Constitutional expert Professor Anne Twomey is quick off the mark with her take on the critical elements of the Palace Letters. She says that the primary sources end the conspiracy theories abroad since 1975 by establishing that our Head of…
With much fanfare and a press conference, the National Archives releases the letters between Governor-General John Kerr and the Palace between 1974 and 1977. There is no smoking gun. The primary sources make clear that the decision to remove the…
Megan Davis starts her discussion about the empty symbolism of Acknowledgements of Country spoken by non-Indigenous Australians with reference to the Republic. She writes: “There is an uncritical but flawed assumption that Aboriginal people are unquestionably Australian republicans. Professor Marcia Langton, responding to…
Commenting on the federal Government’s slowness to provide funding for the arts industry crippled by the pandemic with thousands of job losses, Chris Endrey comments, “The sad conclusion is one that lies at the end of too many questions – Australia is either…
If we didn’t exactly realise this or when it happened, historian Judith Brett neatly captures the political shift in Australia since the mid 1990s to create the binary political world manoeuvred by Prime Minister John Howard. She says that our Republic was characterised as an…
Another tired old Queen’s Birthday holiday, a relic of the predominantly white Dominions and maybe a tired Queen at 94 years and 2 months, her real birthday being on 21 April. And with it comes that tired old warhorse, the Queen’s Birthday honours, all 933 of them. Not much to…
The High Court decides 6-1 in favour of Professor Jenny Hocking’s bid to have 211 personal letters between our Head of State and Governor-General John Kerr released. The Court decided that the photocopies of the correspondence were Commonwealth property and, therefore, subject to the National Archives Act…
Right in Reconciliation Week comes confirmation – by way of tweets from the MInister for Indigenous Australians – that the Indigenous Recognition vote was not going to take place before 2022 and had been shunted to the next term of the federal…
The Greens release a new policy that piqued WfaAR’s interest: Let’s Recreate Australia. Not a surprising theme in the time of a pandemic which often brings about serious rethinking of history and the future at both personal and societal levels. But it wasn’t about the…
As the country began to slowdown and shutdown with strict pandemic prevention measures in place nationally, it is clear that public health and immediate economic issues would be the focus for at least the next 6 months. Non-survival topics like Indigenous Recognition and the Republic dropped instantly from public…
