Johansen.se

This is my data. And this is my sovereign right.No more whitewashing. Let Truth be told.

— Data Sovereignty Words

I am a Wajarri, Badimaya and Wilunyu woman from the Yamaji Nation who has grown up on country with family in the small rural inland community of Mullewa, in Western Australia. In this story, I weave together some of my journey through the space of colonial archive violence, silences, and the creation of family stories where there was once a void, filling it with family love.

Love is often defined as an intense feeling of deep affection and a great interest in something and/or someone. We love our Old People, our Ancestors, and we want to know more about them so they can be part of our story and life journeys – this is wrapped in an intense Aboriginal love that is not often
recognised. It is an Aboriginal love that takes love even further and is shown when we speak about our love for country, culture, family and Old People.

The Aboriginal love I speak of is when we march, write, sing, weave a basket, create art, return to country often and slowly work through colonial archives, even when it breaks our hearts to do so.

Here, I step into parts of my country that other cultural members might avoid, consider taboo and/or may find somewhat difficult to navigate. This is not easy storytelling, and it rarely is when we speak about trauma, family, violence
and colonial archives. But one of the ways we can find family love is by sifting through the colonial archive of violence and trauma.

Charmaine Papertalk Green sitting on her birth country, Eradu Greenough River, WA.
Tamati Smith

There are many Yamaji families like mine who grew up on country with their families. But this does not mean that we don’t have stories to tell around the violence and trauma that colonial archives bring to our family kitchen tables.

In every corner of this big land now called Australia, all Aboriginal people have been touched by colonisation in some way or another. There are many stories of colonial violence through the generations – we all have different stories to tell and share.

This is some of my story, my family story and a Yamaji story.

‘Native welfare’ files – Geraldton, WA

I am kin to the colonial archive’s violenceFamily stories of removal, genocide andSocial experiments of eugenics and inhumaneTreatments of a First peoples on own countryNganajungu yungatha needs our medicine

— Yamaji kin songline

Yamaji people cannot access colonial records in Geraldton or Mullewa, because those records are physically stored in Perth archives, 420 kilometres south.

In the past 15 years, I have driven, flown and taken the bus down to Perth in order to access “native welfare” files and any other colonial records. I have
searched for any family-related data that I could lay my hands and eyes on. These actions are part of that Aboriginal love of our Old People I spoke to earlier – making time for our Ancestors.

Although I started this journey with family names, dates, place names and family oral history, I still bumped into colonial archive violence and trauma.

On one Perth trip, I was told during a very casual conversation with an Aboriginal History Research Services staff member in East Perth: “perhaps the 1972 Geraldton fire destroyed some of your Old People’s government files?”

The comments were surprisingly offhand and matter of fact, just like crumpling up unwanted paper and throwing it in the waste basket. This response was said in a way that seemed like an excuse if, after searching, there wasn’t any information available.

I really thought how irresponsible and uncaring of the Western Australian government this was. How it devalued the historical data of Yamaji people, by these people who prided themselves on being a culture that wrote down everything with their “civilised” writing system. One could be led to believe that a fire ripped through the Geraldton “native welfare department”, destroying the archives.

In the past, I had heard whispers in the Geraldton community of “native welfare”
files being destroyed in a fire. I had heard that a few files survived, taken by Aboriginal staff working in the department at the time, but have never spoken to those Elders. The reality is much more violent, sinister and hurtful for Yamaji people searching for genealogy, truth-telling and family truths.

The truth is that some government “native welfare” bureaucrat ordered deliberate destruction of the archives by burning them in a 44-gallon drum. A junior Aboriginal public servant was instructed to carry out the action at the time, and I am more than grateful that he shared his story publicly so that we know the truth. This is the truth-telling needed.

Some Yamaji ‘native welfare’ files were deliberately burned in Geraldton, WA.
Engin Akyurt/Unsplash

During my autoethnographic research journey, a newspaper article emerged confirming the Geraldton fire and the deliberate destruction of Yamaji colonial records. All I could think of was the Yamaji children removed and stolen by this violent Western Australian government.

I wondered: did I have some relatives out there that I will never know? And what about those who were stolen and their descendants who may never find their way back home? These are the sad and heartbreaking realities carried by many Yamaji people in their daily lives. But the Aboriginal love deep inside of us, transported across generations, will not allow memories and stories to disappear and vanish.

The Geraldton archival “fire burning” was in the 1970s, an era of “self-determination” and the emergence of Aboriginal rights organisations, land rights and identity pride.

I liken the violent act of deliberately burning paper connections to people, culture and country to cutting an umbilical cord between a mother and child, and then swiftly removing that child. The other thing I want to mention is the way governments and the white man are always trying to cover up the trauma trails inflicted on Yamaji people.

Family colonial records, aka Native Welfare Files.
CP Green

The trauma many Yamaji families face when trying to piece together family history is heartbreaking. Many stories and lived realities have been bravely shared by those taken away and by families diving deep into colonial archives. These stories and journeys help us all learn and understand how Aboriginal culture
and its people were violently attacked during colonisation as a form of genocide.

A sliver of information or data can make the world of difference to Yamaji family connection, belonging and identity. And those Yamaji who bravely push through
colonial archive pages do so with love and are indeed part of their family line of healers.

Heart-pain sisters

Where? The space is not silent/ never silent/ You cansit out in the bush/ Insect’s drone, ears ringing/ In thequietest places and times/ I can hear my breathing/ I canhear my heartbeat/ People talk about control

— Just Like That

I want to touch on the trauma that comes with silence and being silent. I am referring to the silences we carry that may have been inherited intergenerationally, or the silence that arrives and lingers after tragedy strikes. Or when our Elders pass on. The silences that bring trauma to individuals, families, cultural groups, and a community.

I want to share an experience at a Geraldton event that evoked intense personal feelings connected to these types of silences and heart emotions.

A local Aboriginal poet was doing some public poetry reading and she mentioned her “heart pains” – a pain she described as being connected to not knowing her grandparents and the jealousy she felt when seeing grandmothers with their
grandchildren. At that very moment she became my “heart pain” sister, with her words stitching straight into my heart because this was a feeling I knew.

But of course, I never did tell her or share my feelings with her – I didn’t want to bond over trauma in that way. I guess we just continued to carry our invisible “heart pains” in our daily lives. I, too, didn’t know my grandparents, especially my grandmothers, and longed for a granddaughter–grandmother relationship with wisdom, love and caring. But, instead, I was handed some painful silences and both of my grandmothers’ graves to drive past each day at the Geraldton cemetery.

I don’t have a special grandmother recipe to hand on to family, or grandparent stories to share around a campfire with extended family. But what I do have is recipes handed down from my mother – such as kangaroo-tail brawn. Over the
years, I did wonder why there were these silences in my family.

Kangaroo tail brawn, made by Charmaine Papertalk Green from a recipe passed down from her mother.
CP Green

What I do understand is that Nanna Alice died 25 years before I was born, and Grandmother Green died when I was 11 years old. This means all their knowledge, stories and information was handed only to those in direct contact with them at the time – their family members, including my parents.

One of the old Yamaji cultural practices I don’t like is when those who have passed are not spoken of again using their names that were used in the living world. I absolutely respect this cultural practice, but I don’t like that family and cultural information could be lost when not talking family names and
when cultural knowledge is not forwarded to each generation.

