History Listen (ABC) Section 71 The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair Part 2 Times changed. Robert Tickner lost his seat in the 1996 election, and John Howard was now Prime Minister, voted in promising “bucketloads of extinguishment” of Native Title. In December 1996 the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Bill before Parliament specifically ruled out Doreen Kartinyeri’s cultural heritage challenge to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge proposal. The May 1998 case before the High Court challenged the power of the Federal Government to make laws using the ‘race powers’ of the Constitution against Aboriginal People. Kartinyeri’s case was not successful, with a 5-1 judgment against her. The developers of the bridge, the Chapmans, claimed $20 million compensation, and it went back to court. This time, in 2001, Justice John von Doussa of the Federal Court rejected the claims for malfeasance and was not satisfied that the restricted women’s knowledge was fabricated or that it was not part of genuine Aboriginal tradition. Since then, the panic among miners and pastoralists over Native Title has abated (although not gone away completely). In 2002 bones were found on Hindmarsh Island and a formal apology was issued by the local Alexandrina council. The bridge is still there.
Emperors of Rome Episode CIX Saturnalia. In Roman mythology, Saturn was the father of Jupiter, and he ceded his power to him. Saturnalia marked the end of the sowing time, before winter set in and was celebrated around 17 December, but the length of the celebration varied. Nonetheless, it was the longest festival that the Romans celebrated. It’s hard to tell exactly what they did as part of the celebrations. Fifth century sources tell us that there was a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, but other than that, it’s hard to work out. There may have been an element of topsy-turviness, with masters serving their servants- or maybe not.
History Hack and Little Atoms. I have just finished reading Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come (my review here) and so I though that I’d listen to a couple of podcasts interviews with the author. In the The History Hack podcast the author points out that Mitchell’s grandmother had seen the burning of Atlanta, and that Mitchell grew up with these stories, supplemented by a reading diet of plantation romances. GWTW is the ultimate rich-poor-rich again Cinderella story valorizing survival and resilience, with a strong female anti-hero. The Little Atoms episode covered much of the same territory, and she explains about the Lost Cause, and emphasizes that the book and the film is revisionist history.
Three Million BBC Episode 3: The F-word What really struck me about this episode is how closely it reflects what is going on in Gaza today. As with the Israeli/Western governments today, there was a real squeamishness about the word ‘famine’, and the British Government was using its wartime censorship powers to censor the letters passing between Indian soldiers and their families. In the end, even the British censor (based in India) felt very uncomfortable about the suppression of knowledge of the famine. Aware that the optics of people dying in the streets of Calcutta could be used for propaganda purposes by the Germans and Japanese, the Bengal Vagrancy Act was passed in July 1943 to get the bodies off the street. Stevens, a British journalist and editor of the English language Statesman newspaper in Calcutta, knew that any text would be censored, but he realized that there was a loophole which would allow photographs to escape censorship. So he sent out a team of photographers, and the following week was emboldened to write an editorial condemning the lack of action. By October, it was being raised in Parliament, and the BBC was drawn into conflict with the government over the “India Food Question” (they still couldn’t say ‘famine’). Then a book called ‘Hungry Bengal’ was published which showed sketches of starving Indians. Of course, it was banned, but there is one copy in the British Library and here a starving man actually gets a name. Three million didn’t.
Things Fell Apart Episode 7 You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy The theory of ‘The Great Reset’ which has been protested by people caught up in the sovereign citizen movement was centred on the idea that the World Economic Forum had plans for a radical reordering of society, expunging private property and restricting people’s movement to a small geographical area. It drew on several individually innocuous proposals: a suggestion of bus lanes; a business of ‘sleep pods’, and especially a thought experiment piece presented to the World Economic Forum speculating on the implications of products being turned into services (I guess, in the way that DVDs and CDs which we used to own are now streaming services). These ideas became weaponized, and their proponents demonized in a way that they never anticipated.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 