Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Book of the Week

Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia
Slavery

Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe

This is not a book for Scott Morrison, who, as prime minister, declared that Australian history was free of the stain of slavery. Santilla Chingaipe proves otherwise. As she states in her introduction, a key theme of Black Convicts is the exploration of ‘how slavery shaped modern Australia’. In the context of this book, ‘slavery’ is both a specific and an umbrella term for different forms of labour exploitation pursued by the British empire between the 1600s and the 1800s. Chingaipe argues that slavery, convictism, and indentured servitude were linked through a fundamental premise: the abuse and exploitation of people for financial gain. Her primary focus is on convicts, as the title suggests, and how Black men, women, and children transported to Australia ultimately were victims of the same system that enslaved their forebears. These convicts were not chattel slaves – many had once known liberty, and would again – but the direction of their lives, in common with the lives of Black people kept as property and forced to labour on plantations in the Americas, was shaped by colonial masters who placed profit over morality.

From the Archive

July 1984, no. 62

The Life of Politics by Peter Howson

S
unday 26 October 1969 ... This evening I went to evensong at Christ Church to give thanks for the election result.’

For the men born to rule – and Peter Howson was a finely preserved specimen of the tribe in his generation – God was not only a Liberal, but a highly discriminating one at that. After all, the 1969 election for which Howson gave thanks at South Yarra slashed the Liberal Government’s majority by seventeen, to seven, and made John Gorton’s replacement as Prime Minister virtually inevitable.

From the Archive

November 1997, no. 196

Twins by Chris Gregory

Incorporating photographs, diagrams, idiosyncratic typography, and even a list of references, Chris Gregory’s Twins is a media kit as much as a short story collection. It beings with a kind of parable about reading:

From the Archive