I tried to ask Mum and her brother questions about their mother, Alice Papertalk, who had died young at 42 years of age in Geraldton. Mum whispered some very important stories over the years, but her brother reluctantly shared stories. They both looked so sad when I did ask, and I now understand this was their “heart pain” of losing their mother so young.

These were contributing reasons for the family silence wrapped inside the Yamaji cultural practice of not speaking of those who had passed and then the “heart pain” reasons felt by our parents and their siblings.

Alternative Archives Collage by Charmaine Papertalk Green and Mark Smith, Geraldton WA.
Held in GRAG Collection

The colonial records offer different types of silences and some of the reasons why our families remained silent or were deliberately silenced. I had to work through these silences to bring family stories alive for myself and other family-tree members. I did not get to learn the meanings of these family silences from old Ancestors who had passed before I was born.

But I did get the sad silences from my mum and her brother when they whispered of their Old People. I could read from their body language, their eyes and the lowering of their heads when they did not want to talk to me about something. I had to accept the family silences held something that I needed to find to complete our family stories.

I did find my answers after they had all passed away.

A family silence narrative

It is a real thing, isn’t it, the silences that are carried forward across generations? I often hear other Yamaji say, “I wasn’t told that story” or “No-one told me about them Old People” or “We don’t know our Old People before our grandparents”. We learn over the years that silence talks and can tell us many things if we are patient and learn silence-listening. There was not much talk, family-tree talk, about our maternal great-grandfather: he was mainly referred to as Old Darby; I call him Old Gami Darby.

Therefore, family history and stories about this great-grandfather were not really handed down to my generation beyond knowing his name. There again was an unexplained silence. There was a near erasure of this great-grandfather from our family tree, and I found this quite distressing.

I could not stop thinking over the years why there was a strong “quietness” around this Ancestor. I wanted to know about all my Yamaji Ancestors. This great-grandfather was part of my identity – he is part of my identity. He is my identity. His story and name deserve to be carried forward in the world that colonisation brought to this land. I want to honour him.

The death certificate for Charmaine Papertalk Green’s grandmother, Alice Papertalk Darby, who died young, aged 42.
CP Green

It was while delving into colonial archives at the State Records Office of Western Australia in Perth that I learnt of my great-grandfather’s tragic fate. He was murdered – shot dead by another Aboriginal man between Meeberrie Station and Mount Narryer Station in the Murchison. Perhaps, closer to Meeberrie Station.

It was his son, Gami Big Jack Darby (Nanna Alice’s brother) who on 30 December 1917 reported to the Yalgoo Police Station that “he had received information that his father had been murdered by native Sam” (Yalgoo Police Station, 1919). I was quite shocked to find out great-grandfather Old Gami Darby was murdered in the Murchison.

This new family knowledge lifted the veil on the “family silence” handed down generationally – my mother did not talk about this happening to her grandfather. I wondered if she even knew about this sad and tragic information confronting me on the pages of a colonial document. This discovery was quite heavy, smothering me, and I felt I just needed to get out of the State Records Office to breathe and process what I had just read.

Once outside the dark confines of that department, I phoned a cousin to share this additional family information because I didn’t want to hold this type of information by myself. I needed to share it and share it fast because the trauma it brought was not going to be handed down into the next generations in silence.
In many ways, this discovery gave answers and reasons as to why stories about Great-grandfather Old Gami Darby were probably not passed down the generations.

My grandmother Alice Darby was a very young mother having her first child
when her father was murdered, between Meeberrie Station and Mount Narryer Station. I am not sure if Grandmother Alice went back to Meeberrie Station to live after moving south to the Mullewa area with Pop Ned Papertalk.

Her sister Thumma was buried at Meeberrie, and her mother Angeline worked and lived there, although Grandmother Alice worked and stayed at Woolgorong Outcamp and other stations in the Midwest and Murchison. That Alice died in her early 40s in Geraldton is another significant contributing factor to the lack of family oral history handed down around her father, Old Gami Darby.

My mother told me her maternal grandfather was from the Murchison and lived in the Meeberrie and Mount Narryer station areas and Murchison. His name was Tommy Darby or Old Darby. That was the end of the conversation, but it didn’t satisfy my need to break family silences, or my need to know more.

Charmaine Papertalk Green’s maternal great-grandfather lived in the areas of Meeberrie and Mount Narryer station (pictured, circa 1919) and Murchison.
Flickr

I wanted to know more information, so I had to search through more records, audio recordings and personal stories of other family members. My mum and all her siblings had passed away by the time I found this information in Perth about his death.

The sad thing is that this silence meant we did not have great-grandfather stories passed down to share with the younger generation. It is because of this I have decided to create a great-grandfather story of this Yamaji male Ancestor in the Murchison. A story I can pass on to other family members, and they can pass to their family members. This story is based on the last day in the life of Old Gami Darby in the Murchison.

The colonial records at least gave me some information and ways to find family love for this Ancestor to enable family silences to be broken and for our family healing tree. I can’t even begin to explain my mixed emotions in doing this, but it’s mainly so that the love for an Old Gami Darby narrative can be built on into the future.

There are some of us who refuse to go into colonial archives, for many reasons. But then there are others, such as me, who delve right in and navigate through the colonial writing, colonial pages and colonial mindsets of another era and a not-so-friendly colonial culture, to try to make sense of the impact of colonisation and to make sense of our family stories in this unforgiving process of colonisation.

I cannot talk about other cultural members’ relationship with colonial archives because it is such a personal private space, and I shouldn’t be expected to do that. My relationship with the colonial archives has been one where I was searching with a purpose for missing pieces to complete family stories and create new family stories.

I wanted to firstly have a look, then claim back my Old People’s stories from those colonial pages. I wanted to pull those words off the pages and tuck them safely away in my notepad and bag to take home. I wanted to imagine and create an Old Gami Darby story based on the colonial court records, police records and the oral history from my mother and her family.

I was anxious reading the court records. There were many thoughts rushing through my head about the Yamaji people with Old Gami Darby in the same camp when he got shot.

Was it an accidental murder or was it something more sinister? What was their relationship to Old Gami Darby and were they afraid to carry the story forward?
What exactly did they tell their families and descendants? Far too many thoughts flooded me, but at the end of the day I wanted to honour Old Gami Darby by writing a short story about his last day on this earth and on his country.

I don’t have all the information and am basing the following story on what I do have. Well, it’s more of a reflection and my imagining from documents I have.

Alternative Archives Collage by Charmaine Papertalk Green and Mark Smith, Geraldton WA.
Held in GRAG Collection

The last day of my great-grandfather, Gami Darby

In December, the Murchison in Western Australia is an extremely hot place, with temperatures up in the thirties or more. On 17 December 1917, a group of Yamaji (six adults and one little girl) set up camp on what they called the Meeberrie–
Mount Narryer Station run. The Yamajis recorded present were called Mary Jane, Polly, Tommy (our great-grandfather Old Gami Darby), Jinnie, Girlie, Sam and Jinnie’s little girl Annie.

On this day Old Gami Darby was wearing a khaki shirt and blue flannel pants. He also had a piece of a magnifying glass on him, quite possibly to read or look at things close-up. It was a hot morning with no clouds in sight when Old Gami Darby, Jinnie (aka Jubyjub) and little girl Annie went to the creek looking for a tomahawk wood handle. Girlie, Mary Jane and Polly stayed at the camp while Sam went into the bush with his rifle – maybe hunting with his rifle.

