The green gold grassy hills

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Indelible ink

FictionSelected for Best Australian Stories 2006SHE WAS FIFTY-NINE, rich, divorced for a year, and out alone on a Saturday night. She told the taxi...

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In the Dollhouse

Poetry I don’t remember my Barbies, but Mother once told me I had twist-popped their limbs off. I do recall this one doll – she would wet her nappy if...

In ConversationIf Aboriginal people are all dead, you don’t have to negotiate a treaty with us and you certainly don’t have to go around feeling guilty about stolen land and stolen wages and stolen children; the subjects of that injustice don’t exist anymore if you choose to believe that we’re dead or all assimilated, which isn’t the case. It’s a very practical kind of assimilation strategy.

From anchor to weapon

Non-fictionIn 1930s Germany, the slogan ‘blood and soil’ was most prominently promulgated by the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, which positioned itself not merely as an administrator but a kind of advocate-guardian of the soil and its workers. In 1930, Adolf Hitler recruited Richard Walther Darré, then a leading blood and soil theorist, to the Nazi Party. On seizing power in 1933, Hitler appointed Darré Reichsminister of Agriculture, a role he occupied until 1942. Recently, for reasons that are unclear but politically alarming, Darré’s works on blood and soil have been translated and republished in English to some fanfare.