Vale Patrick Wolfe

22 Feb 2016

In Saturday’s The Australian newspaper, we see a barrage of conflicted articles:

We think about some of Patrick’s key ideas and concepts: Repressive authenticity, invasion as a structural, ongoing process, not some historical event, settler colonial societies as premised on the elimination of native societies, the Australian settler colonial formation being premised on displacing indigenous people from the land, and (from the Journal of Genocide Research) ‘positive’ outcomes of the logic of elimination including officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations.

Patrick, with almost a mystical sense of timing in putting this mess of circumstances on display the national newspaper has unwittingly paid a great tribute to your enduring legacy and, in our view, extraordinarily insightful analysis of Australian settler society.

RIP dear friend, close colleague and brave intellectual leader, you will be sadly missed.

– Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson