The Hands Off Melbourne’s Estates campaign's organisation, unity, and tactics defeated ten years ago a less extreme version of what Jacinta Allan’s government is implementing today. It’s worth asking how it did so, and whether shifts in the political terrain over the past decade mean such victories are now out of reach.

My response to Adam Kirsch’s essay “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism” in The Atlantic is framed by the writings of Patrick Wolfe, my own research and my Aboriginality. Kirsch would call this Indigeneity, which is a term I don’t often use — it’s too simple.

Schools are deliberate targets for government-funded mystification about Australia’s role in wars. Such instances of official remembrance crowd out the realities of war, and the consequences of Australia’s role in imperialism. As teachers, we should strive to resist this, and we should introduce our students to a fuller understanding of the history of the Anzacs.

First Nation people, who don’t live out their lives under the widespread amnesia over colonial offensives, see the disparity in casualities for what it is. Disproportionate and indiscriminate violence is a hallmark of settler-colonialism to any form of Indigenous resistance, redress or revenge.

Since early October, we have watched Israel perpetrate attacks of an unprecedented scale on Gaza. Their bombing campaign has aimed to destroy Palestinian lives and render it impossible for Palestinians to live in Gaza. Israel has destroyed universities and schools, cultural institutions, libraries, and archives. As historians we know this as an attack on a […]

I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together.

An interactive map that reveals lesbian, queer and feminist sport and fitness culture of 1970s and 1980s Sydney, and beyond.

On a freezing Massachusetts morning in 1967, nineteen-year-old Kathrine Switzer illegally entered, ran and finished the Boston Marathon, which was at that time a men-only race. Switzer was studying journalism, and running ten miles a night. Like many women athletes in the late 1960s, she trained with the men’s team, because there was nothing on offer for her. Her coach often regaled the entire team with stories of success at Boston, which he had run fifteen times, until Switzer insisted that she was good enough to run the twenty-six miles. ‘No dame has ever run Boston,’ he would reply.

Dismissing inconvenient histories and the problematic pasts of individual migrants to both Canada and Australia, however, is not useful. The complicity of the West in assisting perpetrators to escape justice should be acknowledged, and we must be wary of any attempt to normalise fascist views and actions in the public sphere.

Through hundreds of retellings, the imprints and reprints from Dampier’s publications—the earliest documented British incursion onto Indigenous lands—entrenched ‘truths’ about Aboriginal Australians. It was not until 1709 that all of Dampier's volumes had appeared and they’re quite a muddle of editions, volumes and parts. He assures his readers, however, that he has been ‘exactly and strictly careful to give on True relations and descriptions.’ In fact these are eye-wateringly derogatory by today’s standards.

By historicising cultural nostalgia, we may reveal the fundamental object of its longing—the retainment of communal land sovereignty—and prevent it from serving as a blank canvas for far-right populists. In solidaric dialogue with all victims of global colonial capitalism, then, let us reclaim nostalgia in service of its original cause: the ongoing struggle against private enclosure of the natural resources of which are our collective birthright. Our collective fate might depend on it.

The long history of Australian militarism reminds us that the necessary condemnations of Ben Roberts-Smith and the SAS need to be situated in relation to the country’s sub-imperial ambitions. ‘Are we a part of the Empire / Close welded as hilt and blade?’ AG Hales asked. As the tensions between the United States and China grow, that determination to weld Australia into Empire only becomes more dangerous.

While some aspects of her work can be challenging, including the English nationalism of Swastika Night, Katharione Burdekin's bold speculations were extraordinary for the period—as is the fact that she got them into print with major publishers, to appreciative reviews. As a writer on gender Burdekin is even more relevant in our troubled times. Her words, her ideas, retain their danger now.

Ann Turner’s poignant, eerie Cold War coming-of-age film Celia captures a period in Australian history that is glaringly absent from the national collective memory.

An understanding of class as a relationship and a process, and the expanded terrain of class struggle that comes with it, has the potential to unearth or reappraise key events and narratives in our colonial pasts.

This landscape is not a manifestation of a triumphal struggle over droughts, floods, hardships and Blacks. Rather, it is a refraction of swirling patterns of memory, memorialisation; suppression, repression and revelation; constantly ravelling and unravelling, endlessly struggling to erase or incorporate the Other and soothe the settler pillow.