ANOTHER EUROPE |
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| Tom Morton | It is 2011. The former German colonies of Bismarckland, Hegelopolis, Kruppsreich and Bahroland have become social theme parks, experimental micro-states…. |
| Julie Copeland | So casting back to a pre-colonial time, I like to think how, despite no Bolognese fleet, the people from the most civilised part of Italy, Reggio Emilia, managed to bring their splendid quality of life—i.e. flair, fashion and food—to create the richest, best-dressed Communist state in the history of life style, to the southern continent they named Benvenuto… |
| Greg Barnes | Then the settlers come, the trading outposts. Dutch, French, even some English. What is to be made of the indigenous inhabitants? They are left alone in the main. After all, this is an island of commerce… |
| Itiel Bereson | The Dutch, who controlled the Spice Islands of their East Indies Archipelago (Indonesia), settled a predominantly non-European population in north-western and northern Australia as trading outposts… |
| John Slavin | Through historical factors and the unexpected impact of sudden technological developments which we shall not explore here, Terra Australis, or as it was afterwards known to cartographers due to a scribe’s error, ‘Terror Ostrich’, became the last and forgotten colony of pre-Christian Rome… |
| Chris Wallace-Crabbe | Like the Gaul of our headstrong predecessor Julius, Asia is divided into several parts. For years we had sailed the trade routes from the Red Sea to Co-Chin, as the Indians call their great port. Now it was time to go farther, perhaps to another Ultima Thule… |
| Guy Rundle | Along its border, stretching from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the mouth of the Murray River, it was already fighting a war with New Holland, the Dutch colony that occupied most of the Western half of the continent, and civil war had broken out in Provence de Sud between Vichy and Free French forces, with the capital Esperance changing hands almost weekly… |
| Nikos Papastergiadis | The French captain La Perouse who set sail with an expedition to colonise Australia was confronted with an option at the beginning of his voyage… |
| Dennis Altman | After their crushing victory at Waterloo, France annexed New South Wales, renamed Nouvelle Bretagne du Sud, to provide a penal colony for the large number of British dissidents opposed to the new kingdom of Normandy et les Anglo-Saxones, ruled by Napoleon’s cousin, the Princesse de Londres… |
| Mardi McConnochie | ‘I tend a garden in my dreams, a garden on an island, where a city of light is built upon the cliff face; a city on the water, where music plays every day and the sun shines and the ferns are rich and green, and red and blue parrots dart between the trees… |
Another Asia |
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| Duncan Kerr | The Cultural Revolution was a difficult time for Australians with family in China. Mao’s call for a revolution against the ‘four olds’ set in train upheavals in Beijing. This created an opportunity for Australians to finally to break free of the middle empire’s residual suzerainty… |
| Christopher Kelen | My suggestion is that when the eastern part of Indonesia—let’s say everything south and east from Bali across to New Guinea—secedes from the Javanese Empire, it ought to immediately annexe (by friendly treaty of course) the unknown southern land… |
| Chris Tsiolkas | Though South Australian historians have largely concentrated on the Townsville Siege as being the opening salvo in the Antipodean Civil War, it would be fairer to argue that the Massacre at Alice Springs,* in 1949, was the first real incident of the conflict… |
Non-colonisation |
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| Anthony Burke | Their names have been destroyed, but we still secretly speak their language, the beautiful creole of Gaelic, English, German and French they bequeathed us. They were the Exiles—an ironic, bitter name they wore like an ill-fitting shirt… |
| Pal Ahluwalia | As someone who grew up on the Zepondan coast, what fascinated me was the manner in which the ‘Boat’ was so fundamentally a part of Australian culture… |
| David Carter | Imagine, though, a modern Aboriginal nation or a continent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, trading with the Maori nation of Aotearoa, with New Guinea, the Republic of Kanaky, Indonesia, China, the USA. Might the north have become Muslim?… |
| Barry Hindess | During the early fifteenth century the rulers of China supported a major program of voyages of exploration… The program was brought to an abrupt halt in the 1430s… What if, after a few early and expensive ventures, the rulers of the maritime powers of Europe had also been persuaded not to support further voyages of exploration?… |
| Alan Gold | The President of the Eora Nation stood in front of his house and looked down over the sweeping expanse of gumtrees and wattle bushes towards the water. Before him stretched the vast expanse of the river’s mouth, from the far left where he could see the smoke coming from the Boori’dioowoogul encampment at Parramatta to the extreme right, where Barra’woori people were settling down on the shores of the sea for the summer catch and the feast of oysters… |
Anti-colonisation |
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| Geert Lovink | Having had a different starting point Australia would have been country with real cities, not CBDs plus suburbs. If Australia were to redo its ‘colonisation’ then it could at least understand ‘settlement’ as a crucial part of urban planning… |
| MEZ [Mary-Anne Breeze] | >.< ][][][][][][][][pre][(terra)Form(a)][ed][ & ][colon.E][Sourced >.<delving in sun.burnt glass dams a][s][l][?][l e-topped .vs…. |
| Niall Lucy | Following its overwhelming electoral victory in 1996, the Keating Labor Government announced its bold plan for cultural revolution. Everything hinged on the Australian Castles project, initiated in 1997… |
| MTC Cronin | This land at the centre of the world—at the centre because unknown—what millions of people walk behind it and call to it as if they had not thoughts… |
| Lesley Stern | Standing there, in this bifurcated landscape, I understood a little, the nature of Gippsland. But I could not fully grasp what it must have been like before the British, before the massacres, before the coming of the cow cockies and later the weekend farmers… |
| Nikki Gemmell | You were right, I shouldn’t have come. This land is through me like poison now, doing its dirty work. To think the ancient mariners once called it Terra Australis del Espirita Santo, South Land of the Holy Spirit… |
| Fiona Giles | It is recorded that when the American Indians first witnessed their white visitors shaking hands, they fell about laughing… |
| Ti O | Hophophophop hop op op op o los |