Rather than being gripped by the selective memory of Anzac, Australia must engage in a comprehensive process of truth-telling and remediation of historical injustices.
Browsing: Analysis
Without Harlen’s vision and leadership, the University of Sydney Foundation Program may have never come to be. Had that happened, the international student community at USyd, in 2023, would not be as strong as it is today.
The Catholic Church owns about $30 billion worth of property in Australia. The total wealth of the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese is $1.3 billion. Another powerful church, the Sydney Anglican Church, owns almost half of Glebe, some of which it bought when the land was first up for sale in the early colonial period.
While national and state curricula attempt to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories, and experiences are embedded into classrooms, and government policy prioritises that school outcomes for Indigenous students match or better that of their non-Indigenous peers, the implementation is left almost wholly in the hands of teachers.
Students, paying tens of thousands of dollars for a nebulous product, and teachers, stripped away from the research that is normally the lifeblood of an academic career and in increasingly precarious work, inevitably suffer from these partnerships.
Every Australian town has a memorial to those Australians who endured the horrors of war overseas, yet similar physical memorialisation of the war that took place in and around these towns is almost entirely absent.
These disadvantages are linguistic, cultural, and invisible to those who make up a cultural hegemony. Without tearing down these barriers, our justice system cannot serve true justice.
Remembering Henrietta Lacks, and locating her within the wider system of medical and structural inequality in America, is essential.
There seems to be no vision for cultural, ethnic or gender representation in our radio programmes.
Without thorough involvement with First Nations people, sensitively recognising the higher stakes and enormity of their contribution, events become inauthentic and harmful.