Barry Corr

In this groundbreaking history of colonisation and frontier conflict in the Hawkesbury region, First Nations historian Barry Corr navigates the gaps and silences in the primary records to reveal settler amnesia, the cataclysmic nature of colonisation, and the way history is remembered, or not remembered.

Victorians must be weary of grim statistics about the housing crisis. As the state lurches from one dark milestone to the next, there is a real sense of drowning in ugly numbers. The wrong figures — social housing waiting lists, median house prices — grow monstrous, while the right ones —  public housing stock, where the average wage could get you a home —  become more and more emaciated.

My response to Adam Kirsch’s essay “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism” in The Atlantic is framed by the writings of Patrick Wolfe, my own research and my Aboriginality. Kirsch would call this Indigeneity, which is a term I don’t often use — it’s too simple. In an essay for the Journal of Genocide Research entitled “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Wolfe defines settler colonialism as being all about territoriality.