Apology, anthropology, and colonial genocide
A review of Terra Nullius, A Journey Through No One’s Land, by Sven Lindqvist Terra Nullius – a Latin expression meaning ‘no one’s land’ – was a legal fiction used to clear […]
Category Archives: Australia history
Australia’s Guantanamo: the ever-widening consequences of stripping away the right to asylum
Christmas Island, which lies in the Indian Ocean closer to Java than to the Australian mainland, is a non-self-governing Australian territory. It has a population of about 2,000 permanent residents […]
Capitalism’s trail of blood and “exemptions”
On June 8 Murray Taylor became the fourth person this year to die while working in a quarry in New Zealand. The excavator Taylor was operating became buried under 1500 […]
The sheltered childhood of the working class in New Zealand: 1890-1912
The newborn working class in New Zealand took its first breath in the upsurge of union organising and the 1890 maritime strike, which was both the culmination of that upsurge […]
The rise of a New Zealand Empire in the Pacific
Within less than a month of joining the war against Germany in 1914, New Zealand had seized its first colonial conquest from Germany. On August 29 1914 troops from the […]
A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistical philistines
The period of the Liberal government in New Zealand from 1890 to 1912, was one of unprecedented general prosperity – in comparison with the rest of the world – the […]
Workers who stood for King and Country in 1914
While in 1914 the political appeal of “King and country” was comparatively weak among workers in Australasia, the social basis of national chauvinism was highly developed. The split in the […]
‘Defence of the Fatherland’ in the Australasian Dominions
On 4 August 1914, as the guns of the First Imperialist World War began sounding, the Socialist International shattered into a thousand fragments. The International had been built through sustained […]
National myth-making – and a new antidote
April is the month when national myth-making goes into high gear in Australia and New Zealand. It was on 25 April 1915 that a combined Australian–New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) […]
The party of labor and the Labor Party
In the birthplace of industrial capitalism, the young proletariat went through a protracted process of formation into a class. In the first decades the individual wage-laborers were assembled by the […]
