The Sri Lankan state is using violence to unleash fury on its citizens, as its political and economic crisis  deepens

The Sri Lankan state is using violence to unleash fury on its citizens, as its political and economic crisis  deepens

Niro Kandasamy, University of Sydney The Sri Lankan state is descending into a full blown political and economic crisis, as more people contend with starvation, death and severe disruptions. Now they are also facing the brutal violence of the state. The BBC reports at least nine people died and more than 200 were injured as […]
Book Review – The Secrets of Emu Field: Britain’s Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia

Book Review – The Secrets of Emu Field: Britain’s Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia

Elizabeth Tynan, The Secrets of Emu Field: Britain’s Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia, NewSouth, 384pp, $34.99. Book Review by Honae Cuffe.   In The Secrets of Emu Field: Britain’s Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia, historian Elizabeth Tynan reveals the story of Britain’s burgeoning atomic capabilities, Australia’s own ambitions, and the Aboriginal communities who were harmed […]
Are we learning the wrong lessons from  history?

Are we learning the wrong lessons from  history?

Cover Image: ‘Peace for our time’: British prime minister Neville Chamberlain displaying the Anglo-German declaration, known as the Munich Agreement, in September 1938. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University Can historians influence government policy? Should they? And, if so, what kinds of historical knowledge should they produce? I suspect policy-makers only rarely think […]
Friday essay: why soldiers commit war crimes – and what we can do about  it

Friday essay: why soldiers commit war crimes – and what we can do about  it

Mia Martin Hobbs, Deakin University The following essay contains disturbing images and language. In 2020, the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force released the Afghanistan Inquiry into Australian Defence Force Special Forces atrocities in Afghanistan. The report – commonly known as the Brereton Report – resulted in a flurry of analysis debating how and why […]
Friday essay: if growing US-China rivalry leads to ‘the worst war ever’, what should Australia  do?

Friday essay: if growing US-China rivalry leads to ‘the worst war ever’, what should Australia  do?

Hugh White, Australian National University Should Australia join the United States in a war against China to prevent China taking the US’s place as the dominant power in East Asia? Until a few years ago the question would have seemed merely hypothetical, but not anymore. Senior figures in the Morrison government quite explicitly acknowledged that […]
Review – Australia’s Great Depression: how a nation shattered by the Great War survived the worst economic crisis it has ever faced

Review – Australia’s Great Depression: how a nation shattered by the Great War survived the worst economic crisis it has ever faced

Joan Beaumont, Australia’s Great Depression: how a nation shattered by the Great War survived the worst economic crisis it has ever faced, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2022. Review by Janet McCalman.   This is the first general history of Australia’s Great Depression that embraces city and the bush, all states and territories, politics, economics, and […]
Book Review – The Genesis of a Policy Defining and Defending Australia’s National Interest in the Asia-Pacific, 1921–57

Book Review – The Genesis of a Policy Defining and Defending Australia’s National Interest in the Asia-Pacific, 1921–57

The Genesis of a Policy – Honae Cuffe, ANU Press, Canberra, 2021 Review by Anna Kent   In the midst of an election campaign, with some nuanced foreign policy debate breaking through into the mainstream media, it is wonderful to read a book that challenges the conventional view on foreign policy history. Honae Cuffe’s book […]
Q&A with Stephen Gapps, author of Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824.

Q&A with Stephen Gapps, author of Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824.

Kristyn Harman  interviews Stephen Gapps, author of Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2021).   Congratulations on the publication of Gudyarra, Stephen! It’s interesting to see that you’ve chosen to use the Wiradyuri word for ‘war’ as the title for your book. What informed your choice? And […]
Leadership now: what can history tell us?

Leadership now: what can history tell us?

James Walter   Australians are ‘good at elections’ as Judith Brett has persuasively argued. Our practices of mandatory and preferential voting have saved us from the institutional entrenchment of extremes of opinion that have surfaced in the public domain, and that have pushed parties and politics in, say, the United States, to brinkmanship over positions […]
Q&A with Isobelle Barrett Meyering, author of Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution, 1969–1979.

Q&A with Isobelle Barrett Meyering, author of Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution, 1969–1979.

Jacquelyn Baker interviews Isobelle Barrett Meyering about her new book, Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution, 1969-1979, which examines the way in which women’s liberationists spearheaded the new wave of child rights activism in the 1970s.   Congratulations on the publication of your book, Isobelle! It makes a significant contribution to the […]
Can ‘wicked’ policy problems be successfully tackled over time?

Can ‘wicked’ policy problems be successfully tackled over time?

By Brian Head   There has been a growing literature on ‘wicked problems’, which are generally seen as complex, controversial, intractable and evolving. Both the nature of the ‘problems’ and the best ‘solutions’ are strongly contested by political parties and various stakeholders. The problems are ‘wicked’ in the sense that they are not easily tamed […]
Why did women’s liberationists in Melbourne protest Anzac Day?

Why did women’s liberationists in Melbourne protest Anzac Day?

Jacquelyn Baker explains why women’s liberationists in Melbourne demonstrated against Anzac Day in the 1980s and considers how their concerns are still relevant today.   On 26 April 1983, the Canberra Times reported that 168 women in Sydney and seven women in Melbourne had been arrested on Anzac Day.[1] The women in Sydney had allegedly […]