Writer

Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian.
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HENRY REYNOLDS. James Cook and the Contested ‘Discovery’ of Eastern Australia
With the widespread reporting of this year’s diminished Anzac Day, it seems we have forgotten another notable Cook cancellation. Continue reading »
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Thoughts on an unusual Anzac Day
This Anzac Day we should question the relentless militarisation of our history and the cult of the digger. These ideals make it easier for Australian governments to commit to wars overseas and more difficult for critics to engage in serious debate. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS supports Pearls and Irritations.
As a daily reader of Pearls and Irritations and an occasional contributor, I am keenly aware of how important it is both to me personally and to the community at large. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS.- When will we see a cost-benefit of our meddling in the Middle East?
By the end of this year Australia will have begun the process of removing our armed forces from the Iraq and Afghanistan or at least be considering what can fairly be termed a retreat after a series of engagements lasting almost twenty years. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Australia Day or dying in a ditch for January 26.
Australia Day divides rather than unites the community which we presume is the key reason for having a national day in the first place. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. ‘Strange situation’: Why Australia must strike a treaty. (SMH 1.6.2019)
In ringing tones the Uluru Statement declares the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and possessed it under their own laws and customs. Sovereignty has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown. There is, as well, demand for a Voice Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. The centre cannot hold.
In a recent article in the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat drew attention to the Australian elections and the cotemporaneous triumph of Narendra Modi in India and of Nigel Farage in Britain’s European elections. Each represented a surge in supporter for right wing populism and what he called’ the global fade of liberalism.’ Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. The Debate About Anzus and the Defence of Taiwan.
Last week Pearls and Irritations printed spirited contributions by Hugh White and Cavan Hogue about the future of Anzus and the American Alliance. They were both responding to an earlier paper in The Strategist, the in- house journal of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, by Paul Dibb entitled “ Australia and the Taiwan contingency.” It Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. January 26….. and our Declaration of Dependence.
As we approach another Australia Day, public interest quickens and rhetoric escalates. On both sides of the front line the old trenches are reoccupied and well-known strategies rehearsed. The hostility of indigenous Australians looms large in the thinking of both camps. Opponents of 26 January frequently rest their arguments on the need to respond to Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. When will it end?
Three days after the Abbott government was sworn in on the 18th of September 2013 the new defence minister Senator David Johnston made a statement to the media. He told the Sydney Morning Herald that he wanted the military to be ‘battle ready for future conflicts in the unstable Middle East and south Asia.’ After Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. The Best of 2018: Australia’s perpetual ‘war footing’.
We should have paid more attention at the time. It was September 2013 and the Abbott government had just been sworn in. The new Defence Minister, Senator David Johnston, gave an interview to a Fairfax journalist which was reported on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The content was truly extraordinary. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Has the Cavalcade of Commemoration Finally Halted?
With Remembrance Day behind us we may finally have some relief from the relentless commemoration of conflict which began twenty years ago and climaxed with the centenary of the First World War. Historians of the future may well wonder where this obsession with war came from and why we spent more on the centenary than Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Mateship Multiplied.
I was idly trawling through the many programmes available on the hotel’s television and came upon the History Channel. To my surprise there was a feature about what was called Australia’s 100 years of mateship with the United States although the particular focus was on Australians who had worked in Hollywood. I later discovered that Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Henry Reynolds: Australia was founded on a hypocrisy that haunts us to this day.
US slave owners wrote and spoke about liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Similar hypocrisy, buried in the foundations of settler Australia, has escaped comparable scrutiny. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Ethno-nationalism and Australia’s place in the world.
Ethno-nationalism is resurgent in many European countries, in the United States and in Israel. Hostility to immigration and to refugees is widespread. The Australian debate about the level of immigration is a mild symptom of the present malaise. Andrew Bolt’s more strident recent attack on immigrant communities attracted widespread and cogent criticism. But it raised Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. A HUNDRED YEARS OF MATESHIP.
