Marama Whyte reviews Elizabeth Becker’s ‘You Don’t Belong Here’

Marama Whyte reviews Elizabeth Becker’s ‘You Don’t Belong Here’

Dr Marama Whyte reviews Elizabeth Becker’s new book about three women who reported on the Vietnam War, You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (Carlton: Black Inc., 2021).    There are countless places in Australian society where women have been told—explicitly or implicitly—that they don’t belong. The news media has […]
Graeme Davison reviews Elizabeth Farrelly’s ‘Killing Sydney’

Graeme Davison reviews Elizabeth Farrelly’s ‘Killing Sydney’

In our latest article, Emeritus Professor Graeme Davison reviews Elizabeth Farrelly’s, Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City’s Soul.     Elizabeth Farrelly is Sydney’s resident prophetess, its staunchest champion and fiercest critic. She is its eyes and ears, its questioning mind, tender heart and steely public conscience. For thirty years, as a columnist in […]
Book Review – The China Alternative: Changing Regional Order in the Pacific Islands

Book Review – The China Alternative: Changing Regional Order in the Pacific Islands

Our Books Editor, Lyndon Megarrity, reviews a new collection edited by Graeme Smith and Terence Wesley-Smith, about Australia, China and the Pacific region: The China Alternative: Changing Regional Order in the Pacific Islands, ANU Press, Canberra 2021.   A nation’s foreign policy tends to be broad, consisting of strategies and objectives that sometimes complement each other, and, […]
Q&A with Barry Leithhead, author of A Vision for Australia’s Health: Dr Cecil Cook at Work

Q&A with Barry Leithhead, author of A Vision for Australia’s Health: Dr Cecil Cook at Work

Cecil Evelyn Aufrere (known as ‘Mick’) Cook was born in Sussex, England in 1897 and moved with his family to Barcaldine in central Queensland at the turn of the twentieth century. Can you describe the main influences on Cook during his upbringing, and how they shaped his subsequent career in public health? Cook’s mother and […]
Book Review – A Century of Compulsory Voting in Australia: Genesis, Impact and Future

Book Review – A Century of Compulsory Voting in Australia: Genesis, Impact and Future

As Australians have watched the crisis of democracy in the United States, we have begun to appreciate more fully our system of compulsory voting. Following Judith Brett’s excellent study From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage  (see our interview with the author here), Matteo Bonotti and Paul Strangio have produced a new collection of essays about […]
Book Review: The Forgotten Menzies

Book Review: The Forgotten Menzies

Stephen A. Chavura and Greg Melleuish, The Forgotten Menzies: The World Picture of Australia’s Longest-serving Prime Minister (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2021). There is a world of difference between “amnesia” and “forgetting”. The former is an involuntary experience, the reality of physical processes undermining one’s memory. Often, the latter is a more deliberate phenomenon, a […]
Aftermath: Vietnam Veterans and their Historians

Aftermath: Vietnam Veterans and their Historians

AD Hope, Inscription for a War Linger not, stranger; shed no tear; Go back to those who sent us here.   We are the young they drafted out To wars their folly brought about.   Go tell those old men, safe in bed, We took their orders and are dead.   Peter Yule’s book, The […]
Review – The Carbon Club

Review – The Carbon Club

Jeff Hole reviews Marian Wilkinson’s recent book The Carbon Club: How a network of influential climate sceptics, politicians and business leaders fought to control Australia’s climate policy, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2020  Anyone interested in the question of whether business interests wield too much influence over politicians and policy in Australia should read The Carbon […]
Book Review – Australian Women Pilots: Amazing True Stories of Women in the Air

Book Review – Australian Women Pilots: Amazing True Stories of Women in the Air

Prudence Black has reviewed Australian Women Pilots: Amazing True Stories of Women in the Air, a new book by Kathy Mexted. The aviation industry has one of the world’s poorest workplace gender balances; it also tends to be very traditional and risk adverse.  Up until COVID 19 air traffic across the world was growing at […]
Book Review – Distant sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880–1914

Book Review – Distant sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880–1914

Deborah Lee-Talbot reviews James Keating’s recent book, Distant sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880–1914. In an article about New Zealand/Aotearoa’s new parliament on Monday 19 October 2020, the Guardian offered the provocative subheading that ‘Many older, white, male members have been swept from power’. The new parliament included ‘several people of colour, […]
Review: Biting the Clouds

Review: Biting the Clouds

Jacqueline D’Arcy reviews Biting the Clouds, a recent publication by Fiona Foley. Biting the Clouds: a Badtjala perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897, by Fiona Foley, UQP When one thinks of Fraser Island (K’gari), images of white sands, dingoes, and, more recently, bush fires, come to mind. […]
Q&A with Jenny Hocking, author of The Palace Letters

Q&A with Jenny Hocking, author of The Palace Letters

In our latest author Q&A, Jacquelyn Baker interviews Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking about The Palace Letters, which describes her long and extraordinary campaign to gain access to the correspondence between the Australian Governor General Sir John Kerr and Queen Elizabeth II in the prelude to the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975. […]