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Shrink-Wrapped Racial Identity
On QandA the other night it was alleged that one of the women referred to by Andrew Bolt in his 2008 article was driven out of public life because of the psychological trauma of having her identity as an Indigenous woman questioned. I have no knowledge of the specifics of this matter, but it does raise the complex issue of psychological trauma intersecting with personal vulnerability, cultural context and politics.
In a nutshell, the nub of this issue is our right to question ‘personal meaning’. It is about the legitimacy and legality of scrutinizing racial identification (in the Bolt case) or, more broadly, the issue of personal psychological salience. That is, how much should your sense of personal meaning impact on my right to question its authenticity and interrogate its psychological and factual truthfulness? Sometimes fact and meaning intersect in all sorts of ways that are more important than a lesson in post-modernism at the local polytechnic. Section 18C of the…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins