A couple of Thursdays ago, the Queensland government quietly extinguished the Wangan and Jagalingou traditional owners’ native title over 1385 hectares of land that includes the Carmichael mine site. Families have been camped on the land near the mine site, anticipating forced removals.

On 21 June 2018, less than four hours before the passage of Australia’s first treaty legislation through the Victorian Parliament, the only Aboriginal member stood to draw attention to the hypocrisy and disrespect being shown by the Daniel Andrews Government.

There’s one thing that baffles people who probe further and ask about our political structure and history, though, and that’s our apparently unbroken relationship with the British arrivistes of 1788. For many modern states like Mexico, revolutions and the birth of republics mark the ‘natural’ history of a people becoming a sovereign nation, and are thus tied to the personal identity of citizens as proud and independent people.

I was thirteen years old when Helen Clark pinched my land. She told the country my family were ‘haters and wreckers’. I suppose this is another way of saying, it’s personal. Clark, New Zealand’s second-longest-serving Labour Prime Minister and apparently Australia’s choice for the next United Nations Secretary-General, is at the centre of a national tantrum after Marama Fox, the co-leader of the centrist Māori Party, told media that her party ‘cannot support [Clark’s] nomination [for Secretary-General]’.