New Caledonians vote in the long-awaited independence referendum. 56 percent to 44 percent chose to stay as part of France. Only long-standing residents, of both Kanak and European descent, were entitled to vote as a first step in creating the new country of Kanaky. The referendum, established as part of the peace settlement promised…
Results are declared in the latest ARM National Council elections held every two years. Michelle Wood, Alice Crawford, Jenny Hocking and Maggie Lloyd were chosen making them 40 percent of elected candidates. Of the 19 members of the full Council, including the Youth Convenor and the State…
Michael D Higgins is re-elected for a second term as President of the Republic of Ireland. After renominating for a second term of seven years (which he originally intended not to do), he was supported by three political parties but Sinn Fein decided…
Clare Wright’s new book “You Daughters of Freedom” is published today by Text. It covers the active lives of Dora Montefiore; Nellie Martel; Muriel Matters, Dora Coates Meeson and Vida Goldstein, five feminists who came out of the Australian suffragette movement of the late 19th century….
Opening today at the National Museum of Australia is the exhibition “Black Mist Burnt Country: Testing the Bomb, Maralinga and Australian Art”. The show uses painting, photography, sculpture and music to shine a light on the human and environmental impact of hundreds of British atomic tests, large and small, conducted in…
An exhibition of watercolours by Prince Charles opens at the NGA. His selection of 30 works from 2002 to 2016 spans the globe from scenes in the gardens of the royal estates in the UK, to landscapes in the Swiss mountains completed while…
This weeks special guest on Masterchef is Prince Charles, heir to the Australian throne, thus setting a new low for the popularity of the British monarchy here despite a stint at Timbertop and 16 visits since. Given that Charles’ lack of culinary skills is well known, it can only…
Gary Younge, writing in The UK Guardian, states that “the NHS makes us more proud to be British than the monarchy”. Neither count is near the top of our united feelings and brings the difference between being Australian and being British starkly into focus. The…
Penny Russell, Bicentennial Professor of History at the University of Sydney, reviews Tim Ailwood’s “The Quiet Invasion” and pedantically rejects his research and conclusions. But Ailwood has an important point to make about a future Australian Republic. Identifying the people of the Indigenous nations around Sydney as “the Australians” at the…
The Queen’s Birthday honours list – again – has some striking examples of well-known republicans accepting essentially imperial honours, a contradiction if ever there was one. This year, it is Jenny Kee, a founding member of ARM no less, and author Kate Grenville who…
