Lecturer in history and sociology @FedUniAustralia and an Arena Publications Editor
Extract of article in the Public Domain:
"In
the days leading up to National Sorry Day and the opening of National
Reconciliation Week in May 2020, the mining giant Rio Tinto destroyed
two Juukan Gorge sites belonging to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura
(PKKP) peoples. These sites were said to contain some of the earliest
human expressions of symbolic meaning on the planet. They are the only
known inland sites showing evidence of continual human occupation back
into the last ice age, 46,000 years or more. ...
In summary,
Australia’s First Nations peoples—as in the other settler colonies,
including Trump’s United States and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, to which we
might well add Trudeau’s Canada, though perhaps not now Ardern’s
Aotearoa/New Zealand—once again find themselves ‘in the way’. Yet the
contemporary coupling of the eliminationist cultural logics of settler
colonialism and the extractive economic ones of neoliberal capitalism
represents a clear and present danger not only to Indigenous peoples,
whose lives and lands are directly in the path of these twinned and
revivified forces of destruction, but also, now, to all of humanity."