Peter Boyle reviews David Marr's Killing for Country: A Family History, a chronicle of his forebears who were deployed from 1849 to the 1920s to carry out systematic massacres of First Nations peoples in the frontier wars in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Frontier Wars
A ceremony marking the 181st anniversary of the execution of freedom fighters was held at the Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner monument on the corner of Victoria and Franklin Streets. Darren Saffin reports.
Rachel Perkins' new series, The Australian Wars, is a powerful history of colonial wars of occupation against First Nations peoples, writes Andrew Chuter.
A nation that refuses to confront the truth that modern Australia was built on violent dispossession and genocide is incapable of addressing the legacies of invasion, argues ´³²¹²Ô±ð³ÙÌý±Ê²¹°ù°ì±ð°ù.
The quest for Aboriginal sovereignty challenges non-Indigenous Australia to let go of any perceived right to define what sovereignty is, writes Peter Griffin.
I don’t know if an opinion poll has ever been done, but a sizeable portion of Australians, perhaps a majority, recognise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had their land invaded by the British and experienced a systematic genocide.
The fact that this is widely recognised is reflected in the huge protests in response to threats to close remote Aboriginal communities and the response to Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance’s call-out for protests. Even back in 1988, there were 100,000 people protesting the so-called Bicentenary in Sydney.
Thanks to a passing reference in this column only a week ago about statues and other monuments featuring colonial "founding fathers" that participated in massacres of Aboriginal people and other wrongs, I got lumped into Andrew Bolt's collection of "statue haters".
Others in the corporate media suggested that even having the discussion was like Nazi book burning. Right. And we're the ones disrespecting history!