Letters from an American: December 10, 2025

Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-seven years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved countries around the globe.

Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.

President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.

“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.

The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”

The 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial is a collage of an exhibition, and a work of wonder

When the rains end, creeks and rivers run full. Suddenly, deserts bloom with all the colours of the rainbow as new life emerges. As Tony Albert, artistic director of the Fifth National Indigenous Art Triennial, says, “After the rain there are always new beginnings.”

Albert’s creative practice has long been based on adapting and critiquing images made by others. It is easy to see this exhibition is a giant collage, where each work, or group of works, is an element of a larger whole, all working together in harmony.

Post the failed referendum, the participants are aware of what this time means for Australia’s Indigenous people. As Aretha Brown says in the catalogue:

It feels, after the referendum, as if everything has been burnt down, but now the seeds are going to come back stronger and greener.

The exhibition is introduced by Brown’s striking black and white mural, THE BIRTH OF A NATION: THE TRUE HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA, which shows her timeline of colonisation. Her **Kiss My Art Collective began as street art, reclaiming public space for Indigenous perspectives.

Shortly before the exhibition is due to close, Brown will paint over her mural, to demonstrate that the erasure of the past is very much a part of Indigenous Australia’s story.

Unlike previous exhibitions in this series, which were almost encyclopedic in scale, the space is confined to ten rooms, each with either a single artist or artists’ collective.

The mood of intimate collaboration is struck at the entrance where the artists are introduced – not by name but by images in the form of portraits painted by Vincent Namatjira. Their names are listed in small print to one side, but the images dominate.