At some stage during the day, Girlie, Mary Jane and Polly heard a gunshot thinking it was someone – perhaps Sam – kangaroo shooting. Then they heard and saw Jinnie running back towards the camp screaming, “Someone shot my mardong
[man]”. (Meaning Great-grandfather Tommy – Old Gami Darby.)

Jinnie rushed back to the camp looking for something to cover Old Gami Darby, who was shot on the ground. Girlie, Mary Jane and Polly went to have a look at where Old Gami Darby laid deceased on the ground. Sam, who was described as a very tall
Yamaji man about six foot, was standing there with his gun and threatening everyone with what would happen if they “told any other blackfellas”. Sam told the group that Great-grandfather Tommy (Old Gami Darby) was struck by lightning.

The Yamaji women told the police there were no clouds in the sky – it was a hot day. Sam made them all help with digging a shallow grave and then burying Great-grandfather Tommy, Old Gami Darby. Sam then took off with Jinnie and the little girl Annie heading towards the Kennedy Ranges in the Gascoyne.

Sam was not convicted for murdering our great-grandfather, Old Gami Darby, because there were no actual eyewitnesses – they only heard the sound of the gunshot. This was our Old Gami Darby’s last day alive in the Murchison. Months later, Pop Big Jack Darby (Nanna Alice’s brother) is recorded by the Yalgoo Police Station as having taken his father Old Gami Darby’s body to the Mount Narryer Station area for reburial at a site unknown.

Old Gami Darby we been waiting for youTo sing your song through the MidwestAnd Murchison bush and open skyMeebeerie and Mount Narryer is noStranger even if we live in townTo stare into the campfire in MullewaAnd in Geraldton and send you loveOld Gami Darby we been waiting for you

Old Gami Darby I been waiting for youTo share your name and story

— Old Gami Darby

Colonial archives trauma

One of our cultural practices or protocols throughout Australia is to introduce yourself and let people know your cultural groups and family names. It is a custom of positioning yourself in the First Nations world. Letting people know who your relatives are and where your ancestral country is located, your connections.

Colonisation severely disrupted this cultural practice by erasing and disconnecting Yamaji people from place, people and family. In my journey through the colonial archives, native title conversations with anthropologists and others, the presence of alias names caused confusion, frustration and trauma.

This concept of alias names is often found in colonial files with the symbol @ – for example, Alice@Helen. There were arguments over Yamaji with two or more names being in fact the same person, especially when some Yamaji didn’t understand the impact of alias names.

The actions of pastoral station owners, police officers, colonial records administrators and others changed Yamaji identities with the stroke of a pen, most times creating a tangled identity web that was complex to unravel.

These pastoralists, colonists and so forth gave some of my Ancestors different names depending on where they were located (which station they were living at) – they just went ahead and changed their names. The colonials erased and removed traditional names because they couldn’t pronounce or spell the Yamaji names. And all these assimilationist practices were acceptable because Yamaji culture was not valued or considered part of the colonisers’ world.

The community tensions created around identity and connection exist to this day, with other Yamaji confused and not aware of or understanding the impact of name changing on stations or in colonial records.

In the colonial archives, my mother’s maiden name Papertalk was spelt Papidok and Paperdog. My maternal grandmother’s names in the same colonial file were recorded as Alice Darby, Ella Merritt, Alice Papertalk, Alice Marlow, Alice Paperdog and Helen Marlow. Even my family’s younger generation became confused, not understanding the name alias concept.

My maternal grandmother’s sister’s traditional name was Thumma/Tama and yet in her colonial files, depending on which station she was at or partner she had, her names were recorded as Tama Wells, Thelma Wells, Bessie Wells and Bessie Pompey. This grandmother’s sister was buried at Meebeerie Station with the incorrect name Bessie Papertalk – it was her sister Alice (my grandmother) who had married a Papertalk.

The Native Affairs records of Charmaine Papertalk Green’s grandmother’s sister, Thumma/Tama, often record her name incorrectly.
CP Green

All of this data will be corrected out at the Meeberrie cemetery in the Murchison.

I am just a little paper dogReady to bite your anklesAnd chase you in the vaultsOf truth telling to open your eyes

— Little paper dog

The concept of name alias has caused many arguments and distrust in the local native title process because many Yamajis do not know or understand that Yamaji people’s names were changed and given nicknames and aliases by station owners, native affairs recording clerks and other government officials.

The process of erasure and colonisation meant discarding traditional Yamaji names and replacing them with English names and terms.

Data sovereignty: ‘It is Yamaji data’

The colonial archives were never created for Yamaji people. They were a racist colonial tool to control and manage Yamaji. We understand that the collection of our Old People’s data in this way came from a place outside of Aboriginal love.

Knowing about the how and why hurts in many different ways for different Yamaji families. A lot of times, it is a hurt so deep that our Old People’s stories waiting inside these files remain untouched, hidden and silenced. I only understand that real deep hurt and trauma exists because of stories I have been
told from other Yamaji people and some of my own family members.

I came into this journey 20 years ago as an adult, carrying my suitcase of knowledge and experience of what to expect inside the files and on the pages. I needed patience, courage and the ability to work through searching with Aboriginal love. This doesn’t mean I didn’t get angry, feel sad and cry, or just feel so grateful – a range of emotions existed, but I came prepared.

The colonial writing would be hard to read, so translating would take time. The words and terms used were racist, derogatory but expected. This fuelled me with the energy needed to push on through each page of each file. I came to this journey accepting that any data written about my family and Old People was our Yamaji data. This data belonged to us. It was Yamaji data, regardless of who wrote it and what it was written on, and I claimed our data as it is my right.

I had decided to claim any colonial records such as the so-called “native welfare files” as a way to gain insight into the lives and reality of my Old People in times I would not experience and live as a teenager or an adult. This is the
relationship I wanted with colonial records. I prepared myself to sift through with Aboriginal love for my Old People.

I was determined these colonial archives would not harm me or my family, but rather bring healing benefits to my Yamaji family tree.

We deserve stories and knowing from the colonial archive perspective to stitch with our Yamaji cultural knowledge. It is our deepest honour to our Yamaji Old People. And while the burning of the files hurt, it didn’t erase our right to our data sovereignty and love our people. I am still thinking about you, my family.

Ngatha Nganajungu yagu NganggurnmanhaI am still thinking about you my motherNgatha Nganajungu mama NganggurnmanhaMy father I am still thinking about youNgatha Nganajungu gantharri NganggurnmanhaI am still thinking about you my older brotheryounger brotherNgatha Nganajungu gami NganggurnmanhaI am still thinking about you my grandfatherNgatha Nganajungu Aba NganggurnmanhaI am still thinking about you my grandmotherNgatha Nganajungu (family) NganggurnmanhaI am still thinking about you my family

— Nganajungu Yagu

This essay is an edited extract from Shapeshifting: First Nations Lyric Nonfiction by Jeanine Leane & Ellen van Neerven (UQP). Läs mer…

How can a desert burn? Australia’s vast deserts aren’t just sand dunes – they’re often dotted with flammable spinifex grass hummocks. When heavy rains fall, grass grows quickly before drying out. That’s how a desert can burn.

When our Karajarri and Ngurrara ancestors lived nomadic lifestyles in what’s now called the Great Sandy Desert in northwestern Australia, they lit many small fires in spinifex grass as they walked. Fires were used seasonally for ceremonies, signalling to others, flushing out animals, making travel easier (spinifex is painfully sharp), cleaning campsites, and stimulating fresh vegetation growth ready for foraging or luring game when people returned a few months later. The result was a patchwork desert.

