A travelogue tells you about a person, and a place, and, sometimes, a travelogue tells the reader something about herself. I love travelogues. I love travelogues of Australians in Australia, non-Australians in Australia, Australians not in Australia. I also love travel tales of people in China and Malaysia and Singapore, the other places of my heart and my ancestors. Whether these are accounts of people in their homes or on the road, these stories are always new to me, and there’s always the joy of exploration and unfamiliarity.

One of my earliest memories of New Zealand is of being told to ‘Go back to China!’ in the playground at school (ironically called the Confidence Course). This irked me, because I wasn’t from China.

‘When I was a child,’ French philosopher Jacques Rancière wrote, ‘on the day of solemn communions we’d go to school to meet our non-Catholic friends, wearing our communicants’ armbands and handing out pictures. No one thought that this was a threat to laïcité.’ So what changed? How did the onus to subscribe to secularism shift from the state to the individual?

Most of the debates about Muslim women’s modes of dress have rested on their ability to conform to narrow ideas of what being Australian looks like or means. Such debates merely lead to the dead ends of assimilation and exclusion. In light of that, it is worth reflecting on the history of the burkini and its importance as a cultural signifier.

Wave Hill (and Daguragu) is now embroidered into our sociocultural unconscious. It is an actual bona fide ‘watershed moment’ in the short history of the Australian Commonwealth. But what commenced fifty years ago on 23 August 1966 at Wave Hill was itself informed by an industrial dispute that occurred two decades earlier.

But the tracking of lives through government documentation, in particular Aboriginal lives and the lives of other racialised people, has a long history. Despite Keane’s alarm, this kind of surveillance is not a novel breach of privacy. Certain lives and populations have been subject to tracking and surveillance since the beginnings of colonisation in this country; such scrutiny has been a key tactic of various Australian governments.

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]’.

If nothing else, the incident showed just how normalised Islamophobia has become in Australia. Had Kruger called to ban Jewish immigration, her TV career would (quite rightly) have come to an abrupt end – and no mainstream broadcaster would have dared pipe up on her behalf. But Aly’s intervention was especially odd given that Kruger had shown no sign of wanting forgiveness.

In calling on the outraged to employ laudable virtues such as empathy, patience, and understanding towards those seeking to harm them, Aly performs an act typical of mainstream liberalism. That is, to obscure systemic injustices and destructive political realities in preference of a terse symbolism that fails to address those material realities. In this case, an orchestrated appeal to an abstract forgiveness that does nothing to alleviate the suffering already felt by those on the receiving end of Australia’s many violent practices.

Australia, like much of the world, is experiencing a renaissance of violence, both direct and structural, against minorities, and the reception of Cleverman’s critique is important. The show’s ratings are modest and steadily declining in spite of good reviews: this might be symptomatic of a nation’s refusal to talk about its own racism and xenophobia, but it also reflects the need for real talk.

That Victorian Education Minister James Merlino appeased these groups and ordered the VCAA to review its text selection process is unsurprising – he found Israel ‘absolutely inspiring’ during a 2013 ALP study tour [read: junket]. In fact, successive Australian governments have staunchly supported the Israeli state since its inception, including its apartheid policies, and parliamentarians from both major parties regularly enjoy its hospitality.

This casual acceptance of child sexual assault in detention centres is perhaps best summed up in this statement made by the former Prime Minister Tony Abbott: ‘occasionally, I dare say, things happen … Because in any institution you get things that, occasionally, aren’t perfect.’

It’s easy to laugh at Nazis (and fun, too). But the debate in the UPF’s ranks highlights a real issue: the extent to which the right (and even the far right) now feels confident to denounce the left in the name of the oppressed.

In early September 2015, the Federal Court proceedings commenced for the first-ever class action filed against the Queensland Police. If it is won, Wotton v. State of Queensland will be the only case in Australian history in which a community has successfully sued the Queensland Police on the grounds of racial discrimination.

An Australian politician doesn’t usually become immigration minister all at once. Generally, the portfolio takes some time to work its evil magic on new appointments. Think of the slow desiccation of Liberal moderate Philip Ruddock, transformed, over a period of years, into an animated cadaver clutching an Amnesty badge in its withered claws.

Arguing over whether criticising Israel or Zionism is a form of racism is an almost insane inversion of reality: 58 per cent of Israelis think Israel practices apartheid in some (or many) ways. Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians since 1967 without granting them basic civil or political rights. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have rights under Israeli law denied to Palestinians living in the same territory.