Featured Stories
The shape of memory
Non-fictionI sit by the river searching for someone our national memory keepers sought to erase: my great-grandfather. Bundjalung man William Olive served across the Western Front in World War I. Aside from his digitised war record, the archives I have sought are almost silent. He enlisted when the Defence Act outlawed Aboriginal service. He suffered through two brutal offensives: the Somme and the Ypres Salient. He was wounded near Pozières in 1916, not far from this river in Amiens. William and I are separated by time and silence. But silence is a powerful act of agency. It can be revolutionary to hold your tongue, to refuse the container of words. Maybe a river can speak, but what if it, too, chooses silence?
Shutter click
IntroductionEARLIER THIS YEAR, I endured the miserably ubiquitous experience of trying to install a software update on my phone and discovering that I didn’t have enough space. I lost an hour or so trawling through the clutter of my...
The space waste
GR OnlineI don’t want to kill everyone’s buzz (Lightyear), but perhaps it’s time to reconsider how much money we waste on space stuff? Given the state of things on Earth, how can we justify (largely performative) space science? As someone who spends a lot of time attempting to make people care about science, this may seem like a strange hill to die on, but I’ve been struggling to quantify how useful millions of dollars of expenditure is proving to the scientific advancement of…what, exactly?
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Into the Archive
The archive has long been a form of collection, preservation and communication. As the internet and social media reshape what, why and how we record information, whether for personal or institutional means, the nature of the archive itself is...Featured Collection
First Nations Perspectives
Where truths collide
I AM SITTING forward, in nautical terms, looking astern at my awa, who is guiding us through reefs and straits on a moonless night. Above him are stars like phosphorescence in the squid-ink sky. Around his silhouette I see phosphorescence like stars in our small dinghy’s wake. I’m a young man excited to be going night-spearing for kaiyar, the painted crayfish.
Speaking up
The modern Australian incarnation of truth-telling that emerged from the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017 came not from dictatorship and civil war, as had truth-telling in the Latin American ‘radical democracies’ of the 1990s, which pioneered transitional justice. Instead, it derived from local people devising local solutions.
The power of the First Nations Matriarchy
I WAS BORN from the world’s most ancient womb: the sacred womb of a First Nations woman. The blood pumping through my veins is the life force of a long line of First Nations Warrior Women whose spirits run deep into this ancient soil. It is a privilege to be raised in a culture that understands the power of the First Nations Matriarchy.
When the heart speaks
I had in mind what Australia should be as I wrote the book, a gift to the peoples’ movement for legal, political and structural change in this country – the movement to establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament, as proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
The heart of seeding First Nations sovereignty
The demand for treaty – or, more accurately, the demand for many treaties – must be driven by the cultural authority of each sovereign First Nation. This process must be underpinned by cultural protocol and custom that recognises the many tribal clans within the First Nations.
The long road to Uluru
Uluru is a game changer. The response of ordinary Australians to the Statement has been overwhelming…a rallying call to the Australian people to “walk with us in a movement…for a better future”.
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Nanu Gaamu / Google said
WRITING GIVES ME the power to transform the colonial settler narrative written for me (the racialised assumption and notion that ‘natives are unlovable and uncaring’). Writing reminds me why I shouldn’t fear my language too, in spite of the old colonial notion that ‘Islanders’ speaking their language are criminals or evil. Every Thursday at 7 pm, I sit at the dinner table with my cultural parents, ready to hear and analyse the sound theory of Kala Lagaw Ya.
The space waste
IN THE WAKE of the news that the All-American Varsity Space Team recently splashed down after not dying aboard their Artemis mission, Americans are feeling good about how they nailed space again…
Confessions from a bookstore
IT’S A FUNNY thing to work a highly romanticised job – especially when that job is one you created to combat the deep-seated systemic failures of your industry. Customers and visitors to…
Inside it, trying
THE WRITERS’ STRIKE meeting at Égalité magazine is not going well. The writers are owed money, and the unpaid invoices are piling up. These characters have gathered to figure out…
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