Painting Fakes

While I've been recovering from a piece of minor surgery I've spent a bit of time reading Philippa Mein Smith's A Concise History of New Zealand. Strange reading for a health break, you think?  Well, I've spent most of my life in Australia, just a short trip across the Tasman from New Zealand, and yet I'm ashamed to say I know less about the place than about many countries further from me.  The closest I have come to visiting is a quick change of planes in Auckland Airport, and before reading Mein Smith's book I knew almost nothing about its history. Like most Australians I guess, I see New Zealand as like a younger sister.  They are near us, they were founded by the same British colonialists, they speak the same language, they share a history of displacement of their original inhabitants.  Like younger sisters everywhere, they are similar to us, but a bit nicer.  Their people are a bit friendlier, their race relations a bit less oppressive, their politics a bit

There are several ways to cover a classic song.  You can do the tribute, where you try to sing the song as close to its original as possible.  You can do a complete makeover, where you turn a song in one genre into one in a completely different genre. Or you can do this... 'From Little Things Big Things Grow' is a classic Aussie song celebrating one of the pivotal events of Aboriginal Australians' struggle for land rights, the Wave Hill walk-off.  In 1966 the Gurindji, led by senior elder and law-man Vincent Lingiari, walked off Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory in protest at their poor working and living conditions on their own country.  They stayed on strike until 1975 when the Whitlam Government finally granted them title over the land - or perhaps it would be better to say, recognised their ongoing ownership.   Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly wrote the song in 1991 and released separate versions of it over the next year or two.  Since then they've often perform

Here's another little thing about imagination which neatly brings together the idea of animals having their own reasons , and the fact that Australia's First Nations have some different ways of seeing the world. The story of the orcas and whalers of Eden is one of those iconic Australian stories, popularised in Tom Mead's book Killers of Eden in 1961 and since the subject of various books and documentaries as well as a quite impressive little museum.   Eden sits on Twofold Bay in southern NSW, on the country of the Yuin people.  The story involves three generations of the Davidson family, who ran a shore based whaling operation out of Eden from the 1840s to the 1920s.  In the 1840s a number of different crews tried whaling from Eden, but only the Davidsons' survived.  They were successful because they, and they alone, had the assistance of a pod of orcas who acted like sheepdogs, driving the whales towards their boats and harassing them until the whalers could secure

Here's another crack at opening up our imaginations about different ways to live, this time drawing on the experiences and knowledge of one of Australia's First Nations.  This is not my story, it's my reflection on someone else's story. We often think of the invasion and colonisation of Australia as having taken place in the 19th century.  In reality it was a gradual process and it continues to this day.  We see its continuation in our own time in Rio Tinto's destruction this year of the Juukan Caves, a site occupied by the Puutu Kunti Kuurama and Pinikura peoples for at least 45,000 years.  We also see it in the recent exclusion of Wangan and Jagalingou people from the site of the Carmichael Mine in Central Queensland. Both these nations have had to live with Europeans on their country for generations, but there are still people alive today who are among the first generation of their peoples to have contact with Europeans.  One of the most famous is the celebrated

A little after 8.00pm on Monday, 15 June, Noel Henry was riding his bicycle to his home in the Adelaide suburb of Kilburn when he was pulled over by the police.  They told him they suspected him of being in possession of drugs, and ordered him to put his hands on his head so they could search him.  According to the police statement released the next day, he 'originally was compliant and after a short time he began to refuse. Police attempted to arrest the man who resisted and a struggle ensued.'   The noise of this struggle alerted his friends who came out of the house.  Some of them filmed parts of the incident and subsequently posted their films on social media.  They show three police officers holding Henry on the ground, one of them hitting him, and his head being forcibly pushed down onto the concrete footing of the fence they have pinned him against.  All this while his friends yell at the police to 'get off his head' and 'let his head up', while others

It being NAIDOC week, and us all talking about the voice to parliament, treaties and so forth, it's only fair that I should write a review of Sarah Maddison's book, The Colonial Fantasy: Why White Australia Can't Solve Black Problems. Sarah Maddison is Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne.  She is not an Indigenous person, but she has written and researched extensively on Indigenous politics and a good deal of this book consists of direct quotes from Indigenous authors and leaders.  She doesn't claim to represent or speak for Aboriginal people. She is careful to represent the diversity of Indigenous views rather than pretend to consensus. Still, her extensive quotes show at least that there is no shortage of Indigenous people who share her view, even if others have a different opinion. Why, she asks, after decades of debate and effort, are we not succeeding in solving the issues of inequality that face Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communitie

Australia has many myths about its history, and particularly about our history of invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal people.  Among them are the myth that Australia was terra nullius , an empty land, prior to the arrival of the British; the idea that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers who roamed randomly around the country; and the idea that the Europeans named the various parts of the country , as if they did not already have names. Each of these myths has been comprehensively busted, but many Australians remain unaware of this fact.  Other myths also remain alive. Rosalind Kidd is a Queensland historian whose main work has been on the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland.  At the start of the 1990s she was given access, through the intervention of Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, to the files of Queensland's Aboriginal Affairs Department going back to the foundation of the colony.  Aside from her doctoral thesis, the major results of