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.

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.