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.

As a global pandemic joins a long list of catastrophes that have simply become a fact of ordinary life, it seems more urgent than ever to revisit and reimagine the fictions governing the accident. Conditions of debilitation, and the bodies that suffer them, deserve nothing less.

Fifty years ago, on 4 August 1972, three La Trobe University students were released from Pentridge Prison after serving, respectively, four months, three months and six weeks. Hardly any other political prisoners of that period in Australia had served such lengthy terms, with the exception of some of the draft resisters.

On 13 August 2021, the Geographical Names Board officially approved Bayside Council’s request to rename Eastlakes Reserve as Jack Mundey Reserve. Mundey was neither a local resident, councillor nor mayor. Yet sixty years ago, he led a movement that saved these four acres of land as a park for the local people.

When Iris Murdoch was grieving for her lover Franz Steiner, a few weeks after his death in late 1952, she talked for hours on end with fellow writer and eventual Nobel winner Elias Canetti. It was a foggy London night and Canetti offered her a bed, telling her that she could lock herself into the room where they were talking and he would sleep somewhere else. ‘She looked at me with surprise and disappointment,’ he wrote, and said she would go back to Oxford.

A core paradox of the memorialisation of the Holocaust is that its universal significance also makes it susceptible to being exploited for political ends. The political debates and considerations that have surrounded UNIHRD since its inception reflect a long history of political ‘framing’ of the Holocaust, that began even before the gates of the camps were sprung open. Ever since, public remembering has been fraught territory in any country that has attempted it.

The Dawn of Everything—David Graeber and David Wengrow’s ambitious revision of the Standard Narrative regarding so-called ‘pre-history’ and ‘pre-historic’ groups—is full of doors left ajar and rooms gleefully, if tentatively, explored. If it does not provide the reader with marching orders by the end of its 600+ pages, it nonetheless provides countless inspiring examples of the ways that many of our ancestors gradually built alternatives to their own societies, from within and without.

Putting prisoners and their unfree labour back into the historical picture not only tells a more realistic story of the past. It also tells us a lot about capital accumulation and its reproduction through related forms of labour—free and unfree, waged and unwaged.

The role of the historian is to break with received modes of understanding the world, whereby ‘the materialist presentation of history leads to the past to bring the present into a critical state.’ To do so is to challenge the nation-state, the empty time of capitalism and the politics of the future.

The work of the human scientist is a performance. Facts are not plain facts, sitting out there waiting for our recognition; they have to be brought into being with curiosity then some kind of funding, nurtured, celebrated and maintained in laboratories and seminars, and then propagated in the form of books.

Michael Roe’s retelling of Australia’s public health story from 1884 to about 1921 made me see that nothing we’re going through is new. Every mistake we’re making has been made before, and every strength we have has been in us all along.

The dedication of Farmers or Hunter-? to ‘Enkidu and Gilgamesh’, is something of a sleeper. In his interview with Stuart Rintoul, Sutton said that he sees ‘the birth of reconcilement’ in the Epic of Gilgamesh which is one of the earliest literary creations to emerge from the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. It was there that farming began, along with all its infrastructure of metalworking, urbanisation, writing, patriarchal theocracies, monarchies, armies, and colonisation.

This is a historical moment. Palestinians unite in protest from Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza, from Haifa to Ramallah, from Shatila to New York. Our voices come together in a chorus that echoes through time, calling, as we always have, for a Free Palestine. Now stand with us on the right side of history.

Just as today the question is who should pay for the Covid-19 recession, it was basic class antagonism over who should pay for the Great Depression that led to the mass unionisation of Hollywood studios.

This week it’s exactly eighty years since my great-grandmother, Emilie Rau, was murdered in a gas chamber built into the cellar of an asylum in Hadamar, a small town close to Frankfurt. She was forty-nine and had four children, of which my grandmother was the eldest.