourne Writers Festival began the very day after I arrived home. Given the topic of my PhD, attending the Writing Indigenous Australia seminar seemed like an appropriate thing to do. The panel was made […]

Given that we have until 23 May to review the new National Curriculum, I recently shouldered my civic duty and had a look. What caught my attention was this: there will be three ‘cross-curriculum dimensions’ running through the main subject areas of English, math, science and history. These are ‘Indigenous history and culture’, ‘Asia and […]