Articles by: Shannyn Palmer

Author Biography:

Shannyn Palmer is a historian and writer based in Canberra. Between 2011 and 2015 she lived in Central Australia, carrying out research and oral-history work with Anangu who had lived and worked on Angas Downs pastoral station over a period of fifty years across the middle of the twentieth century. This work has led to her interest in the spatial dimensions of settler-colonial capitalism in Australia, especially its apparent unsuitability in the north of the continent.

"Do we really want to continue replicating southern models of settler-colonial capitalism when the catastrophic…

The Problem Child of Empire

Arena Magazine no. 158

Shannyn Palmer

Feb 2019

Do we really want to continue replicating southern models of settler-colonial capitalism when the catastrophic environmental consequences of that logic, especially extractivism, are impressing themselves on us daily?
"I begin with this quote from Ernestine Hill because her description of the Northern Territory…

Informit: The problem child of empire

Arena Magazine no. 158

Shannyn Palmer

Feb 2019

PDF available from Informit

I begin with this quote from Ernestine Hill because her description of the Northern Territory as 'problem child of empire' evocatively captures the paradoxical nature of the 'north' in the settler-Australian imagination - from the moment British settlement pushed further inland and north in the mid-nineteenth century, the north of the continent, the Northern Territory in particular, has simultaneously been construed as both a 'promised land' and a 'white elephant'.