Australian history

Black Convicts

Book Review: Black Convicts is a chronicle of Australia’s forgotten stories

Every Australian knows something of the colonisation of Australia; of the ships that were sent and the convicts that arrived. But, there are some parts that are left out of the wider narrative, unnoticed or undiscussed in conversations about Australia’s history. It’s one such element that Santilla Chingaipe delves into in her latest book Black…

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Book Review: Immerse yourself in the hunt for Australia’s deadliest snake with Brendan James Murray’s Venom

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Australian media began spreading tales of a huge, lightning fast species of snake that was seemingly taking lives at a rate of knots. Attaining a near mythical status, the nguman, or taipan, was all too real. The press demonised them, wary farmers hunted them, and desperate…

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Book review: 1787 by Nick Brodie

Australia Day is a fairly contentious date in the calendar. The idea that Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet on January 26th 1788 has long been offensive to descendants of the Indigenous Australians who already occupied the land. It also dismisses interactions between Europeans and Indigenous people that predated the landing, and…

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