After colonisation, this ended. Without management, the spinifex and grassy deserts began to burn in some of the largest fires in Australia.

But now the work of caring for desert country (pirra) with fire (jungku, or warlu) has begun again. We are Karajarri and Ngurrara rangers who care for 110,000 square kilometres of the Great Sandy Desert. Our techniques have changed – we now drop incendiaries from helicopters to cover more distance – but our goals are similar. Guided by our elders, we are combining traditional knowledge with modern technologies and science to refine how we manage fire in a changing world.

In research published today, we and our co-authors paired analysis of historic fire patterns with five years of fauna surveys. Put together, we found mature spinifex was important for creatures of the Great Sandy Desert – and that means we should burn small and often, like our ancestors.

Karajarri ranger Kamahl Bangu (left) and Ngurrara rangers Lucas Brown, Elton Smiler and Isiah Jack (right) surveying for wildlife.
Anne Jones

Fire and sand

In the 1940s and ‘50s, the Royal Australian Air Force photographed the Great Sandy Desert from the air. These photos were taken before our people moved to settlements and pastoral stations between the 1960s and ’80s.

That means these aerial photographs capture a time when traditional burns were still happening.

Our ranger teams are studying these photographs to draw out the fire patterns produced by our ancestors.

These photographs tell a story. Our ancestors burned many small areas, creating a complicated patchwork of spinifex at different stages of regrowth after fire.

But they also left a great deal of mature spinifex – large old hummocks that hadn’t burnt for years. This patchwork of burned and unburned areas made it hard for bushfires to spread far and fast. When traditional burning practices stopped, bushfires became common.

The knowledge contained in these old photos is very valuable. The images give us clear goals for our fire management. We combine this with guidance from elders and information on fuel loads across Country gleaned from remote sensing and weather modelling, to plan our fire management.

We could see where our ancestors burnt (white patches) in the Karajarri Indigenous Protected Area in this aerial photo from the late 1940s.
National Library of Australia, CC BY-NC-ND

What does fire mean for desert creatures?

Australian deserts are remarkably biodiverse, especially in reptiles. In a single clump of mature spinifex, you might find up to 18 different species of lizard. Then there are snakes and goannas, as well as mammals such as marsupial moles found only in the arid zone.

Spinifex hummocks are crucial to many of these species, offering shelter, food and prey. What does fire do to spinifex-dwellers?

On this topic, scientific knowledge is playing catchup with Indigenous traditional knowledge but we see value in using the scientific method – a universal language – to help us manage Country, and tell other people about what we are doing.

The past few decades have been a time of major change for the Great Sandy Desert. Cultural burns stopped, and feral animals such as camels and cats grew in number. As a result, many native animals are disappearing or already gone.

Karajarri and Ngurrara Rangers manage fire in an area almost twice the size of Tasmania, and much of the burning is done from aircraft. Regina Thirkall, Hannah Cliff, Sumayah Surprise conducting aerial incendiary operations on Ngurrara. Braedan Taylor watches a fire lit from the ground on Karajarri.
Tom Sullivan/Yanunijarri AC: Karajarri KTLA

We think larger, more frequent fires play a part. Our Karajarri and Ngurrara rangers are using science to make sure our patchwork burns – known as right-way fire – are good for native animals.

Between 2018 and 2022, we surveyed reptiles and mammals from 32 sites across the Karajarri and Warlu Jilajaa Jumu (Ngurrara) Indigenous Protected Areas in the desert. We caught almost 3,800 mammals and reptiles from 77 species. Reptiles made up the lion’s share, with 66 species. We also recorded when fire had come through, and how big the burnt patches were.

The data showed reptile species care a lot about where they live. Some prefer recently burned areas, where the spinifex is gone or still very small. Others like old spinifex, huge hummocks going unburned for years. And others still liked mid-sized spinifex.

We found mammals were rare in recently burned areas and more common in mature spinifex. We also found more mammal diversity in areas with fine-scale patchworks of fires.

This shows we must keep our fires small, burning different areas at different times, and protect enough mature spinifex.

The Great Sandy Desert has a rich and varied reptile fauna. The central netted dragon (top right) prefers recently burnt areas, but the leopard skink (bottom right) needs spinifex cover. Other species are a Dampierland sandslider, Northern blind snake, pale knob-tailed gecko, hooded scaleyfoot, bearded dragon.
Karajarri Lands Trust Association; Yanunijarri AC; Anne Jones

This patchwork approach will help spinifex hopping mice, desert mice, planigales, dunnarts, and dozens of small reptile species to survive. But it will also help now-rare game species, the marlu (red kangaroo in Walmajarri language) and pijarta (emu in Karajarri).

Our research tells us returning to the traditional burning techniques of our ancestors is still the right thing to do – even though the desert has changed.

Karajarri Rangers talk about the Pirra Junkgu-Warlu project.

Rare finds

Scientists have rarely surveyed the Great Sandy Desert. As a result, our surveys have turned up important findings.

The kaluta (Dasykaluta rosamondae), for instance, is a feisty little carnivorous marsupial. We found it on the Canning Stock Route, 500km further north than the distribution known to scientists.

Similarly, we found the threatened Dampierland sandslider (Lerista separanda), a vividly coloured skink, in the Karajarri Indigenous Protected Area, expanding its distribution 450km southeast. Karajarri people call sandsliders winkajurta, or “lice eaters”, because in the old days you could use them to hunt lice in your hair.

Our research gives us confidence that bringing back traditional burns helps desert creatures. We want more people to know that right-way fire is part of healthy Country, including our own mob and tourists who pass through, so we can all look after the desert.

In our work, we take our old people out onto Country to get advice on burning and their knowledge of animals. As one told us, seeing the old ways return made him “real happy [and] to come alive” – just like the desert.

We thank Karajarri and Ngurrara Traditional Owners and acknowledge past and present elders. Thanks to the many rangers and coordinators who helped in these surveys, and our partners: Environs Kimberley, Charles Darwin University, Western Australian Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, and Indigenous Desert Alliance. Special thanks to Hamsini Bijlani, our project coordinator. Läs mer…

Since artificial intelligence (AI) became mainstream over the past two years, many of the risks it poses have been widely documented. As well as fuelling deep fake porn, threatening personal privacy and accelerating the climate crisis, some people believe the emerging technology could even lead to human extinction.

But some risks of AI are still poorly understood. These include the very particular risks to Indigenous knowledges and communities.

There’s a simple reason for this: the AI industry and governments have largely ignored Indigenous people in the development and regulation of AI technologies. Put differently, the world of AI is too white.

AI developers and governments need to urgently fix this if they are serious about ensuring everybody shares the benefits of AI. As Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people like to say, “nothing about us, without us”.

Indigenous concerns

Indigenous peoples around the world are not ignoring AI. They are having conversations, conducting research and sharing their concerns about the current trajectory of it and related technologies.

A well-documented problem is the theft of cultural intellectual property. For example, users of AI image generation programs such as DeepAI can artificially generate artworks in mere seconds which mimic Indigenous styles and stories of art.

This demonstrates how easy it is for someone using AI to misappropriate cultural knowledges. These generations are taken from large data sets of publicly available imagery to create something new. But they miss the storying and cultural knowledge present in our art practices.

AI technologies also fuel the spread of misinformation about Indigenous people.

The internet is already riddled with misinformation about Indigenous people. The long-running Creative Spirits website, which is maintained by a non-Indigenous person, is a prominent example.

