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Memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. It creates public symbols of people and events those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counter-narratives of various marginalised others are silenced through processes of collective forgetting. In Australia, this forgetting has meant that colonial histories of exploration and discovery have been commemorated through ubiquitous explorer memorials. But these memorials represent a very selective account of settler-colonial history firmly based in the colonial fiction of terra nullius or empty land used to justify the British claim to Australia. This fiction is now being actively countered by social protests focused on memorials to explorers and colonial administrators. Furthermore, a trend to memorialise and commemorate the massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of the colonisation process is overturning the myth that Australia was peacefully settled. In fact, truth-speaking is now recognised by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as an integral part of the reconciliation process. However, the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and may serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt what has historically been a resounding silence about colonial dispossession and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of humanity in Australia today through the perspective of Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian Kurdish asylum seeker who was detained on Manus Island for over six years. Boochani's writings shed light on the conditions faced by asylum seekers and raise important questions about Australia's treatment of refugees. The article calls for a response from Australian Catholic theologians and emphasizes the need for a new ethical vision and love in the country. It criticizes Australia's refugee policies and highlights the historical violence towards Indigenous people and refugees. Boochani presents resistance as an act of love and calls for a redefinition of hope in the face of inhumanity. The text challenges readers, particularly those of Christian faith, to consider what humanity means in Australia and how they can respond to the plight of refugees. It explores how Boochani's experiences align with Pope Francis' criteria for reading the signs of the times and how his testimony and the resistance of other refugees offer new possibilities for shared futures centered on care and common humanity. Boochani's work invites readers to question governmental regulations and imagine a world where refugees and asylum seekers are treated with dignity. [Extracted from the article]

The emergence of the alt-right in the US since 2008 has been widely documented but its international impacts have received less attention. Located in the context of the 2019 Christchurch massacre of 51 people by an Australian alt-right influenced gunman and based in analysis of two Australian forums, XYZ.net.au and #DingoTwitter, this article investigates the transnational spread of alt-right discourse in the context of the platformisation of extremism. Through historical and content analysis of the sites, the paper shows how key alt-right ideologies of 'white replacement' and 'white genocide', along with anti-Semitic and misogynist ideologies, are adapted to local contexts by alt-right influenced actors. Platform logics, it is argued, provide new possibilities for the mutation and spread of 'translocal whiteness' and for the deployment of alt-right 'metapolitical' strategies that seek to normalise racist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remainder of the Special Issue I speaks to i the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker by providing anthropological contexts and analyses of issues of immediate relevance to and raised by the shooting death: In her article, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel provides a perspective from Willowra, a neighbouring Warlpiri community to the north of Yuendumu. The facts of the situation up to that point were clear: In the early evening of Saturday, 9 November 2019, while some community members were still at the Yuendumu graveyard following the burial of a prominent community member (one of Kumunjayi's grandfathers), police officers attempted to apprehend 19-year-old Kumunjayi Walker at his grandmother's house ("Red House" hereafter). Keywords: Central Australia; fear; indigenous deaths in custody; police violence; settler-colonialism EN Central Australia fear indigenous deaths in custody police violence settler-colonialism 3 16 14 09/21/22 20220802 NES 220802 This is an introduction in three parts. Views tend to fall into one of two camps; one that views the shooting as an isolated incident during which Constable Rolfe acted professionally and correctly, and the other that holds that with the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker at Red House, the murderousness of the settler colony was set loose in plain sight, in the middle of Yuendumu. [Extracted from the article]

The police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker in Yuendumu in November 2019 instigated an immediate and determined response from Warlpiri families who were shocked and saddened by the death of a loved one in the prime of his life and enraged by this latest event in a long string of colonial injustices. This article collates perspectives as expressed in interviews and public statements from Warlpiri spokespeople who have been on the frontline of the fight for Justice for Walker. Incorporating the initial responses in the days after the shooting, the links to the Coniston massacre in Warlpiri and neighbouring country in 1928, the ongoing horror of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the escalating energy behind the Black Lives Matter campaigns across the world, this article illustrates, through Warlpiri voices, the ways in which people from Yuendumu have expertly used the techniques of activist campaigns in their resolute fight for justice for Walker, for all Aboriginal people across Australia and for Black and First Nations people world‐wide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian newspapers on Trove provide important evidence of massacre on the Australian colonial frontier. Stage 3 of the digital map of frontier massacre sites across colonial Australia, 1788–1930, includes evidence from more than sixty Australian newspapers on Trove. Of the 312 massacre sites on the map, sources for 235 of them, that is more than two thirds, are provided by newspapers. To demonstrate how the research team has deployed newspapers on Trove, this article interrogates two case studies of frontier massacre, one from the Black War in Tasmania in the 1820s and the other from north-eastern Victoria in the 1840s. The article finds an important connection between truth telling about frontier massacre and newspaper evidence on Trove. Newspapers rather than official reports often appear more likely to provide the evidence of massacre on the Australian colonial frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It will not surprise the readers of this journal that the Scots had a significant influence on the code of football most Australians probably still call soccer. What is less well known is their positive and negative impact on the domestic code, known by outsiders as Australian Rules, but internally by fiat of the Australian Football League as Australian football. This is a much more complex story involving massacres of Indigenous people, but also supporting them at a time when the majority of the incomers regarded