There are key questions about the priests who concelebrated Mass with Pell in December 1996, questions that should have been asked at the cardinal's trial. They would have told a very different story to the lurid tale of Pell’s accuser. Yet the prosecution’s tactic to airbrush them out of the picture won out

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Cardinal Pell's appeal to the High Court: In prosecutor Mark Gibson’s hands at trial, the five-or-six-minute hiatus was transformed into something that began not immediately after Mass but five-or-six minutes later, after the exit procession. In an audacious manipulation he also shifted its location from sanctuary to the sacristy, where the choirboy said he had been abused

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Where did the altar servers go while Cardinal Pell was allegedly molesting two choir boys in a room normally 'a hive of activity'? At trial, when the Crown prosecutor asserted the altar servers left the room, he was forced to retract since there was no evidence they did. Now, in response to Pell's appeal to the High Court, the prosecutor has quietly revived this same retracted claim

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Margaret Cameron-Ash's 'Lying for the Admiralty' demonstrates how Cook discovered Bass Strait and drew deliberately misleading maps, presenting Van Diemen’s Land as a peninsula and disguising his discovery of Sydney Harbour. His goal and that of the Admiralty was to mislead the French

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According to Geoffrey Robertson, the most notable Australian item in the British Museum is the Gweagal Shield, which he maintains was 'plundered' at Botany Bay by James Cook, whom he also holds responsible the 'bullet hole' at its centre. Neither shield nor hole is anything of the kind

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When Julia Gillard was Minister for Education in the Rudd government in 2008 she appointed a committee to rewrite the national schools curriculum from primary school to Year 10. When the curriculum’s compulsory Aboriginal content was published it became a controversial issue. The Coalition opposition under Tony Abbott called it “political correctness run riot” and […]

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There is no Aboriginal line of descent in any of Bruce Pascoe’s forebears, so it is not only his history in 'Dark Emu' that is bogus, but also his public biography. He should return his Indigenous Writers Prize and any other award given him for his claim to be an Aborigine. And he should apologise to his readers for deceiving them

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Following the rejection in August by the Victorian Appeal Court of Cardinal George Pell’s appeal against his conviction for historic sex abuse of two under-age choirboys after a Sunday Solemn Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, in December 1996, his legal advisers have now sought leave to appeal to the High Court. There are two […]

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the ban on climbing Uluru is simply one more example of the political strategy invented by urban intellectuals and bureaucrats who have tried to impose on the site a culture that exists only in their own romantic political fantasies

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UPDATED: The scenario laid out by George Pell’s accuser and accepted by the Victorian Appeal Court simply could not have happened. There was no time available in the priests’ sacristy for six minutes of sexual abuse to take place

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