Generative AI systems are likely to make this problem worse. They often conflate us with other global Indigenous peoples around the world. They also draw on inappropriate sources, including Creative Spirits.

During last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, “no” campaigners also used AI-generated images depicting Indigenous people. This demonstrates the role of AI in political contexts and the harm it can cause to us.

Another problem is the lack of understanding of AI among Indigenous people. Some 40% of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in Australia don’t know what generative AI is. This reflects an urgent need to provide relevant information and training to Indigenous communities on the use of the technology.

There is also concern about the use of AI in classroom contexts and its specific impact on Indigenous students.

Looking to the future

Hawaiian and Samoan Scholar Jason Lewis says:

We must think more expansively about AI and all the other computational systems in which we find ourselves increasingly enmeshed. We need to expand the operational definition of intelligence used when building these systems to include the full spectrum of behaviour we humans use to make sense of the world.

Key to achieving this is the idea of “Indigenous data sovereignty”. This would mean Indigenous people retain sovereignty over their own data, in the sense that they own and control access to it.

In Australia, a collective known as Maiam nayri Wingara offers important considerations and principles for data sovereignty and governance. They affirm Indigenous rights to govern and control our data ecosystems, from creation to infrastructure.

The National Agreement on Closing the Gap also affirms the importance of Indigenous data control and access.

This is reaffirmed at a global level as well. In 2020, a group of Indigenous scholars from around the world published a position paper laying out how Indigenous protocols can inform ethically created AI. This kind of AI would centralise the knowledges of Indigenous peoples.

In a positive step, the Australian government’s recently proposed set of AI guardrails highlight the importance of Indigenous data sovereignty.

For example, the guardrails include the need to ensure additional transparency and make extra considerations when it comes to using data about or owned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to “mitigate the perpetuation of existing social inequalities”.

Opponents of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament used artificial intelligence to create online ads depicting Indigenous people during last year’s referendum debate.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

Indigenous Futurisms

Grace Dillon, a scholar from a group of North American Indigenous people known as the Anishinaabe, first coined the term “Indigenous Futurisms”.

Ambelin Kwaymullina, an academic and futurist practitioner from the Palyku nation in Western Australia, defines it as:

visions of what-could-be that are informed by ancient Aboriginal cultures and by our deep understandings of oppressive systems.

These visions, Kwaymullina writes, are “as diverse as Indigenous peoples ourselves”. They are also unified by “an understanding of reality as living, interconnected whole in which human beings are but one strand of life amongst many, and a non-linear view of time”.

So how can AI technologies be informed by Indigenous ways of knowing?

A first step is for industry to involve Indigenous people in creating, maintaining and evaluating the technologies – rather than asking them retrospectively to approve work already done.

Governments need to also do more than highlight the importance of Indigenous data sovereignty in policy documents. They need to meaningfully consult with Indigenous peoples to regulate the use of these technologies. This consultation must aim to ensure ethical AI behaviour among organisations and everyday users that honours Indigenous worldviews and realities.

AI developers and governments like to claim they are serious about ensuring AI technology benefits all of humanity. But unless they start involving Indigenous people more in developing and regulating the technology, their claims ring hollow. Läs mer…

New Zealand’s economy has been described as a “housing market with bits tacked on”. Buying and selling property is a national sport fuelled by the rising value of homes across the country.

But the wider public has little understanding of how those property valuations are created – despite their being a key factor in most banks’ decisions about how much they are willing to lend for a mortgage.

Automated valuation models (AVM) – systems enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) that crunch vast datasets to produce instant property values – have done little to improve transparency in the process.

These models started gaining traction in New Zealand in the early 2010s. The early versions used limited data sources like property sales records and council information. Today’s more advanced models include high-quality geo-spatial data from sources such as Land Information New Zealand.

AI models have improved efficiency. But the proprietary algorithms behind those AVMs can make it difficult for homeowners and industry professionals to understand how specific values are calculated.

In our ongoing research, we are developing a framework that evaluates these automated valuations. We have looked at how the figures should be interpreted and what factors might be missed by the AI models.

In a property market as geographically and culturally varied as New Zealand’s, these points are not only relevant — they are critical. The rapid integration of AI into property valuation is no longer just about innovation and speed. It is about trust, transparency and a robust framework for accountability.

AI valuations are a black box

In New Zealand, property valuation has traditionally been a labour-intensive process. Valuers would usually inspect properties, make market comparisons and apply their expert judgement to arrive at a final value estimate.

But this approach is slow, expensive and prone to human error. As demand for more efficient property valuations increased, the use of AI brought in much-needed change.

But the rise of these valuations models is not without its challenges. While AI offers speed and consistency, it also comes with a critical downside: a lack of transparency.

AVMs often operate as “black boxes”, providing little insight into the data and methodologies that drive their valuations. This raises serious concerns about the consistency, objectivity and transparency of these systems.

What exactly the algorithm is doing when an AVM estimates a home’s value is not clear. Such opaqueness has real-world consequences, perpetuating market imbalances and inequities.

Without a framework to monitor and correct these discrepancies, AI models risk distorting the property market further, especially in a country as diverse as New Zealand, where regional, cultural and historical factors significantly influence property values.

Automated valuation models produce near-instant valuations but have done little to improve transparency in the process.
Sansert Sangsakawrat/Getty Images

Transparency and accountability

A recent discussion forum with real estate industry insiders, law researchers and computer scientists on AI governance and property valuations highlighted the need for greater accountability when it comes to AVMs. Transparency alone is not enough. Trust must be built into the system.

This can be achieved by requiring AI developers and users to disclose data sources, algorithms and error margins behind their valuations.

Additionally, valuation models should incorporate a “confidence interval” – a range of prices that shows how much the estimated value might vary. This offers users a clearer understanding of the uncertainty inherent in each valuation.

But effective AI governance in property valuation cannot be achieved in isolation. It demands collaboration between regulators, AI developers and property professionals.

Bias correction

New Zealand urgently needs a comprehensive evaluation framework for AVMs, one that prioritises transparency, accountability and bias correction.

This is where our research comes in. We repeatedly resample small portions of the data to account for situations where property value data do not follow a normal distribution.

This process generates a confidence interval showing a range of possible values around each property estimate. Users are then able to understand the variability and reliability of the AI-generated valuations, even when the data are irregular or skewed.

Our framework goes beyond transparency. It incorporates a bias correction mechanism that detects and adjusts for constantly overvalued or undervalued estimates within AVM outputs. One example of this relates to regional disparities or undervaluation of particular property types.

By addressing these biases, we ensure valuations that are not only accountable or auditable but also fair. The goal is to avoid the long-term market distortions that unchecked AI models could create.

The rise of AI auditing

But transparency alone is not enough. The auditing of AI-generated information is becoming increasingly important.

New Zealand’s courts now require a qualified person to check information generated by AI and subsequently used in tribunal proceedings.

In much the same way financial auditors ensure accuracy in accounting, AI auditors will play a pivotal role in maintaining the integrity of valuations.

Based on earlier research, we are auditing the artificial valuation model estimates by comparing them with the market transacted prices of the same houses in the same period.

It is not just about trusting the algorithms but trusting the people and systems behind them. Läs mer…

Sexual harassment is all too common in hospitality and tourism. One Australian survey found almost half of the respondents had been sexually harassed, compared to about one in three in workplaces more generally.

Hospitality and tourism are marked by intense and close interpersonal interactions and dismissive treatment by some customers, including verbal and physical aggression, bullying and sexual suggestions.

