Mapping the Political Terrain
The history of post-revolution liberation movements has often been a history of the transition towards autocratic rule by former leaders of the liberation movements, through single-party states or...
View ArticleI’m Branded
No Logo author Naomi Klein recently visited Australia, which brought her book to the attention of the mainstream media and the celebrity-making machine. Klein resisted this, but described the book’s...
View ArticleKingdom of Nothingness
Listeners to the ABCs Late Night Live program were treated to an extraordinary radio event some weeks ago. With the release of ‘Sending Them Home’, the latest Quarterly Essay, which deals with...
View ArticleAnaesthetising the National Conscience
Tony Abbott said recently, in connection with the Prime Minister’s revised attitude to parliamentarians’ superannuation, that ‘it takes real guts to do the right thing in difficult political...
View ArticleThe ‘Devil’ in Haiti
A few days after the earthquake, Pat Robertson, a sexist, racist, homophobic American preacher, declared Haitians themselves were to blame for the disaster as they had sworn ‘a pact to [sic] the...
View ArticleResponse to Lattas and Morris’ ‘Blinkered Anthropology’
In Arena Magazine no. 107, Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris attribute to me the view that the current situation of Indigenous people, however one interprets it, is due to their ‘culture’. Nowhere have I...
View ArticleWays to Claim a Country
Identifying the Past This essay began in a cobbled street in the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. As I gaze uncomprehendingly down into an open archaeology dig, roped off and with...
View ArticleThe intervention in context
The Howard Government’s 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), colloquially described as the ‘Intervention’, will form a major landmark of our country’s history in the 21st century. To many...
View ArticleShifting Fortunes: Mount Nancy
The BasicsCard is very discriminating, it’s very shameful when going shopping. You have to scan items to make sure you have enough on your card to pay for food or other essential items. And the...
View ArticleDo No Harm
Six months ago the Internet exploded with the media sensation that was Kony 2012. The swish campaign film made by US NGO Invisible Children called for international action to pursue and capture Joseph...
View ArticleProportionality Lost, Australia’s New Counter-Terrorism Laws, by Spencer Zifcak
New law requires careful deliberation, particularly if it infringes on civil liberties. In this case, it didn't get it.
View ArticleTom Bamforth’s Deep Field: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Aid Relief...
All too often human disasters, particularly ones in Africa, serve as the setting for entitled European people to act out their exciting adventures.
View ArticleStory-telling: Justice and recognition in the narratives of those who have...
The justice process is tied to telling stories and to telling the truth. All around the world, victims of human-rights abuse are judged on their stories.
View ArticleMalice in Wonderland, by Desmond Manderson
The Abbott government and the erosion of the rule of law
View ArticleTime for Treaty, By Tony McAvoy
Principles for a treaty based on fundamental human equality
View ArticleThis Is not a Truck, by Micaela Sahhar
Misapprehending terror and recognising resistance in Palestine
View ArticleWe Are Not Monkeys!, by Peter Arndt
The date 15 August 1962 is significant in the history of the people of the western half of the island of New Guinea, the place commonly called West Papua. On that date the Kingdom of the Netherlands,...
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Weaponising Human Rights: Can the Magnitsky Act deny due process?
The Australian parliament seems about to approve a ‘human rights’ law that would establish the ability to exert arbitrary state power over individuals in other countries who have been accused of human...
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