Marilyn Lake
Professor Marilyn Lake AO is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent book is Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and TransPacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Nuked – a compelling but depressing read – is a deeply researched and strangely suspenseful account of the AUKUS agreement struck between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and United States President Jo Biden and announced in September 2021; a deal that included supplying Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines at the staggering cost o ... (read more)
Is ‘genocide’ a useful concept for understanding colonialism and, in particular, the destruction of Aboriginal communities during the settlement of Australia? Dirk Moses, the editor of this stimulating collection of essays on Genocide and Settler Society, thinks so, but with qualifications. Many of his contributors agree, but tend to be more comfortable using the concept in its adjectival form ... (read more)
When the Whitlam government was elected in 1972, women across Australia responded with elation. The Women’s Liberation Movement had helped bring Labor to power and was in turn galvanised by the programs, reforms, and appointments that began to be put in place. In Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the revolution, Michelle Arrow has assembled a splendid range of memoirs, reminiscences, and short essay ... (read more)
In the process of British colonisation, Aboriginal people lost their country, kin, culture, and languages. They also lost their freedom. Governed after 1901 by different state and territory laws, Aboriginal peoples were subject to the direction of Chief Protectors and Protection Boards, and were told where they could live, travel, and seek employment, and whom they might marry. They were also subj ... (read more)
In July 1894, a year after New Zealand women had gained the national right to vote (the first in the world to do so), their spokesperson Kate Sheppard prepared to address a suffrage rally in London, alongside Sir John Hall, the parliamentary sponsor of the New Zealand suffrage campaign. They took the stage in the vast Queen’s Hall at Westminster to report on their historic fourteen-year struggle ... (read more)