Workers who are young, female, low-paid and casual are especially vulnerable.

The scandals at the Merivale Hospitality Group and Sydney’s Swillhouse restaurant are only the most recent.

The widely held view that “the customer is always right” gives customers power. The power imbalance is magnified where tipping makes up a substantial part of workers’ earnings.

What newspapers report

To examine how sexual harassment is reported, we identified about 2,000 newspaper articles across a number of countries published between 2017 and 2022 dealing with the treatment of hotel room attendants, airline cabin crew and massage therapists. We zeroed in on 273 for closer analysis.

This was a period in which the public awareness of sexual harassment climbed with the rise of the #MeToo movement and media coverage probably peaked.

Media coverage matters because of its effect on public opinion.

Computer-assisted thematic analysis showed four different types of coverage, some overlapping, relating to legal matters, celebrities, power dynamics, and calls to action.

Nirmi et al, Media discourse analysis of sexual harassment in the airline, hotel and spa sectors, 2024

The language used varied according to the countries in which the newspapers were located.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the accused were often described by their social or economic status, with cases involving famous people getting a lot of attention. In Asia and Africa, the reports focused on basic details such as the offender’s age and where they lived.

Women infantilised

But universally we found the terms used to describe victims were highly gendered and dated in ways that suggested subservience and undermined their professional skills. Cabin crew were called “air hostesses”. Room attendants were called “maids”.

Framing these professionals as modern-day servants has the potential to foster and perpetuate an expectation that sexual harassment is to be expected.

Reports involving celebrity harassers highlighted victims’ narratives with emotionally charged quotes using words such as “awful” and “terrible”. These words were perhaps intended to evoke empathy for the victims but also serve to further victimise them.

Female aggression under-reported

In all cases, women were heavily featured as victims but never as aggressors. It is a gender bias that does not match the established statistics, which show that almost one-quarter of aggressors are women.

This misrepresentation creates a skewed understanding of who commits and suffers from sexual harassment. It has the potential to discourage victims of harassment by women from coming forward.

It’s important for the tourism industry to foster secure and dignified working conditions. But it is also important that the media reflect the actual behaviour of aggressors and victims.

Done better, reporting could help

The media could play a crucial role in bringing about better policies and practices in these industries by emphasising the severe consequences of ignoring the problem and the benefits of taking proactive steps.

More respectful and accurate reporting might be able to help drive lasting change, making a positive difference in the lives of the skilled workers on whom so many of us depend. Läs mer…

It wasn’t that long ago that the Federal Reserve, the central bank for the United States, was worrying that annual inflation would surpass 9% in the middle of 2022. The U.S. economy hadn’t seen prices rise that fast since the 1980s, and most everyone feared that a series of interest rate hikes would plunge the economy into a recession.

What a difference two years can make.

Inflation cooled to 2.4% in September 2024, according to consumer price index data released by the Labor Department on Oct. 10. That’s down from 2.5% the previous month and in line with market expectations of 2.3% to 2.4%. The inflation rate peaked at 8.9% in June 2022 – a 41-year high.

The news brings the Fed – and its chair, Jerome Powell – much closer to reaching its 2% inflation target. It also marks the fourth straight month that year-over-year price changes have been below 3% and the third consecutive month of declining inflation rates.

Speaking as an economist and finance professor, I think this could be a big deal for the Federal Reserve, which next meets – and could again cut interest rates – in November.

Fodder for another rate cut?

The Fed has what’s called a dual mandate: It pursues both low inflation and stable employment, two goals that can sometimes be at odds. Cutting interest rates can help employment but worsen inflation, while hiking them can do the opposite.

Since inflation started to take off during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fed officials have emphasized that their job isn’t done until price increases are back down to the 2% target.

But in light of recent labor market news, Powell and his colleagues have changed their messaging a bit. This indicates that the upside risks of inflation are lower than the risks associated with a weakening labor market.

And in September, the Fed slashed the federal funds rate by 0.5 percentage point, or 50 basis points – the first cut since it began hiking rates in March 2022. The move came as unemployment had ticked up to 4.3% in July, job openings plummeted and broader labor markets weakened.

Increasingly optimistic markets

Equity markets rallied on the news of the September rate cut. Investors believe reductions in the federal funds rate, which is a prime rate that helps to dictate mortgage rates, auto loans, credit card rates and home equity lines of credit, will spur increases in investment and consumption, guiding the economy to a so-called soft landing instead of a recession.

After that meeting, most members of the Federal Reserve Board indicated they would also favor cutting rates by 25 basis points at each of their upcoming November and December meetings.

Between today’s inflation news and the unexpectedly sunny jobs report on Oct. 4, investors and markets have a lot of news to digest as they consider what path interest rates will take in the months ahead. Many continue to believe that we may well see two 25-basis-point cuts by the end of 2024 – and so do I. Läs mer…

The next phase of the US election campaign is coming right at us and it’s even nastier than the last. As hurricanes Milton and Helene rolled in to Florida and North Carolina and at least four other states, bringing tornadoes, storm surges, and miles of destruction, Donald Trump’s team poured out new attack lines blaming the government (aka the Democrats), for the bad weather and for not doing enough to deal with its devastation.

In a downpour of misinformation, Trump baselessly claimed that Harris “wined and dined in San Francisco, and all of the people in North Carolina … no helicopters”. The stats told a different story, that the National Guard had completed 146 flight missions, resulting in the rescue of 538 people and 150 pets.

Other allegations came thick and fast including that the national disaster fund had been spent on illegal migrants not those in desperate need because of storm damage. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was forced to set the record straight and set up a fact-checking channel on its website. Meanwhile, Georgian Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, not known for her thoughtful approach to national emergencies, asserted that “they could control the weather”.

Former broadcast journalist, and now professor at Dublin City University, Colleen Murrell believes that the power of misinformation and disinformation to sow conflict will continue to ramp up on social media over the next few weeks as the campaign goes into its final stage. Meanwhile, as Murrell explains, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has significantly shifted a gear this week, and chosen to take some interviews with media big hitters.

iliya Mitskovets / Alamy

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With a little less than a month before election day it’s all to play for. Trump and Kamala Harris remain pretty much neck and neck in the polls, and only the reckless are willing to put money on the result. With the election expected to be decided by a handful of voters in swing states, who are not yet committed to either candidate, both sides are moving fast, trying new things and throwing vast quantities of money around.

Hurricane Milton left three million power without power.

Harris, having apparently not been willing or interested in working with the mainstream news channels in the first few months of her campaign, has changed tack with her media strategy. For a centrepiece interview, she sat down in the CBS studio with seasoned journalist Bill Whitaker to answer some tough questions on the economy, Israel immigration and guns (yes she owns one, a Glock).

As a Conversation editor covering the US election from an international perspective, I have seen Harris start to look a lot more comfortable in her leadership role in the past few months, while still not always nailing the big speeches or the pithy media responses. But for CBS she performed pretty well, appeared more relaxed in front of the camera than she has before and was, sometimes, more concise. Other observers have felt this was a marked improvement on her ability to handle this type of interview earlier this year.

In a race this tight Harris needs to perform well at pretty much everything and she, and her team, have clearly decided that after spending most of the summer developing her presence on social media, where she was a bit of a hit surfing the brat summer theme, they needed a new approach, and 60 Minutes with its 8.4 million viewers was worth the risk.

