Would you walk on someone’s grave? Or cross someone’s back yard if they asked you not to? Or risk your life if you knew someone else would feel responsible if you died? They’re simple questions of common sense and respect, but neither comes into the equation when it comes to climbing the world’s most famous monolithic site. The traditional Aboriginal owners of Australia’s Uluru (also known officially by its European name of Ayer’s Rock), ask tourists to not to climb their sacred site. It’s considered by the local Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (or Aangu) people to be sacred because it links…
-
-
Ordinarily, Britain’s Got Talentdoesn’t have a lot in common with history, though I suppose there will be a footnote onSusan Boylein the ‘History of Reality TV’ when it’s finally published. Or in Simon Cowell‘s autobiography. But none of this matters toMary Beard, whose excellentTimes Online blog, It’s A Don’s Life, covers subjects that have everything and nothing do with history. Beard, aprofessor in classics at Cambridge and the classics editor ofThe Times Literary Supplement, this week confessed to watching the final of BGT, posting a blog under the header: ‘A classicist watches Britain’s Got Talent‘. The Times describes Beard as…
-
The University of Oxford is the latest British research institution to agree to return the remains of indigenous Australians to their homeland. Aboriginal remains are scattered across the globe after they were shipped abroad for ‘research purposes’ following the colonisation of Australia by the British in 1788. It is the intention of the Australian government to repatriate all remains, and the hope of the Aboriginal people to bring all scientific analysis on their ancestors to a halt. Aborigines, who refer to the colonisation of Australia as ‘invasion’, had occupied the continent for more than 40,000 years prior to the discovery…