The poster was launched by the Australian Embassy in Washington on July 4th, Independence Day. It attracted no attention at all locally which may have been a blessing. I only heard about it when reading the Australian edition of the Guardian online. It featured the faces of 15 men. It was a strange collection of Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Australia’s perpetual ‘war footing’. (Repost from 7/5/2018)
We should have paid more attention at the time. It was September 2013 and the Abbott government had just been sworn in. The new Defence Minister, Senator David Johnston, gave an interview to a Fairfax journalist which was reported on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The content was truly extraordinary. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. The Fighting Retreat of the Anglo-Australians.
Australian budgets rarely make news in Britain. But the Sunday Times was moved to feature the Government’s decision to commit just under $50 million to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay in 1770. Two points were made. A new $26 million memorial was a token of Turnbull’s defiance of this year’s Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Australia’s perpetual ‘war footing’.
We should have paid more attention at the time. It was September 2013 and the Abbott government had just been sworn in. The new Defence Minister, Senator David Johnston, gave an interview to a Fairfax journalist which was reported on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The content was truly extraordinary. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Remembrance Day in New York: Anzac Day in Tasmania.
I was in New York during May last year. At the end of the month, there was a public holiday. It was their Remembrance Day. Not that much happened in New York. There were no flags, no marches or processions. Apparently, it is a tradition for a naval ship to come into port for the Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Brendan Nelson and the War Memorial – what about the Frontier Wars?
On Friday the Director of the Australian War Memorial Brendan Nelson announced plans for a massive redevelopment of the institution which would cost up to $500 million.He hoped to receive the required funding in next year’s budget and he is likely to be given what- ever he asks for having already received strong support from Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Where Was The Governor-General?
Sir Peter Cosgrove was not in Canberra last week to swear in the new leader of the National Party and Deputy Prime-Minister. As far as I am aware there was no official explanation for his absence. But it turned out that he was on a ‘secret’ visit to Iraq to visit the 300 Australian troops Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. A hundred years of mateship?
I was astonished! An SBS news report about the Turnbull visit to Washington declared that the two countries were celebrating their hundred years of alliance. Where had this extraordinary snippet of history come from, I wondered? I then discovered that it was the Australian Embassy which had had been talking about 100 years of mateship. Continue reading »
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Australia: A Belligerent Nation
Much discussion has been generated by the recently released Defence White. There were several penetrating essays in Pearls and Irritations. But looking at the text as a historian it seemed that some of the most interesting observations passed without notice. I was drawn to the statement that there was no more than a remote prospect of Continue reading »
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Henry Reynolds. Militarisation marches on . A REPOST
The Australian military featured heavily again in our celebrations of Australia Day 2018. There were Army parades in Canberra and the Navy on show in Sydney Harbour. The militarisation of Australia and the language of war has become the new norm. Is that what Australia Day should be about? What about our civilian achievements? There Continue reading »
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Unnecessary wars – A Repost from October 26 2017
In a letter written in August 1855 to his colleague John Bright, the great free trade liberal, Richard Cobden, expressed his hostility to Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War. ‘And yet I doubt’, he observed, ‘if there be a more reprehensible human act than to lead a nation into an unnecessary war’. Cobden clearly had Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Memories and Massacres- A REPOST from July 10 2017
The release by Newcastle University’s Centre for 21st Century Humanities of a map of colonial frontier massacres has attracted a burst of media attention. It draws national interest back to those questions that were highlighted during the history wars of a decade and more ago. Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Beersheba and the Militarisation of Australian History.
The commemoration of the centenary of the battle for Beersheba illustrates many features of the progressive militarization of Australian history. No other aspect of our past attracts the lavish funding provided by the federal government. The cost of the commemoration must be considerable given the abundant travel grants and the funding of the new Light Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Thinking about memory and monuments.
The controversy about confederate monuments in the southern states erupted in May this year while I was in the United States. I was impressed by the extent and the vigour of the debate. In the back of my mind I wondered if a similar controversy would eventually emerge in Australia. It did and with a Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Citizenship and English proficiency and indigenous people.
So we have the anomalous situation of a projected citizenship test which large numbers of indigenous people could not pass. Continue reading »