Over a handful of days the vice-president did a swing through the Howard Stern show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Howard Stern Show as well as the more comfortable territory of a bunch of podcasts. Harris seems much more persuasive in those podcast interviews (who wouldn’t be?), than under pressure on 60 Minutes still, but she is definitely upping her game.

Over the summer, the Harris team stayed away from most traditional media, the big TV channel interviews for instance, and focused on working with their candidate on social media, where she became part of a brat summer swing. This was clearly aimed at winning over younger votes, who they need to turn up on November 5. Harris memes were a bit of a summer success story, associating the vice-president more of a relaxed type, happy to go with the flow.

But social media trends only get you so far, and those who don’t go near Instagram and Twitter/X are unlikely to be won over. Some of these harder-to-reach voters are far more likely to switch on CBS, than pick up on a TikTok trend. And if they are not watching the TV, then the campaigns will have to go out on the streets and find them.

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Chasing the last votes

Regular Conversation correspondent on the US election, Thomas Gift, has been back visiting his home state of Pennsylvania (PA) over the past few weeks, and has been letting me know what the middle of the key swing state is looking like, campaign wise. Last week he described to me how a set of large Trump banners have become a semi-permanent feature in the streets of Chambersburg, PA. Chambersburg is set right in the middle of the state, almost half way between the major cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

While Harris is likely to win the cities, Trump is expected to win the more rural areas of PA, the state with the fifth biggest population in the US, and a crucial 19 Electoral College votes. They are both fighting over the suburbs, and this is where the battle is likely to be won. More Democrats have moved to the suburbs, from more urban residential areas in the past few years, and suburban populations are growing fast.

Another factor could be the shift in the demographics of those old Pennsylvania industrial towns (where Billy Joel said they were closing all the factories down), they now have a growing population of Latino voters, moving to take up jobs in call centres that have opened there, as A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, a professor of history at Penn State university, details. Latino voters supported Joe Biden in 2020 and, according to a recent government census, Allentown is now 54% Latino. Helpfully for the Democrats, 53% of PA’s Hispanic population is of Puerto Rican descent and Puerto Ricans tend to lean Democrat. Both parties are busy identifying opportunities here.

Trump is rolling out a huge campaign machine in the state, and Harris is pumping money in too. As someone who went to high school in Pittsburgh, I’m naturally fascinated by what is going on in the state, but it is fast turning out to be everybody’s one to watch, as PA is expected to be the tipping point for the campaigns. Whoever wins here is pretty likely to win the presidency. In the last 10 elections, Pennsylvania has selected the eventual occupant of the Oval Office eight times, as Gift wrote for us this week.

Therefore it’s no surprise that Harris and her allies have spent US$21.2 million (£16.9 million) on political ads in Pennsylvania (three times what they’ve spent in Georgia, twice what they’ve spent in Michigan and 18 times what they’ve spent in North Carolina). Meanwhile, Trump’s team are also splashing the cash here in the keystone state, with a US$20.9 million total so far, far more than they are spending in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina. It’s helping to ensure Pennsylvania will remain central to this race right up until election night (and possibly beyond).

Gift will be among my guests at a special Conversation event we’re hosting next week. He and several other expert panellists will be discussing why the result of this election is just as important to the rest of the world, as it is to the US. If you happen to be in London on October 17, do sign up to join us for a lively look at the significant global decisions the new president will hold in their hand.

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Between 1939 and 1945, around 10% of concentration camp guards were women, yet these Aufseherinnen (overseers) as they were known, barely feature in Holocaust history or literature. On the few occasions they do appear, it is most commonly as a masculinised sadist when the reality was much more complex.

I first became interested in the Aufseherinnen after reading a New York Times article about Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, the first person to be extradited from America for Nazi war crimes, and decided to write a novel around her story. In the camps she earned the nickname “the Mare” – which would become the title of my novel – because she was known to kick prisoners to death. After the war, she fled to Vienna and faded into obscurity.

Hermine Braunsteiner.
Majdanek Museum / Wikipedia

In 1957, American engineer Russell Ryan met Braunsteiner while holidaying in Austria. She did not tell him about her past. They fell in love, married and moved to New York, where they lived quiet lives until she was tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Russell could not believe she had been a Nazi concentration camp guard. His wife, he said, “would not hurt a fly”.

Despite discovering everything Braunsteiner had done, Russell Ryan stuck by her through her extradition, trial and imprisonment – she was sentenced to life in 1981 and served 15 years in a German prison before being released on medical grounds in 1996. Hermine Braunsteiner died in 1999 at the age of 79.

The questions this story raised led me to a doctorate at the University of Sydney, in which I examined the history and representation of the Aufseherinnen. My new novel The Mare is the result of this work.

Women and brutality

In the post-war years, the overwhelming narrative was that all German women were victims of Nazism. The Aufseherinnen did not conform to the categorisation, so were written off as gender-defying monsters. For example, in Charlotte Delbo’s memoir Auschwitz and After:

All along the Lagerstrasse, a double row of the camp’s female personnel, SS women, female prisoners wearing armbands and blouses of every color and every rank, stood there, armed with walking sticks, clubs, straps, belts, lashes, whips, ready to flail and scourge whatever passed between the two rows.

Irma Grese, awaiting trial after the war ended.
John Silverside / Wikipedia

Another post-war trope was to link female guards to sexual deviance. In Five Chimneys: The True Chronicle of a Woman Who Survived Auschwitz, Olga Lengyel depicts Aufseherin Irma Grese (who was a guard at Birkenau and Belsen) in a sexualised, predatory way:

The beautiful Irma Griese [sic] advanced toward the prisoners with a swinging gait, her hips in play, and the eyes of forty thousand wretched women, mute and motionless, upon her … The mortal terror which her presence inspired visibly pleased her … Those who, despite hunger and torture, still evidenced a glimmer of their former physical beauty were the first to be taken. They were Irma Griese’s special targets.

Grese appears again in Martin Amis’ novel, The Zone of Interest, published in 2014. Amis combines the caricature of the masculine woman with the pornography of Stalag fiction that proliferated in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s:

I found I was gazing at Ilse with all the freshness of discovery: the strong legs mannishly wide-planted, the hefty trunk in a black serge uniform gullibly studded with signs and symbols – lightning flash, eagle, broken cross.

In the 1960s, a more complex understanding of Holocaust perpetrators beyond innate sadists began to emerge. German historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Eichmann trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, concluded that Adolf Eichmann was driven by “sheer thoughtlessness”, an unquestioning detachment from his evil acts.

Historian Christopher Browning expanded this theory in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, outlining other motivating factors: job security, peer pressure, acclimatisation to violence, being plied with alcohol.

In his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, author and academic Daniel Goldhagen disagreed, finding “eliminationist antisemitism” the main cause of genocide.

Historians Claudia Koonz and Gisela Bock extended this discussion into female perpetration, in what became known as the Historikerinnenstreit (quarrel among female historians). Koonz (an American) asserted that German women were complicit in the Holocaust, while Bock (a German) insisted they had no power beyond the domestic sphere.

The truth is less binary. While Nazism was indeed sexist, women were undoubtedly involved in perpetration.

The only literary portrait of an Aufseherin in any depth is Hanna Schmitz in Bernhard Schlink’s award-winning novel The Reader. Hanna’s illiteracy is a metaphor for the “unthinkingness” of Nazi crimes discussed by Arendt. However, Schlink gives us no access to Hanna’s consciousness, so any other motivation remains a mystery.

