Book Review – Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires

Book Review – Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires

Lyndon Megarrity reviews Sally Young’s Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2023).   The underlying theme of this fine publication is “Perception becomes reality”. Whereas twenty-first century journalists and media moguls have created a self-fulfilling prophecy by repeatedly talking down newspapers as “a dying medium”, newspaper owners between 1941 and […]
Book Review – Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity?

Book Review – Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity?

Joshua Black reviews Richard King, Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2023).   “I don’t know how to rearrange society to make it just and sustainable” says author, critic and poet Richard King in the final chapter of his new philosophical treatise Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our […]
Book Review – The Morrison Government: Governing Through Crisis, 2019–2022: Australian Commonwealth Administration Series

Book Review – The Morrison Government: Governing Through Crisis, 2019–2022: Australian Commonwealth Administration Series

Lyndon Megarrity reviews Brendan McCaffrie, Michelle Grattan and Chris Wallace’s (eds) The Morrison Government: Governing Through Crisis, 2019–2022: Australian Commonwealth Administration Series, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2023), pp. viii +304.   The Morrison Government: Governing Through Crisis, 2019–2022 is the fourteenth volume in the Australian Commonwealth Administration series of publications. This series brings together the contributions […]
Vale Allan Gyngell

Vale Allan Gyngell

By Meg Gurry   Allan Gyngell made a lasting impact on many around him. I was fortunate enough to be one of them. I came across Allan most directly through his work at the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA). As President, he, with then National Director, Melissa Conley Tyler asked me to join a […]
Your body is a temple: The politics of junk food in Australia

Your body is a temple: The politics of junk food in Australia

By Richard Trembath   I cannot advise all more spiritual natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely.  Water suffices . . . No eating between meals, no coffee . . . Tea beneficial only in the morning. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888), from the section called ‘Why I Am So Clever’.   In this […]
Book Review – The Red Witch: A biography of Katherine Susannah Prichard

Book Review – The Red Witch: A biography of Katherine Susannah Prichard

Joan Beaumont reviews Nathan Hobby’s The Red Witch: A biography of Katherine Susannah Prichard, Melbourne University Publishing, 2022, 451 pp. ISBN 9780522877380   By any measure Katherine Susannah Prichard (KSP) was a remarkable woman, full of contradictions. Most notably, she was a renowned and prolific author. After starting her career as a journalist in Melbourne, […]
Book Review – Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia

Book Review – Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia

Anthony O’Donnell reviews Daniel Mulino’s Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia, La Trobe University Press, 2022 i + xii; 372pp   What do we talk about when we talk about ‘the Australian welfare state’? For some, it’s almost a contradiction in terms. We have a minimalist, means-tested, flat-rate system of income supports that […]
Book Review – Wizards of Oz: How Oliphant and Florey Helped Win the War and Shape the Modern World

Book Review – Wizards of Oz: How Oliphant and Florey Helped Win the War and Shape the Modern World

Peter Hobbins reviews Brett Mason’s Wizards of Oz: How Oliphant and Florey Helped Win the War and Shape the Modern World (Sydney: NewSouth, 2022), ISBN 9781742237459 (PB), $34.99.   Dyadic biographies are – quite literally – many-headed beasts. Attempting to integrate the personalities and trajectories of two historical protagonists runs the risk of forced comparisons, […]
Will a preoccupation with party unity destroy the Liberal  Party?

Will a preoccupation with party unity destroy the Liberal  Party?

Cover image: Lukas Coch/AAP Carolyn Holbrook, Deakin University and James Walter, Monash University Such has been the turmoil over the Liberal Party’s recent decision to join the National Party in campaigning against the forthcoming referendum on the Voice to Parliament that even some of the most reliable supporters in the media have remarked on the […]
Q&A with Michelle Arrow, editor of Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution

Q&A with Michelle Arrow, editor of Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution

Jacquelyn Baker interviews Michelle Arrow, editor of Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2023).   Congratulations on the publication of this book, Michelle! It is, in part, the product of the Women and Politics Conference, which was held at Old Parliament House in 2019. Can you explain to our readers why the […]
The Australian War Memorial must deal properly with the frontier  wars

The Australian War Memorial must deal properly with the frontier  wars

Carolyn Holbrook, Deakin University; Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University, and Michelle Arrow, Macquarie University The recent media rounds of the new chair of the Australian War Memorial Council, Kim Beazley, appear to presage a major shift in the institution’s attitude to the frontier wars. Beazley explained it is “enormously important” that the current $550 million […]
Book Review – Taking to the Field: A History of Australian Women in Science

Book Review – Taking to the Field: A History of Australian Women in Science

James Keating reviews Jane Carey’s Taking to the Field: A History of Australian Women in Science (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2023).   In 1977 the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) held a symposium on ‘Women in Science’. Rather than accepting what many contemporaries considered a truth self-evident—that science had […]