Given the history and the structure behind it, there’s nothing surprising about Morrison’s ignorance. The question is whether we allow this indifference to continue the structure of invasion by further colonising the past or choose to accept the responsibility for its redress.

In 2016, the Academy Awards clearly has its own ideological issues. But these stories and hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite demand we remember the long history of this institutionally sanctioned white privilege in particular.

And so the culture wars rage on. In the latest instalment, the World Fantasy Award has decided to retire the bust of HP Lovecraft, traditionally used for the award. The new image for the award is yet to be decided. This has happened hot on the heels of the Hugo Awards controversy and Gamergate, and the world of speculative fiction has once again erupted into acrimony.

Some people will ask, ‘What’s your background?’ Others, usually with a drunken drawl, will demand, ‘What’s your nationality?’ even if I’ve explained that I’m Australian. Some will put it simply by asking, ‘Where are you from?’ And this question, without fail, vacillates from the obvious to the awkward. Not Geelong, Blackburn or Carlton – no, these places do not suffice as places of origin. What they want to know is where my coloured skin comes from even if, in a locational sense, I’m not from there.

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.

In the German discussion, the neo-Nazi is a shorthand device for the idea of a real racist — someone violent, intractable and proud to proclaim their racism. However, another important aspect of this trope is that it locates racism outside of the mainstream.

By 1895, in Australia a ‘battler’ was someone trying to live off betting on horse races despite always losing, and from the late 1800s through to the 1950s, it referred to a female sex worker who went about her business without a pimp. For Moore, then, ‘the battler was a person at the very lowest end of society, who struggled to eke out a very basic existence’.

Can Australian politics get any ghastlier? Even from a country away the stench from Rudd and Abbott appalls. So much for boundless plains to share. Racism, so much a part of the practice of the elites in Australia and elsewhere, can seem so pervasive we miss its everyday reinforcements and constructions. There’s institutional racism aplenty, to be sure, but identifying it forces us to another question: how did institutions get that way?

Part of the reason why the asylum debate among the Left fails to look beyond the end of its own nose is the exclusion of racialised voices from the public arena. Understanding why white, left-wing Australians of a certain ilk are so invested in divesting their society of responsibility for racism is key to understanding why someone like Keane can dismiss ‘let them all come’ – or as I prefer it, Open Borders – as impractical and irresponsible.

Over the last few decades, the rightward shift in the political culture has facilitated a rehabilitation of the Vietnam War, a process that, in Australia, has accompanied and built upon the re-fashioning of Anzac Day, as the extrication of the Great War from any historical context whatsoever paves the way for a similar un-remembering of Vietnam.

Ben Zygier was born in suburban Melbourne in 1976. In 2010, he died a secret prisoner, about whom the Israeli military censor prevented the media from writing. How did this happen?

I spent a morning at the former ‘comfort women’s’ weekly demonstration outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul one Wednesday during the northern summer of 2008, and have never been sure how to write about the experience.

There is a problem of ethnic persecution in Sri Lanka. The civil war, which began in 1983, was forged by the persecution of Tamil communities, and when the civil war ended in 2010, it was terminated in violent acts that targeted the ethnic Tamil minority.

Kate Davison is a Berlin-based journalist, writer and activist. She obtained her Masters in English Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin, and is currently a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. We speak to Kate about her life in Berlin and her essay, ‘My German Question’, which appears in the latest issue of Overland.

While Spielberg’s tale will have viewers exiting the cinema in a complete and total patriotic coma, Tarantino’s will have audiences walking out dripping in the blood, gore and guts of American history.