First People Then And Now

Aboriginal Day Of Mourning   In 1938 Australians marked the 150th anniversary of British settlement with the landing of the First Fleet. This was a day that some celebrated and others mourned. Protest To coincide with the celebrations in Sydney on 26 January three Australian Indigenous leaders organised an Aboriginal Day of Mourning. They were William Cooper, William Ferguson, and […]

Australia A Continent On Fire     New Year’s Day 2020. Australia is on fire.  Etched even more deeply into the Australian psyche the massive, uncontrollable bush fires of 2019 sweeping the country are unprecedented. Catastrophic fires And as we move into 2020 the burning nation can only be described as apocalyptic. The large scale catastrophic fires have put Australia […]

Musquito: Australian Aboriginal Hero Of The Resistance     First People Then and Now: Australian Aboriginal Heroes of the Resistance by Marji Hill is an account of five Australian Aboriginal resistance heroes. It reveals what for many is the ‘hidden history’ of Australia. Musquito was a resistance fighter from the Central Coast of New South Wales. After having been sent to Norfolk […]

Australian Aboriginal Heroes Of The Resistance     Frontier Wars in Australia Violent conflict on the Australian frontier started on this continent soon after the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. From this time on, Australia experienced constant warfare on its soil – not only in the Sydney region but throughout the country.  This continued right up to the […]

Yagan: Hero Of The Australian Aboriginal Resistance     The story of Yagan (c1795-1833) is about the invasion of Aboriginal lands in Western Australia by the British colonists. Yagan was a hero of the Australian Aboriginal resistance and since then has become an iconic figure and symbol of the fight for Nyungar rights and recognition. Marji Hill  First People Then […]

Musquito: Aboriginal Resistance Hero       Musquito (c?1780 – 1825) was one of the early Aboriginal resistance heroes on Australia’s east coast. He emerged in the Hawkesbury River and Broken Bay regions of New South Wales.   Marji Hill First People Then And Now

What Exactly Is A Clan In Aboriginal Australia?       In traditional Aboriginal Australia a clan is a group of Aboriginal people who are all descended from a common ancestor. A band, on the other hand, is made up of small family groups. When these families came together they formed a “band”. A band might be made up of […]

Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Australian Cultural Studies)     Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people from Stradbroke Island in Southeast Queensland, is an Australian academic and writer about Indigenous rights.   Sovereign Subjects is a thought provoking book that puts under the microscope the implications for Indigenous people living in a country founded on their dispossession, and […]

Sweet Country     Sweet Country is a film set in the Australian frontier in the 1920s. It is the story of an Aboriginal stockman who kills in self-defence a white station owner. The Aboriginal stockman and his wife go on the run in the remote outback pursued by a posse. A gripping, cruel and violent tale of racial tension and […]