Marilyn Lake
Marilyn Lake is Honorary Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. Her books include Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, co-published by Cambridge University Press and Melbourne University Press and co-authored with Henry Reynolds, and Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and American Exchange Shaped American Reform, published by Harvard University Press.
Marilyn's recent articles
17 September 2023
The China Threat: Can we escape the historical legacy of Anti-Chinese Racism?
How ironic that mainstream newspapers and conservative commentators should lambast former prime minister Paul Keating for living in the past when he denounced the AUKUS agreement and the Labor governments fulsome support of it. It was, of course, the AUKUS agreement itself, entered into by Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden in 2022, that was the real blast from the past. Their declared solidarity in confronting what they defined as Chinese assertiveness echoed white mens defensive transnational identifications of more than 120 years ago when first faced with the rise of Asia.
16 March 2023
From Yellow Peril to Red Alert
Although it is in America's interests that we are urged to prepare for war against China within three years, the graphic image that accompanied the 'Red Alert' alert series in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald was designed to speak directly to Australia's own deep and distinctive historic fears and sense of geographic isolation.
20 September 2021
Anxious white men look to bonds of 'blood and history' in AUKUS
Apprehensive of loss, the leaders of white men's countries are invoking pride of race to spruik the AUKUS alliance to secure their primacy of place over China in a fast-changing world.
20 April 2021
Anzac and Australasia: war and democracy in our national museums
The paradox of Anzac commemoration in Australia is that an acronym representing a transnational formation Australia and New Zealand known collectively as Australasia in earlier decades has come to stand for a nationalist celebration that effectively renders New Zealand invisible.
30 August 2020
The militarization of Australian history and the myth of shared values
Fifteen years ago when I wrote an op.ed for The Age newspaper about the militarization of Australian historical memory, amidst the frenzy of war commemoration then careering out of control, the sub-editor gave it the title, The Howard history of Australia.