History

What Khatun so deftly accomplishes is the almost impossible task of working from inside imperial intelligence (in all senses of the word), but thinking from traditions outside them, bringing entire repositories of knowledge from epistemes not accorded legitimacy by hegemonic codifications of colonial world-making.

The Sydney Review of Books and Public Books have partnered to exchange an ongoing series of essays with international concerns. Today’s essay,…

Australians want reality hushed up. They are fundamentally inspired by a fear of life. — H.G. Wells in Australia, 1939. Alfred…

In the opening pages of Phillipa McGuinness’s The Year Everything Changed: 2001, I was reminded that I bear a small…

Something about Australia’s settler-colonial foundations is getting in the way of its future somehow. I write this, watching humpback whales…

Cook appears, in Namatjira’s paintings, a reminder, remainder, corpse, trace, or ghost: a symbol of the repeated and the repeatable, the rule of law, and the law of the father. He signifies the continuity of settler sovereignty in the body of the current Queen, and the continuity of invasion in the form of a constant companion.

Roger Lee’s The Battle of Fromelles and Meleah Hampton’s Attack on the Somme are part of a relatively recent shift…

On the eve of Anzac Day in 2014 local news sites swelled with stories of commemoration. I was doing research…

The publication of Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers in 2003 gave Australia what the country desperately needed for the new…

The title of Robert Gerwarth’s timely study, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923, is taken…