Australia needs to challenge authority if we’re going to confront water, fire and climate crises
Any shame white Australians might have felt about the country’s origins as a penal colony has long since disappeared.
For many decades those with convict ancestors have tended to proudly claim them. By the time of my primary education in the 1980s, the crimes of those transported tended to be minimised by teachers. Almost all, the comforting story ran, had stolen loaves of bread.
By then the condition of our ancestors had folded into a self-congratulatory mythos: our convict past, as Russel Ward first asserted in the 1950s, was the font of our subversive, anti-authoritarian sense of humour.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/09/australia-needs-to-challenge-authority-if-were-going-to-confront-water-fire-and-climate-crises
For many decades those with convict ancestors have tended to proudly claim them. By the time of my primary education in the 1980s, the crimes of those transported tended to be minimised by teachers. Almost all, the comforting story ran, had stolen loaves of bread.
By then the condition of our ancestors had folded into a self-congratulatory mythos: our convict past, as Russel Ward first asserted in the 1950s, was the font of our subversive, anti-authoritarian sense of humour.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/09/australia-needs-to-challenge-authority-if-were-going-to-confront-water-fire-and-climate-crises
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