Equipped with royal commission powers, Victoria's latest exercise in myth and grievance will impose an authoritarian lock on our history by creating 'an official record of the impact of colonisation on First Peoples'. That, and recommending financial compensation

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Much-garlanded author Tara June Winch offers the sort of history literary award judges support with other people’s money, one notable admirer being the present conservative Prime Minister, who supported her views with a flattering endorsement and his own $80,000 (tax-free) book prize

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On page after page the parallels between Ivan Bunin's past and our present turn this from a book about the past into a warning from our own future. 'One of the most distinguishing features of a revolution,' he writes, 'is the ravenous hunger for histrionics, dissembling, posturing and puppet show. The ape is awakened in man'

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Applying literary analysis to a fairy tale is akin to using paint stripper on a daffodil. If a reader, of any age, does not understand what the stories are about they have opened the wrong book. Tiina Nunnally's new and splendid translation of Hans Christian Andersen's stories understands this and has restored the author's long lost voice. It is very much the right book

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French journalist Albert Londres' remarkable 'The Wandering Jew Has Arrived' suggests histories of the Holocaust should consider far more deeply the influence of Eastern Europe's pogroms' on both the future victims and those volunteers who aided with such enthusiasm the later Nazi work of extermination

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Plagiarism, misquotation, vague dates, variable death tolls and scenes of alleged conflict that leap about the countryside according to the need of researchers who all too often spurn primary sources in favour of whatever suits the narrative of slaughter -- that's how to draw a 'massacre map'

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Curious and more than somewhat sceptical of two much-lauded maps purporting to chart some 300 colonial massacres, I selected thirty Western District events and set to work checking their sources. What I found was plagiarism, gross inaccuracy, slipshod scholarship and damning evidence of the researchers' incurious laziness

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In Australia those who know Bruce Pascoe’s book is damaging stupidity are too frightened to criticise the cultural establishment and the vile Twitter mob they cultivate, not to mention the question of careerism. While they remain mute and a charlatan capers from award to academic sinecure, a French academic and man of the Left isn't so reticent

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'Have you turned conservative?' It was the early 1980s, I was back in Australia, and the speaker was a friend I had made during the campaign for Whitlam in London. It was the last time I saw her. Those on the Left are very aware that something is wrong with us even before we are. They are a sensitive lot, ever ready to scent dissent

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Bruce Pascoe has robbed Aboriginal Australia of its essential and millennial experience of hunter-gathering and its associated beliefs and traditions and replaced them with an elderly counter-culturalist’s fantasy of Earth Garden agriculturists, hippie cooking and Green Left Weekly village/commune dwellers

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