German historians such as Sabine Arend and Simone Erpel have begun to explore the Aufseherinnen with nuance. It’s now thought most were ordinary women who took the job for the high pay but, once in the camps, acclimatised fast to brutality. Political prisoner Germaine Tillion describes the speed of this process in her memoir Ravensbrück:

One little Aufseherin, twenty years old, who had so little knowledge that she said “excuse me” when walking in front of a prisoner, and who was visibly frightened by the first round of brutality she saw, needed exactly four days to adjust her tone and procedures, although it was totally new to her.

Screenshot at.
Northodox Press

This historical nuance does not exist yet in fiction. Robert Eaglestone hypothesises that writers “swerve” away from perpetrator ordinariness, afraid they will be accused of sympathising with the devil.

I attempt to address this in my work because, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Modernity and the Holocaust: “The most frightening news brought about by the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it.”

The true horror of genocide is found in the similarity between us and the perpetrators, not in the difference.

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Lactate will be familiar to many due to a common belief that it causes muscle “burn” following exercise – but this is a myth.

Lactate is formed in our muscles during exercise, but this is not the only source of it in our bodies. It is also produced by many of the microbes that live in our gut as they grow.

In the gut, lactate has several important roles. Some of these are beneficial. For example, it is produced by bifidobacteria that dominate in the colon of breast-fed infants. Scientists think that this lactate helps protect the infant by making the gut more acidic, which can impede the growth of some harmful bacteria.

In other situations, though, the acidifying effect of lactate can severely harm the wider gut microbiome and the health of the host human – or animal.

This is most clearly seen in livestock, such as cattle, where lactate accumulation can make the gut too acidic, leading to a condition called lactic acidosis. This kills off swathes of beneficial gut bacteria and leads to further accumulation of lactate in the gut.

In severe cases, this can lead to the death of the animal, since lactate can be toxic in high concentrations.

That muscle burn you feel during a hard workout is not caused by lactate.
fizkes/Shutterstock

Lactate accumulation in the gut of humans is also associated with poor health. Thankfully, the sort of gut-derived lactic acidosis that occurs in ruminant livestock is much rarer in humans, but can occur in people with short-bowel syndrome (the name is self-explanatory).

Increasing lactate concentrations in the colon are also associated with disease severity in people suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases.

Lactate-induced killing of protective gut microbiome species may also favour the growth of harmful bacteria, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter. These pathogens can also feed on lactate themselves if there are not high concentrations to inhibit this, giving them a further growth advantage.

Lactate-utilising bacteria

Fortunately, lactate tends not to accumulate in the gut of healthy adults, despite the fact it is produced by a range of different gut bacteria. This is because the gut microbiome contains several microbes, collectively termed “lactate-utilising bacteria”, that are able to grow on and gain energy from lactate, and in the process convert it into other things.

One of the most interesting lactate-utilising bacteria is called Anaerostipes hadrus. This microbe is so well adapted to growth on lactate that it will still use it effectively even when also provided with other energy sources, such as glucose.

Another key feature of Anaerostipes hadrus is that it converts lactate into a short-chain fatty acid called butyrate. Butyrate is generally thought of as highly beneficial as it is absorbed and used by the human cells that line the colon, providing them with up to around 70% of their energy needs.

By feeding our gut cells, it helps them to grow and function optimally, strengthening our gut barrier against invading harmful microbes. Butyrate also appears to be anti-inflammatory, helping to dampen down excessive or damaging immune reactions in our gut. There is even some evidence that it may have a protective role against colorectal cancer.

Lactate-utilising bacteria, such as Anaerostipes hadrus, as well as other butyrate-producing types including Anaerobutyricum species and Eubacterium limosum, can therefore be thought of as doubly advantageous, given that they remove the potentially harmful lactate from the gut and simultaneously convert it into beneficial butyrate.

The potential importance of these lactate-utilising bacteria for health was further hinted at in a study published in 2021, which showed that Anaerostipes species were commonly reduced in the guts of people with a range of different diseases.

For these reasons, there is emerging interest in developing lactate-utilising bacteria as probiotics. However, testing in humans is still needed to prove that they will work.

These bacteria are typically highly sensitive to oxygen, meaning they are more difficult to grow and package than traditional probiotics, so may be more challenging to develop into therapies. Still, they hold much promise, and by removing lactate, probably play an important role in maintaining gut health. Läs mer…

It might sound far-fetched, but recent research suggests that dogs’ and humans’ brains synchronise when they look at each other.

This research, conducted by researchers in China, is the first time that “neural coupling” between different species has been witnessed.

Neural coupling is when the brain activity of two or more individuals aligns during an interaction. For humans, this is often in response to a conversation or story.

Neural coupling has been observed when members of the same species interact, including mice, bats, humans and other primates. This linking of brains is probably important in shaping responses during social encounters and might result in complex behaviour that would not be seen in isolation, such as enhancing teamwork or learning.

When social species interact, their brains “connect”. But this case of it happening between different species raises interesting considerations about the subtleties of the human-dog relationship and might help us understand each other a little better.

What’s new puppy dog?

The dog was one of the first animals humans domesticated. And they have a long history of sharing time and space with us. Dogs are not only companions for us, they also have key roles in our society, including therapeutic support, detecting diseases and protecting and herding livestock.

As a result, dogs have developed some impressive skills, including the ability to recognise and respond to our emotional state.

In the recent study, the researchers studied neural coupling using brain-activity recording equipment called non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG). This uses headgear containing electrodes that detect neural signals – in this case, from the beagles and humans involved in the study.

Looking into those irresistible eyes could help deepen your bond.
Wirestock Creators/Shuterstock

Researchers examined what happened to these neural signals when dogs and people were isolated from each other, and in the presence of each other, but without looking at each other. Dogs and humans were then allowed to interact with each other.

Look into my eyes

When dogs and humans gazed at each other and the dogs were stroked, their brain signals synchronised. The brain patterns in key areas of the brain associated with attention, matched in both dog and person.

Dogs and people who became more familiar with each other over the five days of the study had increased synchronisation of neural signals. Previous studies of human-human interactions have found increased familiarity between people also resulted in more closely matching brain patterns. So the depth of relationship between people and dogs may make neural coupling stronger.

The ability of dogs to form strong attachments with people is well known. A 2022 study found the presence of familiar humans could reduce stress responses in young wolves, the dog’s close relative. Forming neural connections with people might be one of the ways by which the dog-human relationship develops.

The researchers also studied the potential effect of differences in the brain on neural coupling. They did this by including dogs with a mutation in a gene called Shank3, which can lead to impaired neural connectivity in brain areas linked with attention. This gene is responsible for making a protein that helps promote communication between cells, and is especially abundant in the brain. Mutations in Shank3 have also been associated with autism spectrum disorder in humans.

Study dogs with the Shank3 mutation did not show the same level of matching brain signals with people, as those without the mutation. This was potentially because of impaired neural signalling and processing.

However, when researchers gave the study dogs with the Shank3 mutation, a single dose of LSD (a hallucinogenic drug), they showed increased levels of attention and restored neural coupling with humans.

LSD is known to promote social behaviour in mice and humans, although clearly there are ethical concerns about such treatment.

The researchers were clear that there remains much to be learned about neural coupling between dogs and humans.

It might well be the case that looking into your dog’s eyes means that your respective brain signals will synchronise and enhance your connection. The more familiar you are with each other, the stronger it becomes, it seems.

So the next time a dog gazes at you with their puppy dog eyes, remember you could be enhancing your relationship. Läs mer…