When Lieutenant James Cook landed, uninvited, onto the continent now known as Australia, he began a colossal theft. The British colonial project initiated by his landing not only involved the mass theft of Aboriginal land, but also of sacred Aboriginal objects made...
Event: Decolonising Australia Roxley Foley, Firekeeper and spokesperson of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy Canberra Ex Freedom Summit delegate will be speaking via Skype on issues of ongoing Australian colonial paradigms that are contributing to the continued...
Even if you are a regular visitor at the British Museum, you probably haven’t noticed the Gweagal shield. It hangs on a hoall of the ‘Enlightenment’ room, a long regal chamber lined with glass cabinets and dotted with shiny white busts of colonial explorers. It has...
Social Justice, published by Routledge, editors: Davina Cooper, Sarah Keenan, Sarah Lamble. The Social Justice Book Series welcomes new manuscripts and book proposals. We are also happy to talk with authors whose book projects are at an early stage about the series....
I came late to riot grrrl. It was 2004 and there was a rush on tickets in Brisbane to see a band called Le Tigre. It seemed like every lesbian in the city was going. “What kind of music is it?” I asked my then girlfriend. “They’re girls”, she answered, “they shout a...
Like many others, I used to admire Julian Assange. In 2009 I took part in a campaign to nominate Assange for ‘Australian of the Year’, thinking that putting forward a journalist who actively publishes material that challenges nationalistic myths for a nationalistic...
Three years ago last Saturday, an oil rig around 50 kilometres off the coast of Louisiana exploded. The explosion killed eleven workers instantaneously, and marked the beginning of an 87-day period of uncontrollable crude oil spillage into the Gulf of Mexico, the...
Just over five years ago, on 21 June 2007, Australia’s then prime minister John Howard announced that rates of child sex abuse in the country’s Northern Territory aboriginal communities were so high that they constituted a national emergency. Drawing on the federal...
I've been a little taken aback this week at the level of racism against China in the British and US media, and on longer-than-usual comment threads on various friends’ facebook walls. I mean, I know that racism in sport and in the media is nothing new, and I know...
This weekend was an eventful one for the Tate Modern. Late Saturday morning, pursuant to section 7 of the Museums and Galleries Act 1992, art collective Liberate Tate presented the gallery with an unexpected ‘gift to the nation’. That gift was a 1.5 tonne, 16.5...
If you're tempted to listen to BBC5 this morning for some coverage of the London riots, don't. I made that mistake and was barraged by racist callers spouting off false facts and being moderated by a patronising school ma'am announcer who consistently referred to...
At least 28 Iranian and Iraqi asylum-seekers drowned yesterday within sight of the Australian territory they were aiming for. The media keeps emphasizing that there were "women and children" on board. If they were all men, would we not need to feel bad about it? is...
Early in opening discussion at the 'Spatial Justice' workshop, Massey said that those who had come for a punch-up were going to be disappointed, and she was right. While I wasn't blood-thirsty for a Massey Harvey heavy-weight match, along with many others I was...