Writer
Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian.
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Australia Day: The contention is inescapable
Contemporary Australia is not the wayward step-child of Britain. It was created in our own country. Is it time to establish an Australia Day freed from the dark shadows cast by the now discredited British Empire? Continue reading »
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Australia is addicted to fighting other people’s wars
How do we explain that half the Australian community thinks we should go to war with China? After twenty years of conflict in the Middle East, will our addiction to war and our insouciance about its consequences finally catch up with us in an American war over Taiwan? Continue reading »
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AUKUS is breathing new life into our oldest relationships – Marles
It will come as no surprise to readers of Pearls and Irritations that AUKUS continues to arouse contention while organised public opposition mobilises. Continue reading »
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War Memorial pressured into recognition of Frontier Wars
A watershed moment for Australia as the War Memorial, caught in a confluence of events, is pressured to announce its plans for recognition of Australia’s brutal Frontier Wars. Continue reading »
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The Defence Strategic Review: What suffering will we accept to keep America in first place?
Do we want to risk incalculable suffering to prevent America from slipping to ‘second place’ among the nations of the world? Without serious assessment of what cost we are willing to pay in the Defence Strategic Review – how much death and destruction we can tolerate – planning for war is little more than a Continue reading »
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Geography or history in determining our defence and foreign policies
I was living in London and had been referred to an eye specialist in Wimpole Street. In conversation he remarked that the problem with Australia was that it had too much geography and not enough history. This observation came back to me when I was thinking about the evolution of Australian defence and foreign policy Continue reading »
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The West is white
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 Gorbachev’s vision of a ‘common European homeland from the Atlantic to the Urals’ did not prevail. Rather than retract ,NATO expanded. Russia was too weak to halt the process but was useful as a potential adversary. Suggestions that it could actually join the alliance were peremptorily dismissed. NATO Continue reading »
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Why we need a new Mabo case
The Sunday Age on June 5th carried an article by Justin McManus who had been on Murray, or Mer Island, to witness the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the High Court’s Mabo judgement. Discussions conducted during ‘yarning circles’ concentrated on finding a way forward from the 1992 decision. McManus reported that both Malcolm Mabo, Continue reading »
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Peter Dutton urging war with China
Last week Defence Minister Peter Dutton announced that, what he called a Chinese spy ship, had been discovered off the Western Australian coast farther south than any similar vessel had ever previously been seen. He didn’t inform his public that it had been observed 250 kilometres offshore and therefore 50 kilometres outside Australia’s Exclusive Economic Continue reading »
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Competing sovereignties and the voice to Parliament
Policy towards the First Nations has attracted very little attention during the current election campaign. The Labor party has given a commitment to holding a referendum to enshrine the voice to parliament in the constitution as proposed by the Uluru Statement of 2017. Continue reading »
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ANZAC’s contested legacy
The evidence suggests that the Federal government sees Anzac as an attractive tool to open a new front in the culture wars and one where the Labor party might well be wedged. Continue reading »
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At war with the autocrats
‘ I think we are in a contest’ President Biden declared in June last year, ’not with China per se but with autocrats, autocratic governments around the world ,whether or not democracies can compete with them in this rapidly changing 21st century.’ Continue reading »
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The Americans are coming! ASIO looks away as hate groups gain foothold
What does our security agency have to say about an insurgency linked to local fanatics who take their cues from Trump and the Republican right? Continue reading »
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Conservatives venerate January 26. Do they even understand how it happened?
The British government knew almost nothing about Australia, assuming it was uninhabited and available to be exploited. Continue reading »
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Right-wing protesters in Canberra lit a fire under democracy, but did we care?
The assault on Old Parliament House in Canberra last month illustrated the depth of pernicious American influences on Australian public life. Continue reading »
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Britain’s ‘enduring stranglehold’ on Australia
Australia is still tied to British legal decisions from 1786. It should come as no surprise that the Uluru Statement of the Heart directly challenges Australia’s entrenched legal doctrine. Continue reading »
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History repeats as Morrison provokes China hostility
The official visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2014 was the high point in Sino-Australian relations. It has been all downhill ever since. Continue reading »
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The terrible effects and disastrous consequences of war. But we keep doing it.
The chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan coincides with a debate in the Senate on a bill which would curtail the unrestrained power of the executive to take the country to war. Continue reading »
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Anzac Day and the frontier wars
Anzac Day in Hobart in 2019 did not turn out in the way that participants expected. The Hobart Mercury explained why the following morning. The front page was dominated by a large and arresting headline. ‘Battle Cry’ it declared and went on to explain that ‘Anzac Day Marchers Highlight Black War.’ Underneath the headline was Continue reading »
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Truth and Treaties: the ongoing legacy of the Uluru statement
The 27th of October 2017 was the most shameful day in Malcolm Turnbull’s tenure as Australia’s Prime Minister. It was the moment when he peremptorily rejected the Uluru Statement which had been addressed to the people of Australia five months earlier. He declared that the projected voice to parliament would not be ‘either desirable or Continue reading »
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Book extract: It’s time for a new museum dedicated to the fighters of the frontier wars
Whether as paramilitary troopers, workers, trackers, guides, servants and sexual partners, many hundreds of Aboriginal Australians were participants in the outward thrust of the frontier. The implication is inescapable. Many Indigenous families have ancestors who were pioneers in the precise meaning of that term. Continue reading »
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Australian ‘patriots’ wrap themselves in the flag of a colony
By choosing to stick with January 26 (1788) as Australia’s National Day, conservatives are celebrating a date that highlights the very worst of British imperialism – a ‘rule of law’ belonging to a tiny aristocratic oligarchy with a vicious criminal code defending private property through capital punishment and transportation. Continue reading »
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In hunting for Chinese spies we hang on for dear life to Anglo-Saxon allies
Like so many members of the security establishment Director of ASIO Duncan Lewis adopted the time-honoured tactic of implicitly saying to the public ‘trust us because we know things you don’t know and which we can’t tell you’. Continue reading »
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The Australian Army’s inauspicious birth. From the Boer War to the Afghanistan War.
With such intense focus on the army’s record in Afghanistan we might look more closely at its history. It had an inauspicious birth on the first of March 1902 in South Africa, three months before the end of the Boer War. Continue reading »
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Those dangerous and subversive sister cities.
Sister cities provide opportunities for coercion, according to Professor John Blaxland. Continue reading »
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China: are we asserting Australia’s independence or America’s?
The recent determination to make an enemy of our important trading partner China is the most egregious foreign policy blunder since John Howard’s reckless decision to join George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Continue reading »
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When the war on terror turns inward
We now have evidence of a campaign conducted in Australia to attack the credibility and the reputation of individuals and organisations seen as being too close to China. Continue reading »
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The extraordinary ambush of China Matters.
We have been caught in the slipstream of Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic struggle against overwhelming adversity . Continue reading »
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History Hits the Headlines.Our Troubled Past
History haunts many countries at the moment. This is especially true of the United States. But Australia , New Zealand, Britain, France and Belgium are being forced to once again face up to their legacy of colonial brutality and attendant racism. Continue reading »
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The American Alliance: More incantation than inquiry.
Our chosen national heroes are the young men who died fighting for King and Empire on the coast of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. When will our focus shift to the many thousands of indigenous men and women who died fighting for their kin, their customs and their country all over the continent for well Continue reading »
