Threats and challenges to Australia’s democracy are well outlined in government report. Now for some  action

Threats and challenges to Australia’s democracy are well outlined in government report. Now for some  action

Carolyn Holbrook, Deakin University The Strengthening Australian Democracy report released by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil this week provides a sophisticated diagnosis of the challenges facing democratic governance around the world. The report also offers a broad prescription of how Australia might meet those challenges. The Strengthening Democracy Taskforce, established by O’Neil in 2023, prepared […]
The making of the Australian Historical Studies 55:2 (2024) ‘Wan Solwara: Australia and Papua New Guinea’

The making of the Australian Historical Studies 55:2 (2024) ‘Wan Solwara: Australia and Papua New Guinea’

Helen Gardner,     Jonathan Ritchie and Brad Underhill   The most recent issue of Australian Historical Studies: Wan Solwara: Australia and Papua New Guinea, brought together scholars from PNG, Australia and the broader Pacific to reconsider the place of PNG in Australia’s national story.  Edited by Deakin University scholars: Helen Gardner, Jonathan Ritchie and Brad […]
Book Review – Crossed Lines: Disruption, Politics and Reshaping Australian Telecommunications

Book Review – Crossed Lines: Disruption, Politics and Reshaping Australian Telecommunications

Nicholas Brown reviews John Doyle’s Crossed Lines: Disruption, Politics and Reshaping Australian Telecommunications  (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022).   Crossed Lines tracks an archetypical story in the undoing of the ‘Australian settlement’  – a ‘transition from a system of rigid state monopolies in the 1960s to a competition-based model in the 1990s’ (p.193). John Doyle’s […]
Is Australia doing enough to respond to Papua New Guinea’s catastrophic landslide?

Is Australia doing enough to respond to Papua New Guinea’s catastrophic landslide?

Jonathan Ritchie, Deakin University and Brad Underhill, Deakin University The total number of people killed in the landslide in Papua New Guinea’s remote and mountainous Enga Province will probably never be known. Shortly after the entire hillside collapsed on Friday, it was speculated around 150 men, women and children had lost their lives. Such a […]
‘Groundhog Day’: 40 years of Australian government responses to domestic violence reveal a bumpy road to  change

‘Groundhog Day’: 40 years of Australian government responses to domestic violence reveal a bumpy road to  change

Above Left: Anne Summers working at women’s refuge Elsie. Elsie Conference, Lukas Coch/AAP Zora Simic, UNSW Sydney; Ann Curthoys, University of Sydney, and Catherine Kevin, Flinders University Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declared a “national crisis” of domestic violence following an alarming spike in killings of women and a wave of protest rallies across the […]
Book Review: Abortion Care is Health Care

Book Review: Abortion Care is Health Care

Jacquelyn Baker reviews Barbara Baird’s Abortion Care is Health Care (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2024)   In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned the ruling set in 1973 by Roe vs Wade. This was a landmark case that ‘recognised that the decision to continue or end a pregnancy belongs to the individual, not […]
Walking Towards the Führer. What Do These Neo-Nazis Signify?

Walking Towards the Führer. What Do These Neo-Nazis Signify?

By Richard Trembath, Ballarat.   Let’s be precise.  On Sunday 3 December last year, my wife and I were having lunch, next to one of the large windows in our living room.  I looked out and then informed Anne Marie that, if she cared to view the street, she would see a group of about […]
Medicare: A Forty Year Health Check

Medicare: A Forty Year Health Check

Healthcare experts diagnose fundamental problems with our health system – it remains oriented to acute and episodic illness and curative responses even though we are now in an age of chronic illness, which requires continuing and holistic care, and a more preventative approach. Not only does this disjunction between disease and service provision affect the […]
Book Review – W.E.H. Stanner: Selected Writings

Book Review – W.E.H. Stanner: Selected Writings

Wayne Bradshaw reviews W.E.H. Stanner: Selected Writings (La Trobe University Press, 2024)   The works of W.E.H. Stanner loom large within the Australian tradition of progressive writing on Aboriginal and settler relations. Before Henry Reynolds rewrote the history of Australian settlement, Bill Stanner revolutionised Australian anthropology. In any format, Stanner should be considered mandatory reading […]
Book Review – Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain

Book Review – Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain

Anna Kent reviews Charlotte Lydia Riley’s Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain (London: Bodley Head, 2023)   Imperial Island is an engaging book that shows the great power that historical research can wield. Changing understandings of what Empire was, and in some ways still is, is important to the understanding of contemporary […]
Q&A with Graeme Davison, author of My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British–Australian Family,

Q&A with Graeme Davison, author of My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British–Australian Family,

Lyndon Megarrity interviews Graeme Davison, author of My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British–Australian Family, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2023.   Congratulations on your new book. You have now published two volumes of family history, the first on your mother’s side of the family (Lost Relations) and this current, second volume, on your father’s […]
Book Review – The Locked-Up Country

Book Review – The Locked-Up Country

Tim Rowse reviews Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri’s The Locked-Up Country (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2023), $32.99   In 2023 Tom Chodor and Shara Hameiri published ‘COVID-19 and the Pathologies of Australia’s Regulatory State’ in the Journal of Contemporary Asia. Congratulations to University of Queensland Press for giving their argument, expanded to a […]