Since the early 1990s Kokoda, in Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province, has become a site of intense national feeling for many Australians. Thousands travel to Oro each year to complete the 96km track that runs from Kokoda Station to Port Moresby, in an act of remembrance of the conflict waged there in 1942 between Australian and Japanese forces. More than 45 years after the end of Australian colonial administration of PNG, the Kokoda Track is one of the few spaces when ordinary Papua New Guineans and Australians have much to do with one another.

In this episode, we go to Kokoda to find out what the trekking industry means to local people who live or work along the Track. What we see is that the benefits and recognition that the tourism industry offers are uneven. For some, the industry has become an important source of employment and cash income. For others, the industry has not delivered on its promises, and many local people bemoan the brief and fleeting interactions they have with the trekkers who ‘come and go’.

If Kokoda is, as former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating suggested in 1992, a place that epitomises the relationship between Papua New Guineans and Australians, this episode asks: What would it mean to reckon honestly with the complex, and sometimes difficult histories of that relationship?

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Communities across Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province were profoundly affected by the Second World War, and the fighting between Australia, American, and Japanese forces that was waged on their lands. In the years since, the Kokoda Track has become a focal point for many Australian tourists looking to commemorate the war. But there are many other communities across PNG whose wartime experiences don’t attract that same kind of attention or recognition.

In this episode we travel to one of these lesser-known places, a small village called Kapurakambo in PNG’s Oro Province. The community there describes the impacts of the war on their place, and the kinds of tenuous relationships that have followed in the years since. They also recall the remarkable tale of their ancestor, James Mamogoba, who established Kapurakambo as a coffee plantation back before the war started, in the midst of the colonial period. The relationships that he was able to forge with Australians and other outsiders, as one of the only Papuan plantation owners at that time, are held up in contrast to the absence of relationships with outsiders that his descendants describe today.

This episode asks: How is it that recognition flows to some places and people and not others, and what are the effects of this? What would it mean to look beyond Kokoda? Indeed, what would it mean to recognise the war itself as just one chapter in a long, complex history of encounter that also includes Australian colonialism? And what kinds of ethical relationships might that kind of recognition of shared history yield today?

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This is part two of a two part episode. Head to our feed for part one.

Kenya’s Nubians are an ethnic minority who found themselves in the country after having served the British as soldiers during the colonial period and in both World wars. They were originally from Sudan, but over many generations have come to see themselves as Kenyan, even though the Kenyan government has only recently recognised them as citizens.

The story of Kenya’s Nubians illustrates the impossible positions that so many people were put in by Imperial powers: brought to Kenya and used there for decades, they had nowhere else to go when Kenya became independent. The story shows how tough it can be to overcome difficult pasts of this kind. It is about the ambiguous feelings that colonialism can leave in its wake: for the Nubians, a fierce loyalty to Kenya, alongside something of a nostalgia for the better life they had under the British.

In this episode, Sam Balaton-Chrimes visits Kibra in Nairobi, the heart of the community, and talks with Nubians living there about the legacies of their past. What does this history mean for Nubians and their relationship to other Kenyans? And their relationship to the British? What do they feel the British owe them?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part one of a two part episode. Head to our feed for part two.

Kenya’s Nubians are an ethnic minority who found themselves in the country after having served the British as soldiers during the colonial period and in both World wars. They were originally from Sudan, but over many generations have come to see themselves as Kenyan, even though the Kenyan government has only recently recognised them as citizens.

The story of Kenya’s Nubians illustrates the impossible positions that so many people were put in by Imperial powers: brought to Kenya and used there for decades, they had nowhere else to go when Kenya became independent. The story shows how tough it can be to overcome difficult pasts of this kind. It is about the ambiguous feelings that colonialism can leave in its wake: for the Nubians, a fierce loyalty to Kenya, alongside something of a nostalgia for the better life they had under the British.

In this episode, Sam Balaton-Chrimes visits Kibra in Nairobi, the heart of the community, and talks with Nubians living there about the legacies of their past. What does this history mean for Nubians and their relationship to other Kenyans? And their relationship to the British? What do they feel the British owe them?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The English language is an import to this country. As with the foreign flora and fauna brought by the boats to the shores, language spread where the speakers settled; thrown over like a blanket on the same bed where the pillows of the ‘dying race’ were being smoothed.

