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André Brett reviews Jack Vowles and Jennifer Curtin’s ‘A populist exception? The 2017 New Zealand general election’

A Populist Exception? The 2017 New Zealand General Election, eds Jack Vowles and Jennifer Curtin. Canberra: ANU Press, 2020, pp.286+xvi. Print: AU$60, ISBN 9781760463854. Online: free, ISBN 9781760463861. The dust is settling on New Zealand’s 2020 general election. There are still about 480,000 special votes to count—overseas voters, people who registered on election day, […]

Border Wars: History and Creative Imagination

In our latest opinion piece, Richard Trembath steps into the always-contentious debate about history, historical fiction and ‘narrative non-fiction’, prompted by the publication of Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves. Kate Grenville’s latest novel set in early colonial New South Wales, A Room Made of Leaves, was published in July this year to positive reviews […]

Q&A with Jacqueline Kent, author of Vida: A Woman For Our Time

Vida Goldstein is one of Australian history’s most interesting and accomplished figures. She campaigned for the rights of women—including the vote —and the disadvantaged, opposed conscription and the First World War and stood unsuccessfully for federal parliament several times. She ought to be more widely known. Carolyn Holbrook interviewed the acclaimed biographer, journalist and broadcaster […]

Australian Foreign Aid in Historical Context

In our latest opinion piece, Nicholas Ferns, author of the recently published Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945–1975: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia (Palgrave), describes the decline of Australian aid to our region. Reviewing decades of developmental policy to the Pacific and south-east Asia, he argues […]

The Fatal Lure of Politics: A Q&A with Terry Irving on Vere Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe was among the most influential archaeologists of the twentieth century but his connections to the intellectual worlds of the British and Australian Left have, until now, received less attention. In a major new biography, Terry Irving sheds light on Childe’s life as a political theorist, radical intellectual and pre-historian. History PhD student […]

Q&A with Clive Moore, author of Tulagi.

In this Q&A session, Clive Moore talks to Bethany Keats about his recent book, Tulagi, which focuses on the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) and its original administrative centre, Tulagi. Why is Tulagi an important story that needs to be told? Tulagi, a small island in the Ngela or Florida Group, was the first […]

Q&A with Russell McGregor, the author of Idling in Green Places: A Life of Alec Chisholm

Idling in green places: A life of Alec Chisholm has been published by Australian Scholarly Publishing and has been shortlisted for the National Biography Award, State Library of NSW. How and why did you become interested in Alec Chisholm (1890-1977) as a biographical and historical subject? The simple answer is that Alec Chisholm was a […]

The Department of Immigration was central to Australia’s post-World War II recovery. What role might it play in Australia’s recovery from COVID 19?

On May 3 Kristina Keneally, the federal opposition Immigration and Home Affairs spokesperson, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that ‘As a result of COVID-19, Australia will soon have an opportunity to do something we have never done before: restart a migration program’. Kenneally has a point. The COVID 19 crisis presents challenges commensurate with […]

The Trials of Portnoy: Michelle Arrow in conversation with the author, Patrick Mullins

The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system has been published by Scribe. Your previous book, Tiberius With A Telephone, was a widely-acclaimed work of biography, the winner of the 2020 National Biography Award and the winner of the 2020 Douglas Stewart Prize in the NSW Premiers’ Literary Awards. One aspect of The Trials of […]

Australia’s universities, Covid-19 and the future.

In our latest opinion piece, John Doyle and Scott Doidge survey the effect of COVID on the university sector, and urge the higher education sector to use this crisis to reinvigorate its broader mission as a pillar of civic society. As 2020 dawned, Australia’s university sector was anticipating another prosperous year, notwithstanding perennial concerns about […]

Could Thatcher and Reagan inspire Australia’s economic recovery?

A recent editorial in the Australian Financial Review declared that after devising Australia’s biggest ever stimulus package, the Government now needs to develop a sweeping ‘supply-side reform program’ to drive recovery from the economic downturn caused by the global response to COVID-19 (AFR 2020). The Government has said that it is devising a supply-side policy […]

Merle Thornton urges younger feminists to ‘bring the fight’ in recent memoir.

Merle Thornton’s Bringing the fight is published by HarperCollins. Autobiography is not new to the genre of feminist writing. As Margaret Henderson stated in Marking feminist times: Remembering the longest revolution in Australia, autobiography, memoir and ‘life-writing’ play an important role in ‘expanding and realigning the historical and literary record’. Furthermore, Henderson contended that the modes […]