Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian.
Henry's recent articles
10 December 2024
Endless onslaught: Would Israel’s Mordechai be attacked as ‘antisemitic’ in Australia?
Haaretz, Israel’s oldest and most widely known newspaper, has just published a long, roughly 8,000 word feature article, about the work of Lee Mordechai, the Associate Professor of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has compiled on line a massive report entitled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War.”
26 October 2024
The foundation stones of reconciliation, truth telling postponed again
The failure of last year’s referendum still troubles the country. The focus on the Voice to Parliament took attention away from the far more consequential question of truth telling, while paradoxically displaying how much it is still needed.
13 September 2024
Antisemitism and our universities
In today’s papers the Education Minister Jason Clare announced the decision to appoint a new National Student Ombudsman who will combat anti-Semitism at Australia Universities. He explained that Jewish students don’t feel safe at university and that it was obvious that antisemitism was a serious problem at tertiary institutions.
21 August 2024
The military Americanisation of Northern Australia
The headline in the Weekend Australian said it all: NT Bases Key to American War Plans. Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, the Chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Australian, after a ten day visit to Australia that our geography offered key advantages to the US as it sought to deter Chinese aggression. Indeed, the north would become the central base of operations in the Indo-Pacific to counter the threat.’ Defence Minister Marles added his voice to the crusade explaining that after AUSMIN talks in the US last week that America’s military was now operating in Australia...
10 August 2024
Political capitulation, moral failure
Anthony Albanese’s recent visit to the Gama Festival will certainly be memorable but not in ways that he will necessarily appreciate. It displayed, in a manner for all to see, his government’s final renunciation of the Uluru Statement From The Heart of 2017 and the attendant process of reconciliation.
6 August 2024
A dissident challenge to the West’s narrative control
Pearls and Irritations has been a source of enlightenment since its foundation in 2013. It has progressively increased in importance.
3 July 2024
Last chance for the War Memorial
The Frontier Wars were fought in every part of the vast Australian continent from the 1790’s to the 1920’s. How could they be overlooked in local or even in global history? The ownership and control of a continental landmass was at stake. First Nations’ warriors bled and died on, and for, their own country. Why would we want to overlook them?
26 June 2024
Another royal tour: should we expect a formal apology to our First Nations?
The announcement last week of an impending Royal Tour provokes many considerations. Both international and domestic developments need to be taken into account. The global reconsideration of the legacy of centuries of European imperialism, of slavery, indigenous dispossession and economic exploitation represents the latest manifestation of the long process of de-colonisation. As a consequence Britain, along with much of the West, is losing both intellectual hegemony and moral authority. They will be hard to retrieve.
22 May 2024
Don't mention the "G" word
It's not the word I would use... As Western Australian Senator Fatima Payman breaks party ranks to condemn the Gazan genocide, Defence Minister Richard Marles, in defiance of the International Court of Justice and United Nations, is attempting to shield Israel and deter MPs from using the term 'genocide' .
10 May 2024
The West believes antisemitism is a more egregious problem than genocide
The loss of Western authority as a result of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza has merely sped up changes already underway for a generation.
16 January 2024
Australias brutal Rules-Based International Order is on full display in Gaza
Americas seamless support for Israels pitiless onslaught on Gaza has both astounded and angered the world. War crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide have accumulated as the destruction and death have continued. The hypocrisy of the West as a whole is publicly on display on a daily basis. The Western media has performed as poorly as governments and has lost the respect of the world. Once gone it may never be recovered. How can Australia, for instance, expect to be taken seriously when we go forth in our customary manner chiding other countries for their human rights record?
24 November 2023
Australiasthree wars
In a lead article last week in The Sydney Morning Herald the political and international editor Peter Hartcher declared that Australia was connected to three wars, but only one of them would be measured in decades. He was referring to the conflict in Gaza and the war in Ukraine both of which affect Australias security. How this was so was nowhere explained. But it is the third war which was a direct threat to our sovereignty and liberty. Here he was pointing to the Chinese Communist Partys war to dominate the Indo-Pacific and, ultimately, the world. This unconventional war, he...
31 October 2023
Racism: The unstated Australian agenda?
In the wake of the failed Voice referendum several topics are still attracting contentious debate. How significant was racism for the no case? Does the decisive defeat suggest that Australia remains chained to its heritage of White Australia? Many people think so.
28 October 2023
What happened to Indigenous Rights? The world will judge Australia harshly
The prolonged debate about the Voice to Parliament was dominated by the question about what rights should be accorded to our First Nations communities. It was, without doubt, the most potent argument advanced by proponents of the no case. By enshrining the Voice in the constitution, it was said, Aborigines and Islanders were to be given special rights not available to other Australians. It was, therefore, unfair and discriminatory and divided the nation. What is more it encouraged indigenous separatism which threatened national unity.
24 October 2023
This country has witnessed a counter-revolution against First Nations rights
The turn of events we have seen in the defeat of the Voice referendum is what appears to be a successful counter-revolution in Australia steered by the right wing think-tanks and the Murdoch press. The arguments which were mobilised in opposition to the Voice to Parliament has transported the nation back 60 years to Paul Haslucks era of assimilation. This should be seen as no less shocking than had the Australian people this year voted to re-introduce the discredited White Australia Policy.
