Over the last semester of university, I had the good fortune to be able to write a number of essays on New Zealand history. What has struck me quite strongly over the course of this work are the contradictory attitudes New Zealanders take to their own history. We are simultaneously proud and dismissive of it. We like to emphasise our ( Read more... )

Ah, 28/11, what a funny little date in my life you are. When I was informed that I would know the status of my Honours application by the 1st of December, I should have known that I would find out today. The application was pretty much a formality, but I was nonetheless quite excited to open the mail and read that I have been accepted to Honours ( Read more... )

Today will surely go down as one of the greatest days in Australian political history. As the first order of business of the 42nd parliament of Australia, Kevin Rudd offered an apology to the Stolen Generations, those thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their homes and made wards of the state, deprived of contact with ( Read more... )

Well, I hope everybody else has had a good start to their 2008. Mine has been fairly mundane so far. I've watched a good deal of cricket, returned to my writing, and read a fair bit. I've been feeding my addiction to 19th century Russian literature lately, but I don't want to overdo it. This morning, I finished Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our ( Read more... )

Well, I recently received my university results for the second semester. I think this is turning into "Axver's half-yearly justifiable bragging". ( So let's get that out of the way. )