Refusal is not only possible, it generates different worlds. Refusal insists on the possibility of alternative anti-colonial futures and ways of being. Refusing the University’s erasure of Palestine involves a collective effort in thinking on how we will teach Palestine, the ongoing settler colonial violence and what this means for a place like Australia.

Water is an elemental force that may be subtle or powerful, trickle gently, soothe or roar, and sweep all before it in a deadly trajectory. It comprises over ninety per cent of our bodies, and moves us, consciously or not, with the tides. For artist Judy Watson, water sits at the heart of her forty-year practice. It is her subject, material and inspiration.

In Indigenous Liberation & Socialism, historian and activist Jordan Humphreys probes the Australian far left’s evolving attitude towards Indigenous peoples, locating a tradition of working-class solidarity dating back to the 1890s. Humphreys is not blind, however, to the fact that this tradition was a minority perspective, or that solidarity was often clouded by paternalism and assimilatory thinking.

Dark Mofo has commissioned an artwork that interferes in Indigenous truth-telling in Lutruwita/Tasmania. Dark Mofo has given Santiago Sierra funding and a platform to attempt to act out a violent fantasy on stolen land, one that reinforces the harmful notion that Indigenous bodies, histories and stories are sites of exploitation and extraction. A fantasy of blood-soaked silence to be hung on a wall.

OCCURRENT AFFAIR has been conceived as a ‘collaborative activist gesture, … [addressing] current socio-political, economic and environmental issues, while celebrating the strength, resilience and continuity of Aboriginal culture’. It’s the first exhibition by the proppaNOW Aboriginal artists collective in the last five years.

If settlers are to see a treaty substantively address injustice, power, and inequality, we need to listen to Aboriginal people, especially to Aboriginal women, whose views, anger and pain are routinely silenced by nationalist discourses. We need to ensure that the state moves beyond the symbolic politics of recognition.

Dyirbal is now spoken by just twenty-nine speakers. Languages in decline have their own complexities. In their book Vanishing Voices: The extinction of the world’s languages, Daniel Nettle and Susan Domain explain how Dyirbal previously contained very specific terms which are now lost. Many terms for ‘big’ existed, depending on what was being described. A big eel required a different term to a big turkey, different again was a big tree.

The 1967 referendum remains a watershed moment in Australia’s civil rights history. On the 50th anniversary of the result, that saw over ninety per cent of Australians vote in favour of including First Nations people in the Commonwealth constitution, a special performance will pay homage to the era and its activists at the Sydney Festival.