Category: Ernest Carr

Violent Etymologies

09/28/2019.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Heather Burke A map is a frail thing, although the politics that underlie its construction and naming practices are not. In 2017 Queensland removed several racist place names from the map, prompting debate over whether memorials to Robert Towns and John Mackay—the namesakes of both Townsville and Mackay—should tell their history more fully, given […]

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Willing Volunteers? Recruiting Aboriginal Boys and Men to the NMP Part II

05/13/2018.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Lynley Wallis, Heather Burke, Bryce Barker and Noelene Cole In an earlier post we considered some of the mechanisms through which Aboriginal boys and men may have been enticed, or forced, to join the NMP. In this post, we consider what is perhaps the most perplexing type of “recruitment” of these men: that of […]

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From the Horse’s Mouth: Horses and the NMP

04/26/2018.Reading time 27 minutes.

By Lynley Wallis and Heather Burke Today we don’t think twice about travelling vast distances by car at great speed, so it’s hard to imagine what life was like before the invention of the internal combustion engine. The First Fleet that arrived in southeast Australia in 1788 included horses, and by the time colonists began […]

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