18 October 2023
Pearls and Irritations: A dissident challenge to the Wests narrative control
Pearls and Irritations has been a source of enlightenment since its foundation in 2013. It has progressively increased in importance.
10 October 2023
Will a shocking hurdle defeat the Yes vote?
In a lead article published on the front page of The Saturday Paper on the 30th of September Rick Morton discussed the people who were planning to vote against the Voice. He remarked that focus groups conducted late last year revealed what he called a shocking hurdle blocking the path of the yes vote. Almost a third of all participants believed First Nations people had been treated fairly. Not just now, but since invasion.
19 September 2023
Assimilation re-emerges
In her recent address to the National Press Club, Jacinta Price resuscitated the seventy years old policy of assimilation constructed by Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck.
10 September 2023
Americas unique relationship with Australia? Few countries are as gullible
Last week the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet released a brief press release about Mr. Albaneses forthcoming trip to Washington from the 23rd to the 26th of October which will be his first such visit since becoming Prime Minister. The enthusiasm of the members of Albaneses staff seems to have run away with them. They declared that the Australian-United States relationship is unique in scale, scope and significance reflecting more than 100 years of partnership between our nations. They are very large claims but are they true?
31 August 2023
Pearls and Irritations: A dissident challenge to the West's narrative control
Pearls and Irritations has been a source of enlightenment since its foundation in 2013. It has progressively increased in importance.
30 August 2023
The Rights of Indigenous People
The 13th of September 2007 was an important day in the history of Australian diplomacy although few people have heard of it. That was the occasion when veteran Aboriginal activist Les Malezer addressed the U.Ns General Assembly as the Chair of the Global Indigenous Caucus and introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People.
24 August 2023
The Voice: walking with the Australian people for a better future
For me, indigenous recognition wont be changing our constitution so much as completing it. Tony Abbot, 2015.
12 July 2023
The Voice and the problem of race
Defeat for the Voice referendum will reverberate internationally. Surviving suspicions about our racist past will be refreshed. It will come at the same time as our renewed embrace of our forever friends in Britain and the United States and our growing enthusiasm for closer ties with NATO.
8 June 2023
Australia's real test
A few days after coming to power in 1972 Gough Whitlam declared that Australias real test as far as the rest of the world is concerned is the role we create for our own Aborigines. More than foreign aid programmes, more than any role the country plays in agreements or alliances, treatment of the Aborigines will be the thing upon which the rest of the world will judge Australia and Australians not just now but in the greater perspective of history.
12 April 2023
NATO and Australia: vital partners in a new world war?
Two recent news stories say it all. On the 4th of April the Sydney Morning Herald carried a report of an interview with Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, in which he claimed that Australia was a vital partner in the organisations campaign to confront the security challenges posed by China and in particular NATOs plans to defend Taiwan. Quite clearly this came as a surprise to many Australians.
17 March 2023
Penny Wong's faltering foreign policy
Little that was distinctive about Penny Wongs foreign policy has survived the signing of the AUKUS agreement.
7 February 2023
Australia's future in Asia: bridge or spear?
The perceptive Singaporian diplomat Kishore Mahbubani remarked recently that: Australias strategic dilemma in the twenty-first century is simple: it can choose to be a bridge between East and West in the Asian Centuryor the tip of the spear projecting Western power into Asia. He clearly believed that it was a matter of deliberate choice, a clear case of deciding on one course or the other.
22 January 2023
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?
5 November 2022
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?
24 October 2022
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.
4 October 2022
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 Australias brutal Frontier Wars.
12 September 2022
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 vacuous exercise.
19 July 2022
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 which has, for much of the time, privileged historical ties with great and powerful friends ahead of the opportunities and challenges of scale and location.
30 June 2022
The West is white
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 Gorbachevs 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 was far too useful for the Americans as the means to perpetuate their dominance of Western Europe. And without the Soviet Union the members of the alliance could be called on to join the global campaign against terror and go to war in Libya, Iraq...
10 June 2022
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 Courts Mabo judgement. Discussions conducted during yarning circles concentrated on finding a way forward from the 1992 decision. McManus reported that both Malcolm Mabo, Eddies son, and Kaleb Mabo, his grandson, believed that issues arising from the High Court decision remain unresolved. Kaleb explained that possession of the land came with strings attached..Its still attached to the Commonwealth government and what he had found in his grandfathers writings was...
18 May 2022
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 didnt inform his public that it had been observed 250 kilometres offshore and therefore 50 kilometres outside Australias Exclusive Economic Zone and in international waters.
17 May 2022
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.
24 April 2022
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.
21 March 2022
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.
14 February 2022
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?
25 January 2022
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.
23 January 2022
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.
13 October 2021
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.
14 September 2021
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.
2 September 2021
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.
24 April 2021
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 a picture of a large black, red and yellow banner which read: Lest We Forget The Frontier Wars.
16 March 2021
Truth and Treaties: the ongoing legacy of the Uluru statement
The 27th of October 2017 was the most shameful day in Malcolm Turnbulls tenure as Australias 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 capable of winning acceptance in a referendum. It was a stinging collective insult to the first nations leaders who had come from all parts of the southern sky to draft the document.
27 February 2021
Book extract: Its 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.
31 January 2021
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.