The National Institute of Standards and Technology

About the author

Andrew Galan

Andrew Galan is the author of two collections of poetry, That Place of Infested Roads and For All the Veronicas, and his work has...

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Non-fictionThere’s no denying the pride and glory that comes with being born Aboriginal and knowing it, along with knowing the history of my culture. Yet with this comes a weight, attached by invisible rope tied by the hands of colonial settlers. Aboriginal people live with the death and damage our ancestors have experienced since 1788, while trying to outweigh it with the strength we inherit from the 2,000 generations that came before us. Cultural integrity is one of many facets of Aboriginal identity, and a testament to our reclamation of social governance led by our own communities. Aboriginal people recognise the power and impact lore and values have on the body and mind, and the life elements between, and this fuels our fire to design structures that allow our knowledge and history to be at the forefront of the services our people receive. Certainly, this powered my need to be working within the community, to acknowledge and understand the strength we find in the face of difficulty and push it into the valleys of my physical form as an Aboriginal creative.

The inspirations of radical nostalgia

Non-fictionEnvironmentalism, like history, is a civic discourse that critically engages with change in the world, contemplates the nature of limits and challenges ahistorical self-absorption. Like all good historians, environmentalists create recognition that the structures and conditions of today are not natural, inevitable or preordained but thoroughly contingent. The study of history and ecologically motivated advocacy also both demand reasoned scepticism towards the ideological claims of the powerful.

The Gordon cult

Non-fictionFrom a modern perspective Gordon makes an odd choice for a national poet, since he wrote only rarely about the country that embraced him. He set many of his popular verses in England and studded the others with the classical references familiar to an English gentleman. Yet before the passage of the 1931 Statute of Westminster – or, more exactly, until similar laws passed through the Australian Parliament in 1942 – Britain retained the legal right to determine foreign relations for the Australian Commonwealth. Accordingly, prior, during and for some time after the Great War, respectable Australian nationalism generally manifested as Empire patriotism.