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
New essay · 31 August 2026
Truth-telling must unsettle, and it must also keep people involved. Drawing on First Nations political thought and the psychological evidence on shame and guilt, the essay maps the movement from discomfort to responsibility, organisation and structural change.
Read the essay →New essay · 20 August 2026
Gaza’s hospitals, and what it means when the enclave of the stricken is itself made a target. A clinical ethicist lays sixty sources of documentary record against the idea of the hospital as a protected place.
Read the essay →The 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.
Read publication →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.
Read essay →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.
Read essay →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.