This week in Australia is Reconciliation Week….reconciliation with Australia’s first peoples, reconciliation with the brutal history of colonisation that continues to reverberate, reconciliation with country…
Some new food for thought in our Black Lives Matter link library
You can access the BLM link library directly at www.brightanddark.net/blmlinks or via the [CATEGORIES] menu above. You will land on featured items, but if you scroll through the dropdown menu you can view all items or select to view by topic or category: books, movies, articles etc
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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea
Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world.
Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield. An article in the Guardian by Robert P Baird
‘The right thing to do’: restoring Aboriginal place names key to recognising Indigenous histories
In 2017, the Queensland government renamed seven places that included the word “nigger”. In 2020, after global Black Lives Matter protests, Western Australia renamed the King Leopold Ranges, named after the brutal colonial Belgium monarch, the Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges, using both the Ngarinyin and Bunuba names for the area. But many Aboriginal communities argue that renaming landscapes should not be limited to removing overtly racist names. An article in the Guardian by Calla Wahlquist.
Dyarubbin: Mapping Aboriginal history, culture and stories of the Hawkesbury River, New South Wales
This online story map, takes you on a journey through Darug and Darkinjung Country on Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Dyarubbin flows through the heart of a vast arc of sandstone Country that encircles the city of Sydney and the Cumberland Plain on the east coast of Australia. This map places Abororiginal names back on Dyarubbin the Hawkesbury River. The list was recorded in 1829 by Rev. McGarvie and has been researched by Historian Prof. Grace Karskens with Darug knowledge holders Leanne Watson, Jasmine Seymour, Erin Wilkins and Rhiannon Wright and a team of linguists.
New light in a land shaped by fire
Rare aerial photos intended to help open up the outback to mining following World War II instead deliver a lesson from the last generation of Indigenous people to live in the Great Sandy Desert on how to protect life and country. An article on ABC online by Ben Collins
