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history
‘As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’
‘When profound ideas are introduced to the world for the first time,’ writes Professor Marcia Langton, in her foreword to The First Astronomers, ‘our world is fundamentally changed and the previous understandings consigned to history. There are those who continue to deny the intelligence and scientific traditions of Indigenous people. The idea that the only true science is that of Western thinking must be consigned to history.’
In 1741, the exalted members of the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences met to consider sixteen essays written in response to the following question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’
When Bob Hawke died in 2019, two days before the federal election, many mainstream commentators took the opportunity to remind the prime ministerial hopefuls that in terms of charisma, persuasiveness and popularity they didn’t exactly measure up to the example of the Silver Bodgie.
In How to Rule Your Own Country, Harry Hobbs and George Williams consider the phenomenon of micronations, which is to say territorial entities whose members claim independence or sovereignty but which lack diplomatic recognition.
Towards the end of Dreamers and Schemers, his ‘political history of Australia’, Frank Bongiorno tells us that the term ‘democracy sausage’ first entered public discourse in 2012. The date, he suggests, is significant, for while the coinage seemed on one level to speak to the relaxedness and egalitarianism of the Australian electorate, and even to a sense of celebration and fun as regards the institutions of democracy, its introduction coincided with a sharp decline in public trust in politicians and the political process.
I was interviewed about the history of unemployment in Australia and, more specifically, the history of how Australia has treated unemployed workers. We haven’t always been so punitive. For about 25 years after WW2 unemployment was seen as a collective … Continue reading
By Warwick Smith This article was first published on April 15 2020 at 10daily, which has since shut down. I’m reproducing it here now partly to keep a record in case the web site ceases to exist. Update: the 10daily … Continue reading
Between dodging viruses and pondering fascism and climate disasters, I have been re-reading a truly uplifting book which I hadn't visited for many years. It's the masterpiece of the French historian Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, first published in 1940. I have a 2-volume paperback of the English translation, which I bought as a student for the terrifying price of 3 dollars and 60 cents.
It's social history or historical sociology, whichever you like. Bloch set himself the austere task of anatomizing a whole society, tracing the basic relationships that made it a distinct social formation. But it is also full-blooded history, concerned with the conditions that brought this society into being, its attitudes, its divisions, its conflicts, its laws; with how it survived in western Europe for five hundred years or so, and how it changed.