Three-fingered Jack was Jack Mansong, killed in 1781 while resisting slavery in Jamaica. His own #head and hand was #preserved in spirits “for the satisfaction of the curious”. #Pemulwuy and #JackMansong were enslaved in perpetuity because they resisted. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

So, when the English artist James Ward drew “2 heads of Botany Bay Men” in London’s Royal College of Surgeons in 1818, one of whom was probably Pemulwuy, he could describe him as a “chief of marauding predators, a kind of Three-fingered Jack of Botany Bay.” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The #resistance to colonisation, and the violence of colonial repression, demonstrate the same agency historians identify among the enslaved. Their resistance to the prerogatives of white colonial power however, was frequently characterised as ‘savagery’ illustrative of imposed #racial designations.

Those whose remains were taken by #violence, or #collected by #theft, were not passive #victims. They were dismembered in this global flow of #EnlightenmentScience because they resisted. Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal warrior who led Dharug resistance against colonial expansion is one example.

The collection and transportation and display of #HumanRemains was a feature of “scientific head hunting” in service to the Enlightenment aspiration to catalogue the #varieties of #humankind in #taxonomies of #race. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We argue “The #collection of the Indigenous dead could never match the volume of forced mobility of the #trans-Atlantic slave trade, nor its remorselessly #monetised suffering”, yet both slaves and skulls were #violently made globally #mobile without consent. yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/11/20/h...

Enlightenment in Australia can be gauged by the practice of “scientific enslavement of the Indigenous dead”. From 1788 the the human remains of #Indigenous peoples were taken without #consent to enrich in status, power, and reputation collectors and institutions. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

As @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I argue, #colonial Australia was a vector of Enlightenment, not in spite of #enslavement but because of it. #Slavery and slave trading was integral to Europe’s Enlightenment and its global reach, not least in Australia. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A former #Australian PM recently wrote, “[f]rom the outset [1788], Sydney could hardly have been less like a slave colony”, and thus embodied noble aspirations of Europe’s #Enlightenment. A haggard trope, that fabricates myth in service to a facile truism. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I spoke today at the AHA conference on scientific enslavement in Australia, with @amywayness.bsky.social and Gemmia Burden. Calling stolen First Nations body parts enslavement is a provocation to rethink our colonial history. More on this with @lindaaburnett.bsky.social in History Australia soon!

What about Aunty Jack? Or would a man in drag on the ABC threatening to “rip ya bloody arms orff!” be too challenging to the WunNashun monoculture?

I’m no psephologist, nor any kind of expert on British politics, I just hope these low figures indicate that voters for the Raving Loony Party and Count Binface have been strategically voting. And that British voters more generally have started composing the political epitaph for Reform and Restore.

The Age of Trump demonstrates the value of an education in the humanities every day. It poses hourly questions of ethics and epistemology, repeatedly shows the relevance of history, demonstrates distortions of language. Even the Reflecting Pool has become a gaping metaphor in paint and algae.

Australians have indulged Pauline Hanson’s public career for 30 years. She’s rusted into our political establishment. Yet in all that time she has only manifested a relentlessly sour, ignorant, resentful, narrow, and miserably bigoted point of view. What in heavens does that say of us as a nation?

Each year Griffith University campus becomes an arena for a struggle between males of two different species moved by bloody minded wilfulness as the hapless ground staff do battle with the male Brushturkeys assembling their incubating nests. The current score is 1 - nil to the Brushturkeys!

If algae in the Reflecting Pool is a metaphor, the removal of his name from the Kennedy Centre is an allegory.

The exactions levied in our ancien régime are not onerous taxes, but continuous proliferation of rents, owned as prerogatives of the billionaire class, our digital nobility. The next democratic revolution must break their stranglehold on the algorithmic commodification of personal attention.

It only took 50 years of neoliberalism to rebuild the ancien régime. The billionaire class is not united, but they all know they are defined by their interests. They act accordingly. Their chief interest is to ensure that the populace remains unable to act in its own interests. They are succeeding…

Given the choice between doing that or hosting a tour with Richard Marles, I think I’d also choose resignation.

She is indeed fabulous, but I’ve long been fascinated by Cranach’s very different Melancholia.

Despair.

Which country would be dumb enough to pay $58 billion for 3 used nuclear submarines to these guys?

What will it take for the world to intervene diplomatically, establish an international commission to reopen the strait of Hormuz, and cut this ailing empire and its demented president out of our lives for good?

In dark times, when hope begins to ebb, and faith in your compatriots wanes, it is important to take solace where you can.

Trump is a perfect medium for the ancient body politic metaphor’s corporeal inscriptions of misrule. His putrescent colour a sign of his weaponised fakery. The tiny grabby hands grasping for ever more corruption. The bodily decay advancing as he shambles the zombie US empire toward catastrophe.

Here is an indisputable truth that no public figure will ever avow: the Australian people will achieve far greater security from ensuring all can live with dignity, than they ever could from increases in defence spending.

Trump is an abysmal president and walking, talking catastrophe of a person, but if he takes his evident displeasure with Australia to the degree of cancelling the awful AUKUS deal, I’ll be the first to thank him.

Has nobody around him thought to suggest to the former PM that his comment strongly suggests he is “Trump, with no brains”? #auspol

Trump says he will bomb Iran "back to the stone age". Another President already said that in 2006. Nothing better captures the impoverishment of this moment than a plagiarised boast by a corrupt but empowered moron whose only genius is to ruin - buildings, businesses, economies, countries, lives.

If it is true that we are not responsible for the evils of the past, then we should immediately stop honouring the values we routinely locate in that past, such as Christianity & western civilization. If we honour the past we have a responsibility to address its wrongs. Abstaining won’t get it done.