In over sixty-six years of Christmas stamps, Australia has never issued one featuring an Aboriginal artwork, let alone a Black Virgin and Christ child.
A reply to Barry Morris on the Frontier Wars commemoration. To headline Barry Morris's comments (Arena Magazine, May 2019) on the Frontier Wars contingent at the Canberra Anzac Day parades with the police sergeant's 'This Is Not a Day for You' is to silence the Indigenous ex-serviceman who shot back: 'When is our day?'
Did Melbourne's Roman Catholic Arch - bishop Daniel Mannix allege, early in 1917, that the Great War was 'simply a sordid trade war', or did he but repeat as 'a truism that the war was a trade war'? His enemies seized on the 'sordid'. Well before the Cold War, his acolytes were uneasy with a 'truism' that sounded like a snippet from the godless Lenin's Imperialism (1916). Belief in the commercial motives behind war has…
Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker and Gregor Mendel: dramatising the life of plantsDespite Charles Darwin's confessing in 1843 to an 'entire ignorance of Botany', he had, before his death in 1882, inherited the laurel of Jupiter Botanicus. On the centenary of 'On the Origin of Species' in 1959, population geneticist J. B. S. Haldane valued Darwin's botanical researches more highly than his earlier work on evolution. In truth, those elements were inseparable, since he supported natural…
