Category: The Big Questions

The big questions, as always, are about how we should live well, and religion and philosophy are our primary approaches to them. Australian history is included here because the questions it raises are primarily ethical.

Dark Emu

• This post replaces and updates my original (2023) introduction to Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu in The European colonisation of Australia on this blog, and the comments and additions which followed it there.

Dark Emu

As I said in 2023, it has gradually become apparent that the Australian history we learned in school fifty years ago obscured much of the truth about the early years of European settlement. Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) is a key work in our rethinking of that narrative.

I knew about the book for some years before I finally found the time and courage to read it. I had avoided it because I really didn’t want to read yet another account of white injustice and brutality, but I needn’t have worried: the book is not confronting in that way but is primarily about pre-contact indigenous communities and their food.

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The Mapoon Story

Mapoon is a small community on the Western coast of Cape York Peninsula, 200 km South of Bamaga (which is almost on the tip) and 100 km North of Weipa.

This is the story of Mapoon according to the Aboriginal people of Mapoon as they wrote and recorded it in the Dry Season of 1974 and the Wet Season of early 1975.

There was at Mapoon at that time about six families, pioneering the rebuilding of their destroyed settlement…

So begins the Introduction to the first of this pair of books, published in Melbourne in 1975 by an activist organisation. The second volume, much longer, tells the story of the “Invaders” largely in their own words, quoting extensively from church and government records.

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The early colonial period in Northern Australia

canoes in mangroves
Aboriginals and Canoes at Cooktown ca 1900 by James Cossar Smith

This post was triggered by the wonderfully evocative old photo above. It comes from the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, part of a large collection indexed here.

The page will gradually grow into an anthology-style post like People in Australia before Europeans arrived and The European colonisation of Australia but covering specifically the early colonial period in northern Australia, roughly 1850 – 1930 and anywhere north and east of a line from Bundaberg to Darwin. Like those two, it will be a collection of items that deserve to be remembered, from various online sources.

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Notes for a dictionary of dispossession

Language shapes our thought. Examined carefully, it reveals our attitudes. For both reasons, looking at the language around the arrival of Europeans in Australia is worthwhile.

wordle for a dictionary of dispossessionThese are notes for a dictionary, a collection of words and concepts arranged somewhat logically. English is a rich and flexible language. Where we have multiple choices for an idea, as we usually do, each of them has a slightly different meaning and cluster of connotations. Teasing them all out is slow, patient work.

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Breath

Breath by James Nestor - coverBreath, the new science of a lost art

James Nestor, Penguin 2020.

Nestor, a science writer, explains in the introduction to Breath that he was alerted to the possibilities of breath-based health therapies (conventional and not) when his doctor sent him to a yoga breathing class to fix up his own chronic poor health. It worked, and sent him on an intermittent quest  (he wrote another book along the way) to learn more.

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