Articles by: Dan Tout

Author Biography:

Dan Tout is a lecturer in history and sociology at Federation University and an Arena Publications Editor. In 2023, he was an inaugural Visiting Fellow with the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on settler colonialism and nationalism in Australia and their impacts on and implications for First Nations peoples.

Settler Nationalism and Progressive Discourse

Arena Quarterly no.15

Dan Tout

Sep 2023

Even searching accounts of Australia’s founding can’t resist the assimilationist logic they expose.

Again and Again: Settler-colonial extractivism and the Juukan Gorge inquiry’s interim report

Arena Online

Jon Altman, Dan Tout

17 Dec 2020

…it seems the First Nations of Australia will be left with another empty promise that governments and mining companies, together so invested in their ongoing dispossession, will act in good faith to ‘protect’ them and their heritage. Surely nobody can reasonably believe this by now.

Juukan Gorge Destruction: Extractivism and the Australian Settler-colonial Imagination

Arena Quarterly no. 4

Dan Tout

Dec 2020

...the settler-colonial logic of elimination—of displacement for the purpose of replacement—has come to align in ever more destructive ways with the economic logic of neoliberal capitalism…

Destruction and erasure: Juukan Gorge and the contemporary settler-colonial imagination

Arena Online

Dan Tout

30 Jun 2020

…the post-1967 period, in which settlers have been no longer able to deny Indigenous existence, has been marked by the development of new strategies that seek to submerge, subsume, or to otherwise evade the implications of Indigenous sovereignties…
"Review(s) of: Deep time dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia, by Billy Griffiths, (Black Inc., 2018).

Informit: Belonging [Book Review]

Arena Magazine no. 158

Dan Tout

Feb 2019

PDF available from Informit

Review(s) of: Deep time dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia, by Billy Griffiths, (Black Inc., 2018).
"

Informit: Confronting a new leviathan

Arena Journal no. 47/48

Dan Tout

Jan 2017

PDF available from Informit

"This issue of Arena Journal, as many before it have been, is concerned with both…

Editorial – Issue 47/48. ‘Confronting a New Leviathan’, by Dan Tout

Arena Journal no. 47/48

Dan Tout

Jan 2017

This issue of Arena Journal, as many before it have been, is concerned with both specific and more general processes of transformation and crisis. While, considered together, the contents of this issue paint a bleak picture about the contemporary situation and future prospects, they also point towards more hopeful, if provisional and conditional futures.
"'Invasion is a structure, not an event.' Through his oft-quoted refrain, Patrick Wolfe aimed to…

Informit: Why didn’t we listen?

Arena Magazine no. 148

Dan Tout

Jun 2017

PDF available from Informit

'Invasion is a structure, not an event.' Through his oft-quoted refrain, Patrick Wolfe aimed to emphasise the persistence of the structures and effects of settler colonialism from the past into the present. He sought to reorient our (settlers') understandings of settler colonialism away from a retrospective view of invasion as an event that had occurred in the past and, one way or another, been resolved (even if its legacies might still warrant some form of…
"At the 2013 conference of the Australian Historical Association, Tim Rowse brandished a recent copy…

Informit: The Janus faces of indigenous politics

Arena Journal no. 45/46

Dan Tout

Jan 2016

PDF available from Informit

At the 2013 conference of the Australian Historical Association, Tim Rowse brandished a recent copy of Arena Journal in its book form as 'Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: The Settler-colonial Present', and railed against what he characterized as a 'festschrift' to Patrick Wolfe's self-fulfilling project of the homogenization of Indigenous histories and experiences. He accused Arena of projecting the overarching singular narrative provided by Wolfe's 'elimination paradigm'. The session was tense. Rowse was himself subsequently excoriated…
"In December 2015, Megan Davis opened her article for The Monthly, 'Gesture Politics', with the…

Informit: Settler recognition?

Arena Magazine no. 143

Dan Tout

Aug 2016

PDF available from Informit

In December 2015, Megan Davis opened her article for The Monthly, 'Gesture Politics', with the following words: 'Despair. In a word, this is the universal sentiment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders I have spoken to about the state of Aboriginal policy in Australia'. More recently, Jon Altman has written in The Guardian and on the 'Arena' blog on the Coalition government's 2016 Budget and its damaging disregard for Indigenous affairs, alongside the…
"Prior to the currently emerging popular awareness of anthropogenic climate change, there existed little impetus…

Informit: Unsettling conceptions of wilderness and nature

Arena Journal no. 37/38

Alice Robinson, Dan Tout

Jan 2012

PDF available from Informit

Prior to the currently emerging popular awareness of anthropogenic climate change, there existed little impetus for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to engage regarding the sustainability of land - no way, that is, that inherently affected, concerned or was crucial to the survival of both peoples equally. There was no issue in which both had similar amounts at stake. This is in spite of the fact that land has always been and continues to be of…
"Review(s) of: The last man: A British genocide in Australia, by Tom Lawson, I. B.…

Informit: Whose genocide? Whose stain? [Book Review]

Arena Magazine no. 137

Dan Tout

Aug 2015

PDF available from Informit

Review(s) of: The last man: A British genocide in Australia, by Tom Lawson, I. B. Taurus, 2014