them as less than human. Scots played a vital part in the origin and early history of the Australian code and on both sides of the big split over professionalism in the 1890s. Scots were the first to form soccer clubs based on the communities and allegiances from which they had come rather than geographical districts in Australia, with implications for image of the game and its place in Australian society thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the history of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, mostly focussing on its development, its white officers, how much the Colonial Government genuinely knew about the actions of the Force, and how many people were killed during the frontier wars. Far less attention has been given to the Aboriginal men of the force, the nature of their recruitment, and the long-term traumatic impacts on Aboriginal peoples' and communities' psyches rather than broadscale changes to Aboriginal culture per se. This article examines the historical and ongoing psychological impacts of dispossession and frontier violence on Aboriginal people. Specifically, we argue that massacres, frontier violence, displacement, and the ultimate dispossession of land and destruction of traditional cultural practices resulted in both individual and collective inter-generational trauma for Aboriginal peoples. We posit that, despite the Australian frontier wars taking place over a century ago, their impacts continue to reverberate today in a range of different ways, many of which are as yet only partially understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European hunger for resources, particularly land, led to the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and culture with the expansion of European colonialism. This was the most important ecological, economic, and political upheaval to affect the modern world. Records created during this violent rush of land-hunting and flag-planting can help us to understand how Western empires carved up "new" worlds into tributary states and discrete spheres. In Australia, persistent Indigenous resistance to European rule led to the establishment of the Native Police – an armed, mobile paramilitary force – consisting of Aboriginal troopers led by European officers. The sole purpose of the Native Police was to crush this resistance. Drawing upon historical documents and maps from the European invasion and annexation of territory, this article discusses the "names of places" project, which involves the mapping of colonial massacres and frontier violence in Queensland, Australia, including the mapping of the actions of the Native Police in the northeastern part of the Australian continent. In particular, we interrogate surviving records, currently held at the Queensland State Archives, which illustrate the actions, the composition, and the movements of this colonial formation. Mapping colonial violence forces readers to acknowledge that empires and modern nations are often built on the bones of the dispossessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perspectives of the First Peoples of Australia are unravelling the dominant narratives of heroic European pioneers, peaceful settlement and accommodation. The debates about Australia's past as one of invasion and violent conflict, and often referred to as the 'history wars', have become part of a battle for the present. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Yamaji, from the mid-west of Western Australia, fought for country and family in a war of resistance against squatters, miners, settlers and police. The emotional responses of Yamaji to colonial violence and dispossession were deeply felt, but rarely acknowledged in what was then described in the press as a 'state of war' between blacks and whites.1 There are, however, numerous accounts of the fears and anxieties felt and expressed by colonial society at this time on the public record. But, although there are historical accounts of the physical impacts of the violence on Yamaji people, their emotional responses were either absent, dismissed, hinted at, or 'lost' in the translations of a form of Aboriginal English. The transgenerational effects of this historical trauma are still felt today by Yamaji. Its impacts on overall health and emotional well-being is now recognised so that processes of acknowledgement and healing may begin.2 This paper explores a history of Yamaji emotions in the context of a historical discourse on race war and the biopolitical and paramilitary responses of government towards Yamaji resistance that involved both discursive and physical violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces and contextualises the poem 'The Battle of Minderoo' written in 1869 and depicting an attack on the Thalanyji people, the traditional inhabitants of the area, by 'white' colonists. They had travelled to the Pilbara in search of land, becoming pearlers and merchants and taking up huge pastoral leases, and meeting Aboriginal resistance to the expropriation of their land with violence, first in what has become known as the Flying Foam massacre of 1868 and then in the 'battle' for Minderoo the following year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archival research into episodes of frontier violence in the Kimberley region of Western Australia indicate that the bodies of Aboriginal victims of massacres were frequently incinerated following the event. This paper presents the results of a scientific investigation of a reported massacre at Sturt Creek where burnt bone fragments were identified in two adjacent sites and documents the archaeological signatures associated with the sites. The methodology used to undertake the project brought together three systems of knowledge: the oral testimonies of the descent group originating from a sole adult survivor of the massacre; archival, historical and scientific research. An archaeological survey defined the two distinct sites containing hundreds of fragile bone fragments; a third site was found to be highly disturbed. Scientific investigations included macroscopic and microscopic examination of selected bone fragments by an anatomical pathologist and a zooarchaeologist and X-ray diffraction analysis of sixteen bone fragments. The anatomical pathologist and zooarchaeologist undertook macroscopic and microscopic examinations of selected bone samples to identify morphological evidence for human origin. It was concluded that three bone fragments examined may have been human, and two of the fragments may have been from the vault of a skull. It was concluded that the likelihood of them being human would be strengthened if it was found that the three samples had been subjected to high temperatures. X-ray diffraction analysis of 16 bone fragments provided this evidence. All fragments showed sharp hydroxylapatite peaks (crystallite sizes 9882nm and 597nm respectively) and all had been subjected to extreme temperatures of either 600°C for more than 80h, 650°C for more than 20h, 700°C for more than 4h or 800°C for more than 1h. XRD analyses were also done on bone samples collected from three cooking hearths at three different archaeological sites. It was found that two of the three samples had been exposed to substantially lower temperatures for a short time period. It was concluded that there was strong pathological and archaeological evidence that the bone fragments were human in origin, but that the evidence was not conclusive. This research also identified archaeological signatures for the identification of massacre sites in similar Australian environments and circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]