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.
Henry Reynolds
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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’.
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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.
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Those dangerous and subversive sister cities.
Sister cities provide opportunities for coercion, according to Professor John Blaxland. (more…)
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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.
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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.
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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 . (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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 over a hundred years? (more…)
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Australia goes fishing in troubled waters.
A few weeks ago Foreign Minister Marise Payne condemned ‘ China’s actions in the South China Sea’, adding that in recent days the Australian frigate HMAS Parramatta had been conducting exercises with two American naval vessels as they ‘passed through the waters.’ (more…)
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Between America and China?
In his Lowy lecture delivered in Sydney last October Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared that ‘Australia does not have to choose between the United States and China.’ (more…)
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HENRY REYNOLDS. James Cook and the Contested ‘Discovery’ of Eastern Australia
A problem with the way Cook’s voyage has been taught to generations of Australians is that it has been so relentlessly Anglo-Centric. The much earlier and more significant exploration of Dutch navigators has often been overlooked particularly in the eastern mainland states. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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.’ (more…)
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Anzac Day.
As we approach Anzac Day for another year, its national significance is reaffirmed. But we are so familiar with the accustomed ritual and rhetoric that it escapes critical scrutiny. And its sanctity places it outside the reach of sceptical inspection. (more…)
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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 was encouraging to see that there was significant debate within the defence and foreign policy establishment in Canberra although little of it emerges into the wider public sphere. (more…)
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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 those powerfully expressed sentiments. Defenders of the status-quo insist that the will of the majority should take precedence. (more…)
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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 14 years of involvement in overseas conflicts the defence force had a ‘strong fighting momentum that should not be lost.’ He planned to maintain and ’augment our readiness for future fights in the unstable region stretching from Pakistan to the Middle East’. This was the area that’ we might need to go back into at some point in the future.’ (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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 any other comparable country. It has been one of the most striking features of both political and cultural life for the last quarter of a century. Despite the continuous and lavish expenditure of public money there has been almost total bipartisan support and few attempts to ask what it has all been for. The apotheosis of the warriors has lifted them far above sceptical assessment and even the normal cut and thrust of public life. (more…)
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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 the episode was one of a series of nine five minute features billed as ‘Australia and the USA: A Century Together’ and which ‘talked candidly about the effect both cultures had on each other.’ But the central theme was clear: ‘ it was in war that the bonds grew strongest.’ In fact, the viewer was informed that it was a ‘ friendship largely forged in blood and iron.’ (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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 a number of significant questions. (more…)
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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 both Australians and Americans. There were all white and there were no women at all. This was the main theme of the Guardian’s criticism and Ambassador Hockey felt it necessary to issue an apology for the partial selection of the people who were called ’patrons’. But the choice of participants was only one of the problems with the hapless poster. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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 protests about Australia Day and the graffiti daubed on the Cook statue in a Sydney park. Of more substance was the observation that the fulsome commemoration of Cook’s voyage would re-affirm Britain’s importance to Australia. (more…)