By Tad Tietze This post is dedicated to the memory of the essayist and blogger The Piping Shrike, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on 15 July this year. A dear friend and a key inspiration for this blog’s “anti-politics” analysis, as well as my thinking on race and the Constitution. Strip away the rancour […]
11 Jun
Comments Off on Australia’s racial state, Indigenous Recognition & the Left
This article was first published at New Matilda. For those who think that Indigenous rights issues generally split people along Left/Right political lines, the stoush within the conservative camp between influential Herald-Sun columnist and blogger Andrew Bolt and The Australian over “Recognition” must be confusing. Yet for months now Bolt and the Murdoch-owned broadsheet have […]
26 Jan
Comments Off on Invasion Day
A number of myths have shaped Australia’s national identity in profound ways. The possibility of a vast inland sea saw many early settlers search the interior of the country unfruitfully, often meeting an untimely death. The kernel of this myth was a 1798 report to the Colonial Office by First Fleet botanist Joseph Banks: It […]
01 Oct
Comments Off on Premature celebration? The Bolt verdict & the Left’s missing critique of the state
In this blog post I want to argue that the Bolt verdict is a problematic “victory” against the right-wing pundit and the Right more generally. Without wanting to diminish abhorrent and manifestly racist character of Bolt’s attack on “fair-skinned” Aboriginal people, I think that any celebration of the result by the Left is premature and […]
01 Dec
Comments Off on Vale Bobbi Sykes
Reposted from the Overland Journal Blog: A fortnight ago Bobbi Sykes died. When I read the news, I was stilled by sorrow for and about someone I have never met. I am not a practiced obituary writer, nor am I an ‘expert’ on Aboriginal poetry. I write this post because the girl of 18 who first read […]
12 Oct
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