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Keywords: Colonisation

  • AUSTRALIA

    Listen – just listen!

    • Brian McCoy
    • 30 August 2023
    16 Comments

    The Kimberley region stands as a testament to both the enduring spirit of Australia's Aboriginal communities and the shadows of colonisation. As the Referendum looms, the potential for a united Voice beckons, inviting Australia towards a harmonious future.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The refugee children of colonisation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 June 2023
    5 Comments

    Observing World Refugee Week and the Referendum on the Voice to Parliament together is appropriate because the First Peoples and later refugees have suffered in similar ways. Jordana Silverstein's latest book draws striking parallels between Australia's colonial past and the modern treatment of refugee children.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A voice for the voiceless

    • Brian McCoy
    • 19 April 2023
    13 Comments

    Terence Darrell Kelly is not an isolated example of the intergenerational trauma that colonisation has brought to many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. As Australia grapples with the ongoing effects of colonisation, including the dispossession of land and culture, the need to listen to voices of Indigenous communities becomes increasingly urgent.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Discovery or cover-up?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 August 2022
    9 Comments

    Much has recently written about the doctrine of discovery and its bearing on the treatment of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the United States where it grounded an early legal decision. The doctrine enshrined in law claims that the discovery of underpopulated and cultivated lands conferred on the discoverers the right to ownership, and was used to justify colonial occupation of territory in the Americas, Asia and Africa.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The complexity of epidemics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 July 2021
    9 Comments

    It is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The uncomfortable legacy: colonisation and the church

    • Brian McCoy
    • 07 July 2021
    17 Comments

    Reading the paper, Instrumentum Laboris, written in preparation for the coming Plenary Council, I found myself quite disappointed by the lack of depth, awareness and any sense of the need for an apology. Much less an openness to any serious conversion that is needed within the Church.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia should resist totalising China narratives

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 July 2021
    28 Comments

    We should resist the pressure to regard China as our enemy. The pressure to do so is powerful, given the cycle of retaliatory words on both sides that further poison relationships. The impetus to enmity, however, damages both sides. To treat people as enemies means that they become enemies, with the result that both sides will spurn the mutual exchanges that can help each.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Palestine remains embroiled in the quagmire of politics and legitimacy

    • Ramona Wadi
    • 14 May 2021
    9 Comments

    Using the term ‘colonisation’ in regard to Israel and its relationship to Palestine and its settlements in the West Bank is contested, with some claiming that the situation is not a perfect parallel to other colonial contexts throughout history. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Racism in families belies simple reconciliation

    • Celeste Liddle
    • 22 April 2021
    9 Comments

    Due to the impacts of colonisation which have led to everything from loving intermarriage to acts of sexual violence, most Aboriginal people have non-Indigenous relations. Most of these people have, at some time or another, experienced racism within their extended family.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Learning from Timor-Leste’s experience for Victoria’s Yoo-rrook commission

    • Pat Walsh
    • 23 March 2021
    4 Comments

    Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a truth-telling inquiry that will investigate injustices committed against Aboriginal Victorians since colonisation, rightly looks to similar models in South Africa and Canada. Each of these also had a clear Indigenous focus and addressed the ravaging impact of white settlement on traditional lands, cultures and communities in their respective countries.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fair enough?

    • Seetha Nambiar Dodd
    • 20 October 2020
    3 Comments

    The story of colourism has roots that go back many generations; it has trickled relentlessly through time and is still evident in many ways today. In many countries with a colonial history, light skin was perceived, for a long time, as belonging to the upper classes, constituting power and wealth.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Felling statues raises deeper questions

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 June 2020
    14 Comments

    The larger questions posed by the destruction of the statues, and indeed of reputations, that they symbolise, concern how to handle complexity.

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