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 […]
Book Review – Decolonial Archival Futures

Book Review – Decolonial Archival Futures

Krista McCracken and Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey, Decolonial Archival Futures (Chicago: Society of American Archivists and the American Library Association, 2023), USD $39.99, 112 pp.   Decolonising archives and record-keeping spaces is a dreadfully slow process, one attached to the post-World War Two decolonisation movement and the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and […]
GOLD STANDARD?: THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT 40 YEARS ON

GOLD STANDARD?: THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT 40 YEARS ON

Celebrate and reflect on the legacy of the Hawke government. Watch a recording on the Museum of Australian Democracy’s website of this conference looking back on the Hawke government – one of the longest-serving and most transformative in Australian political history. Learn about the Hawke government’s successes and failures from key speakers including: Hon Professor […]
Setting a dangerous policy precedent: when digitisation leads to destruction

Setting a dangerous policy precedent: when digitisation leads to destruction

Dr Deborah Lee-Talbot   The libraries and archives of Europe have been described by the Australian researcher George Collinridge, as the ‘great centres and stores of knowledge’ (2018, p. 5). If that is so, the recent proposal to destroy records from Britain needs to be a concern for many. On 15 December 2023, as people […]