The Winnowing Raised across the parapet of mind, words frowned […]

In Aboriginal communities clan violence lives on and, as Noel Pearson recently demonstrated with his attack on Mick Gooda, there is discord and infighting even amongst the elites. If the urban Aborigine elite can't speak in the shared tongue of a common vision, what hope for the Voice to do anything more than feather the nests of its loudest advocates?

In case you haven't noticed, ours is an age of extremism, censorship and fanatical positions on issues which once would have been open to debate and hearty dissent. It is also an age where those who question these new ‘faiths’, from the apocalytic climate change to veganism, are hated, reviled and cancelled -- albeit, not for the moment, atop a pyre

When history is sourced in fantasy and fabrications, as is increasingly the case in regard to pre-contact Aboriginal society, we are denied insights other than recognising the Rousseauean urge to frame the primitive past as a damning indictment of the present. If the past is to be viewed through rose-coloured glass, best to know the tint is that of blood, war and slaughter

Aid to remote Aboriginal communities has done more harm than good. But to those well-meaning souls who empty the horn of plenty into communities whose power structures and mores they can't begin to understand it always seems a good idea. That insistence on repeating failure in hope of a different result is the genesis of so many ongoing tragedies