Evidence in Argument · Clinic to Country
Research and writing about history, justice and the struggle for lasting structural change
Justice can only hope to endure in a reformed order of law and society. What lasts is what gets built: social structures, institutional arrangements, resource commitments. I spent a career building them in hospitals and universities. Now lodged on Quandamooka Country, I write sourced essays on Australian history and policy, on the American constitutional order in which I was formed, and on the international law that is meant to protect people and places, while monitoring the decisions still imposed on First Nations peoples of this land.
⌖ Quandamooka Country · Manly, Queensland
Letter to America, No. 2 · 22 October 2026
Since January 2025 at least sixty people have died in ICE custody, a record thirty-seven in the last fiscal year. Federal agents have shot dead American citizens on American streets, and no agent has been charged with any of those killings. County medical examiners, federal inspectors and federal judges, Trump’s own appointees among them, have recorded the punishment the law forbids.
Read the letter: Killed, Jailed, and Disappeared: The Human Record of US Immigration EnforcementLetter to America, No. 1 · 21 October 2026
In August 1864 Abraham Lincoln had his cabinet sign, unread, his promise to hand over power if he lost. In February 2026 Donald Trump, asked whether he would trust the midterm result if his party lost, answered: “I will if the elections are honest.” The first of the Letters to America, written home from Australia.
Read the letter: An Election Is a Promise to Accept Defeat. Trump Refuses to Make It.New essay · 19 October 2026
On 16 October 2026 a parliamentary committee accepted that the ‘Breach Bail, Go to Jail’ Bill is incompatible with human rights, and recommended that Parliament pass it unchanged. The Government will pass it, and Labor has told the committee in writing that it “will support” the Bill. The children it reaches first will be First Nations children.
Read the essay: Queensland’s Bail Bill Breaches Human Rights. A Committee Agrees, and Says Pass It AnywayRapid response · 15 October 2026
Three years after the referendum, Megan Davis finds Aboriginal self-determination divided against itself: between bodies funded to speak and representatives chosen to speak, between the haves and the have-nots, and between the Commonwealth and the states to which it has returned its 1967 mandate.
Read the essay: Without a Federal Voice, the Gap Will Not Close: Megan Davis’s 2026 Mokak OrationThe work now
From Quandamooka Country, I write sourced essays on Australian history, racism, public policy and structural justice, with particular attention to the continuing consequences of colonisation. Alongside the writing, I build and operate websites and digital campaigns, and provide photography and video for community projects. When the work concerns First Nations communities, I build the platform, the audience, and the record. What gets said belongs to the speaker.
Evidence-led essays designed to be checked, challenged and used.
Tracing how law, institutions and inherited structures shape present outcomes.
Websites, email campaigns and practical communications for public-facing work.
Documenting speakers, gatherings and stories with care and context.
Different settings, different decades, one recurrent aim: to build justice into the structures a community of good character requires.
The measure of any structure is how its decisions fall on the people least able to refuse them.
In Australia, what colonisation built remains as racial hierarchy, systemically degrading First Nations peoples while insulating from consequence the perpetrators of continuing injustice.
Those who hold power can be replaced only periodically. Meantime, we must ask of their decisions what part evidence played, whether the people who must live with the consequences took part in making them, and what liability attaches where injustice is left standing.
Advocacy premised on truth, not ideology or possessive retention of the spoils of conquest. Truth-telling is necessary but insufficient until codified constitutionally; as more white Australians come to own their black history, one hopes to attain the societal critical mass required for the refounding of the country.
Selected writing
A 21-page submission by First Nations Allies Wynnum to the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, coordinated, integrated and edited by Philippe Foubert.
What the evidence shows about racism, health and justice, and what moving from consultation to shared power requires. Drawing on national survey and health data, the essay argues that First Nations leadership is the essential starting point of repair, not its afterthought.
Australia’s racism is discussed as private prejudice, but it was written into law: immigration statutes, protection regimes, the schooling of national memory. This essay traces how inherited stories survive contact with the documentary record, and why historical literacy, not accusation, is the civic precondition democratic repair requires.
The work is documentary. It draws on legislation, court and tribunal decisions, parliamentary inquiries and Hansard, gazetted decisions, archives and published research. Claims are sourced so that readers can check them. The institutions and dashboards I monitor, with their publication rhythms, appear in the Trusted Sources directory.
Where the work of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander author, organisation or community appears, it is attributed as theirs rather than absorbed into my own authority. Corrections are welcome. Tell me if I have something wrong.