Category: Advocacy

60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?

60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?

by | Dec 23, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 17 minutes
Each of these declamatory objects speaks back to power, a creative act of resistance to a perceived political injustice. Like the stories of the creation, presentation and reception of the Eureka Flag and the women’s suffrage petition, the story of the Bark Petitions takes us to a time when democratic inclusion, when basic entitlements of citizenship, could not be taken for granted by certain sections of the body politic.

Read More
Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters

Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters

by | Oct 14, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes The Native Mounted Police operated in Queensland for 80 years, starting in 1849. It consisted of small groups of between six and 15 Aboriginal troopers under the command of white officers. The troopers were typically recruited from areas far from where they were sent to serve. Detachments of troopers were regularly sent out on patrol, covering large areas along the frontier of the colony in pursuit of Indigenous people who were considered to be “problematic”. Their main job was to protect civilian settlers, the lands they had taken up, and their livelihoods – by whatever means necessary.

Read More
Why the Anthropocene began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the ‘great dying’ of the 16th century

Why the Anthropocene began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the ‘great dying’ of the 16th century

by | Aug 13, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
We’ve made enough concrete to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a layer two millimetres thick. Enough plastic has been manufactured to clingfilm it as well. We annually produce 4.8 billion tonnes of our top five crops and 4.8 billion livestock animals. There are 1.4 billion motor vehicles, 2 billion personal computers, and more mobile phones than the 7.8 billion people on Earth.

Read More
What Australia’s convict past reveals about women, men, marriage and work

What Australia’s convict past reveals about women, men, marriage and work

by | May 6, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
It is not the presence of convicts that matters, but the drastic distortion in the ratio of men to women that came with it. Convict men outnumbered convict women by roughly six to one. These numbers were even more skewed at the start of settlement. Convicts were joined by free migrants, especially in the second half of the 19th century, whose numbers also skewed heavily male. The ratio of men to women was consistently skewed in favour of males in Australia until the start of the first world war.

Read More
‘Habits of civilised life’: how one Australian State forced Indigenous people to meet onerous conditions to obtain citizenship

‘Habits of civilised life’: how one Australian State forced Indigenous people to meet onerous conditions to obtain citizenship

by | Apr 17, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
In the breakthrough High Court case Love and Thoms vs Commonwealth in 2020, the court ruled that First Nations people could not be considered aliens in Australia. As Justice James Edelman noted in the decision, whatever the other manners in which they were treated […] Aboriginal people were not ‘considered as foreigners in a kingdom which is their own’.

Read More
Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

by | Mar 27, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women. The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks, too.

Read More
“Homosexuals Are Not Cowards”: The Legacy of Willem Arondeus

“Homosexuals Are Not Cowards”: The Legacy of Willem Arondeus

by | Feb 21, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Dutch artist and author Willem Arondeus’ life had always been fraught with insecurity. Despite the modest success of his artwork, he lived in poverty, and friend Frieda Belinfante remembered him first for his timidity. ‘He was very shy,’ she said, ‘and kind of an inferiority complex. He didn’t think he was good enough for this or that.’

Read More
How unearthing Queensland’s ‘native police’ camps gives us a window onto colonial violence

How unearthing Queensland’s ‘native police’ camps gives us a window onto colonial violence

by | Dec 4, 2023 | , , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
This government-funded paramilitary force operated from 1849 (prior to Queensland’s separation from New South Wales) until 1904. It grew to have an expansive reach throughout the state, with camps established in strategic locations along the ever-expanding frontier, first in the southeast and then west and north. While staffed with non-Indigenous senior officers, the bulk of the force was made up of Aboriginal men and, sometimes, boys.

Read More
Loading