And yet, we survived.

Indigenous poets who have been published since owe a lot to the landmark publication of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s 1964 collection We are Going, the first published collection of poetry from an Aboriginal person in this country. In the time since, poets have ‘written back’ into popular literary spaces with playful ways of using the English language and tongue-in-cheek refusal to adhere to those structures and conventions. The novel uses of Aboriginal English play with the limits of language to rework its meaning into the written and spoken word. Each poet is writing into a growing body of literary works dealing with the ongoing systems of oppression by challenging but also poking fun at the structures that uphold them.

In this episode, Alice Bellette (Palawa) speaks with poets Alison Whittaker (Gomeroi) and Laniyuk (Larrakia, Kungarrakan and Gurindji) about their work, as well as experiences with communities that foster the literary voices of Indigenous people in this country. We also talk about the ‘coding’ of language, a strategy poets use to articulate different meanings for different audiences, usually in ways that privilege Indigenous audiences. We reflect on what this might mean for the various audiences of this kind of literature.

You don’t need to be a regular reader of poetry to get something out of this episode, just bring an open mind and a value for the connections between humans.

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Listeners are warned that the episode includes the name of an Aboriginal person that has died. His name is used with permission.

Native title in Australia is sometimes celebrated as a successful form of recognition for Indigenous people. But the way the law works means the rights of Indigenous people are required to co-exist with those of settlers and their descendants. This is the case in Wilinggin in the Kimberley region of North West Australia. Here, Ngarinyin people who never ceded their land live alongside cattle station owners, tourism operators and other Aboriginal people, and though their native title rights have been legally recognised, they don’t have the right to veto activities on their land, nor straightforward access to it.

In this episode we take a journey to the Kimberley, where the brutal history of the cattle industry’s colonial past continues to resonate. We make stops along the Gibb River Road to hear from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Each of them spoke with Cameo Dalley, sharing their experiences of living on the Road, its history and what they envisage for the future. 

The stories in this episode ask challenging questions about whether and how coexistence might work in practice, and how it reinforces colonial relationships of power. It prompts us to think about how these kinds of relationships might endure in our own lives and communities.

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This is part two of a two part episode. Head to our feed for part one.

In this episode, we explore Africa as not some out of the way place riddled with poverty and conflict, but as a more ordinary place that is home to ordinary people, and the place from which they welcome – or not – their many and varied visitors. We explore the human connections that are possible, and those that have been made more difficult by traumatic colonial pasts. But we also talk about Africa, and Africans, as inherently worldly, both bigger and older than the colonial encounter.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is an award-winning novelist and essayist based in Nairobi, Kenya. In this episode, she speaks with Sam Balaton-Chrimes about her two novels, The Dragonfly Sea and Dust. Whether you’re a fan, or this is your first encounter with Yvonne’s work, do listen. You don’t have to have read her books to follow!

Yvonne’s work and this conversation with her ask the questions: how are we human in amongst troubled colonial histories? How can we connect with each-other? And how can we remind ourselves of all the interactions we have had and will have across cultures that transcend colonialism?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part one of a two part episode. Head to our feed for part two.

In this episode, we explore Africa as not some out of the way place riddled with poverty and conflict, but as a more ordinary place that is home to ordinary people, and the place from which they welcome – or not – their many and varied visitors. We explore the human connections that are possible, and those that have been made more difficult by traumatic colonial pasts. But we also talk about Africa, and Africans, as inherently worldly, both bigger and older than the colonial encounter.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is an award-winning novelist and essayist based in Nairobi, Kenya. In this episode, she speaks with Sam Balaton-Chrimes about her two novels, The Dragonfly Sea and Dust. Whether you’re a fan, or this is your first encounter with Yvonne’s work, do listen. You don’t have to have read her books to follow!

Yvonne’s work and this conversation with her ask the questions: how are we human in amongst troubled colonial histories? How can we connect with each-other? And how can we remind ourselves of all the interactions we have had and will have across cultures that transcend colonialism?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.