Pascoe invents Aboriginal farmers; Harney looked at Darwin and knew individuals who were trying to enter a white world: “Let them grow a garden and they soon felt the full weight of kinship ties when, at harvest time, their hosts of relations came to help them—not to gather, but to eat the crop.”

Bruce Pascoe has made many claims to be of Aboriginal descent but has never produced a scrap of solid evidence. The 'our people' of which he writes in the opening pages of Black Duck are not his people and never have been. Race appropriation is offensive, but for page after page Australia's leading fauxborigine keeps piling it on...and on...and on

I saw the tattooed number on his forearm. It was a shock that disturbed me then and I have never forgotten ... My short life lived through books saw the reality of another life. I had grown up with a literary fantasy of what we now call the Holocaust. I idealised the victims. An unsympathetic man made it real

There are books you save from childhood, a few that […]

Modern activists might be more kindly disposed to Captain Cook if he had honoured Aboriginal customs and eaten the children abandoned by their parents at Botany Bay, rather than gifting them cloth and trinkets. To do so would have been a form of communion, of commonality, between the English navigator and the locals

On the day Whitlam was re-elected leader after Labor's 1975 election drubbing, Clyde Cameron noted in his diary that Gough 'looked uncomfortable ... chastened and worried'. It was a prescient appraisal. Dark and compromising secrets held in Moscow and Baghdad were soon to spill onto Australia's front pages

Gabriele Tergit's Käsebier Takes Berlin was a German publishing success in 1931, and then it slept. Though its author was a Jewish journalist it was not even noticed when books were burnt in 1933, by which time the author had fled Germany for Czechoslovakia, then Israel, finally settling. Then, in 1977, the novel was republished and a glorious, captivating mess brought fame to an 83-year-old

What is a retired AFL player to do with himself? For complainiac Adam Goodes, who celebrated his Australian of the Year Award by grumbling about the country that honoured him, it is advising Woolworths to scrap Australia Day merchandise and putting his name to a Disneyfied storybook that twists fact and history in the cause of alerting small children to generations of white wickedness

A number of the Sydney Theatre Company's luvvies took a recent curtain call draped in kaffiyehs, presumably to support Hamas and spray contempt at the Zionist Entity. A subscribers' backlash led to instructions they must never do so again, which marks a definite change from 2008. That was when Daniel Keene's The Serpent's Teeth also stumbled onto Middle East turf and the only complaints concerned a memorably stupid production