Australian History

Good afternoon, conquerers and conquered alike. If you’ve missed the news, The City of Sydney has overnight officially declared the 1788 settlement of Sydney an invasion. Council voted 7-2 in favour of the name change, citing a dictionary definition of invasion as “to take possession, to penetrate, to intrude upon, to overrun”.

Another definition we read today describes an invasion as “military action consisting of armed forces of one geopolitical entity entering territory controlled by another such entity.” By that definition, the First Fleet was no invasion. The convict ships may have had weapons, but were hardly “armed forces”. And Australia was not “controlled” by Aborigines. Yes, they controlled some aspects of the environment through practices like firestick farming, and yes, the concept of terra nullius was a disgrace. But Aborigines didn’t “control” Australia.

You can tie yourself in all kinds of knots arguing over definitions. You can also make some unbelievably foolhardy comments, as indigenous leader Paul Morris did today in a news.com.au story where he jaw-droppingly said “Jewish people wouldn’t accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust so Aborigines should be to call the events of 1788 an invasion”. From where we sit, there’s only one way to settle this. That’s to look at some of history’s famous invasions to see if they might help us assess the events of 1788…

Continue reading "At what point does settlement become invasion?" »

The Australian ski season starts today. And leaving aside the very real possibility that that I may well be a wanker for all kinds of other reasons, the point here is that I am not automatically a wanker because I choose to indulge in snow sports.

Nor are at least one million other Australians who visit our snowfields annually. Yet we’re all tarred with the same brush of the wealthy Toorak and Vaucluse minority who flit and flounce about in poncy overseas resorts like Aspen each year.

Many people don’t know that snow sports have been practised in Australia by ordinary Australians for 150 years. In 1861, a bunch of gold miners in Kiandra, NSW, formed what is widely believed to be the world’s first ski club. The above pic shows The Kiandra Snowshoe club, as they were quaintly called, at the turn of the 20th century.

Continue reading "I ski and I am not a wanker" »