Humphrey McQueen
Humphrey McQueen is a Canberra-based writer Humphrey is the author of 19 books that cover history, the media, politics and the visual arts. His articles appear regularly in theBulletinand his two classic books of Australian historyA New BritanniaandSocial Sketches of Australiawere reissued in 2004. Humphrey McQueen is the author of Framework of Flesh Builders Labourers Battle for Health and Safety (2009).
When Humphrey McQueen published an obituary of Menzies in Nation-Review in 1978, the Liberal party room wanted him charged with lese majeste.
Recent articles by Humphrey McQueen
30 March 2025
Go north, old man
Donald Trump’s pledge to push the boundary of the United States of America 2000 kilometres north is not another rush of blood, but channels 300 years of imperial rivalries over resources.
12 March 2025
The forgotten fascists
When The Skull sooled bother-boy Sukkar to cancel Attorney-General Dreyfus as he spoke about his family as victims of the Holocaust, a scatter of opposition back-benders appeared dismayed. Their ignorance of the 100 years of crossovers between fascism, antisemitism and the social classes represented by the Coalition and its predecessors, suggests that the civics-deficit does not stop at year 10.
26 January 2025
The lucky Aborigines
I do hold the view that the luckiest thing that happened to this country was being colonised by the British, he said. Not that they were perfect by any means, but they were infinitely more successful and beneficent colonisers than other European countries. - John Howard, October 26, 2023.
23 January 2025
AI – Boom! Bubble? … Bust ???
Anniversaries are not harbingers of doom. Twenty-five years back, Walter Marks of Oakland Capital, which now manages $US200 billion, had warned his clients that the dot.com boom was a bubble about to burst. On March 23 that year, the market peaked. From there, the Millennium Bug was not in the race to the bottom.
27 November 2024
‘No appeal from the grave’ Phillip Hughes, workplace deaths and getting the balance right
The death of cricketer Phillip Hughes ten years ago to-day (November 27) was one of several hundred workplace fatalities in 2014.
3 November 2024
I’m still dreaming of a Blak Xmas stamp
In 1962, a columnist with the Melbourne Herald noted that a 16th century sculpture of Madonna and Child would be on that year’s Christmas stamp. He went on to praise ‘Our Lady of the Aborigines’ as ’a real Australian Madonna and Child,’ before asking, ‘How about it for next year?’
2 November 2024
What’s this American democracy crap?
For the worst part of 250 years, the United States of America has been a plutocracy. With 800 billionaires in a population of 345 million, the enemy is not ‘the One Percent’ but a 0.01%
1 September 2024
Inventing Father’s Day
Father’s Day is not what it was when first promoted in Australia in 1936 with Give-dad-a-tie campaign. Neither are fathers. With one marriage in four ending in separation, step-fathers proliferate, or have their places pass through a succession of uncles; sperm-donors, anonymous or not; same-sex households might have two dads, none or take your pick; and more great-grand-dads as male life expectancy exceeds 81 years.
13 July 2024
The Bezosmoth
Behold, now behemoth … Behold, he drinketh up a river … The Book of Job, 40: 15 and 23.
30 June 2024
Primates are human: Archbishop Gough
“Why did GOUGH GO OFF like that?” the satirical OZ magazine asked in June 1966 after the Rt Rev. Hugh Rowland Gough had resigned as Anglican Archbishop of Sydney and Primate of Australia. The official statement had mentioned ill health.
8 March 2024
Price-fixing to price-gouging
price-protection is, and must always, remain the very first and foremost plank in any fighting platform worthy of the name, and hang the public! Southern Grocer, 1912.
16 February 2024
Pulling a Swiftie
Swiftie: A piece of sharp practice; an act of deception; a trick, esp. in the phrase to pull a swiftie. The Australian National Dictionary.
26 January 2024
26 January or thereabouts
Vox Pop illustrates that the most enthusiastic celebrants of Australia Day do not always know what happened on 26 January 1788 in Sydney Cove. Some think their holiday has to do with Captain Cook who had sailed past Sydney Harbour eighteen years earlier. Others run the event together with the creation of the Commonwealth from 1901 or wrap their flag patriotism around references to Gallipoli.
5 October 2023
The Voice: How to change the Constitution without asking
Should the Voice be carried, the addition of a mandated power to a piece of paper is no guarantee that a Commission will be set up, or funded. Dutton could ignore Yes. Only voices massed beyond the national gasworks would ensure that the Voice does not go the way of the 1967 amendment granting the Commonwealth the power to make laws for the first peoples.