Reviews
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Douglas Newton’s Private Ryan and how peace efforts were sabotaged in WW1
Every now and then a historian produces a book that gives a rational and compassionate insight into the war of 1914-18 and the origins of the Anzac legend. Douglas Newton has given Australia such a work in his story of Private Ryan set against the backdrop of war aims and peace movements…. Continue reading »
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‘Mr Sin’ aka Abe Saffron had a little mate at ASIO headquarters
Abe Saffron, the king of Sydney’s vice rackets, had a long friendship with Dudley Doherty, a top spy with the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)…. Continue reading »
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Beyond apocalypse fatigue
We can have economic growth without wrecking the planet, says economist Per Espen Stoknes…. Continue reading »
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A tepid cry for change: Tanya Plibersek’s book “Upturn” and Labor’s prospects
In a world riven by crises, we need new ways of thinking, knowing, and relating. We also need courage. The challenge is huge. There will be no return to a pre-Covid-19 normal, which for many Australians meant poverty, hardship, and marginalization. This book had rich promise but is a missed opportunity. A comprehensive, coherent vision… Continue reading »
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What’s the point of Labor?
As the Labor Opposition jettisons policies on negative gearing, capital gains taxes, franking credits and climate change policies that don’t embrace coal you have to ask – what’s the point of Labor?… Continue reading »
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Upturn: all too familiar ideas but an advance on Coalition’s limited offerings
An eclectic set of essays, the book Upturn: A better normal after Covid-19 tries to put forward a serious reform agenda. While there is a wealth of enthusiastic ideas, Upturn is unfortunately stronger on identifying problems than solutions. This post concentrates on the chapters discussing economic and social welfare. Reviews of other chapters will be posted… Continue reading »
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Inspirational heroes abound – discover and promote them
Gellibrand MP Tim Watts draws on his family experience – his children, Hong Kong Chinese wife and in-laws – for his book “The Golden Country: Australia’s Changing Identity”. A modern response to Donald Horne’s 1960s “Lucky Country”, Watts see our future as a “golden country”, reflecting a largely Asian Australia…. Continue reading »
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There’s nothing entrepreneurial about Rentier Capitalism, as it sucks up more of the wealth pie
‘Rentier Capitalism’ is a cracking thesis on a cruel economic order. Read it and you’ll start seeing rentiers everywhere, hearing them in every news bulletin, all involved in massive anti-competitive behaviour and impoverishing the rest of society…. Continue reading »
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Humanity in medicine. The life of physician Dr Stanley Goulston
Proverbs 22.v.6 states: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it.” I suspect Stan’s character was shaped by his deeply ingrained Jewish faith, the character of his father and father-in-law, the loss of a mother he never knew, an acute observation… Continue reading »
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Review: Cruelty or Humanity by Stuart Rees
Cruelty or Humanity by Em.Prof. Stuart Rees, is essential reading in our present tumult and bedlam of human cruelty…. Continue reading »
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P&I ISSUES in Stuart Rees’ Cruelty or Humanity , Bristol: Policy Press 2020
Regarded by international jurist Richard Falk as ‘A road map for humanity’ and by Noam Chomsky as ‘a wonderful guide to the challenges we face’, Stuart Rees’ ‘Cruelty or Humanity‘ identifies world-wide threats to freedom and democracy and displays the humanitarian alternatives…. Continue reading »
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What can possibly be done with our political and policy malaise.Part 1.
Two new books are available or soon will be; (“How to Win an Election” by Chris Wallace and “What is to be Done?” by Barry Jones). Both focus on the state of the nation and the state of the ALP…. Continue reading »
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Exposing the Hidden Hand
Clive Hamilton’s new book Hidden Hand: “Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World” is a diatribe. We do not need this hysteria when we are trying to maintain a modicum of practical relations with the People’s Republic of China…. Continue reading »
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Book Review: “Hidden Hand” – Exposing how the Chinese communist party is reshaping the world (The Conversation 10.7.20)
In Hidden Hand, China scholars Clive Hamilton and Marieke Ohlberg examine the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Europe and North America in a similar way to how Hamilton dissected the CCP’s influence in Australia in his 2018 book, Silent Invasion…. Continue reading »
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KIM WINGEREI. My week with Malcolm and a faltering democracy.
Otto von Bismarck (in)famously said: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best”. It is a sentiment I abhor…. Continue reading »
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JUDITH WHITE. The Australia Council latest funding – the arts betrayed.
The latest round of The Australia Council funding, announced on 3 April, marks a new level of government interference in the arts. The council was never meant to police the arts on behalf of government, but under the Coalition that has become its function…. Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART.- Quarantined in the Jazz Age
A friend mailed me recently to ask if I was well and safely distanced socially. He also pasted the following letter and asked me if I’d seen it. I hadn’t. … Continue reading »
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MARK BUCKLEY. Rita Hayworth via Graham Green
I started to cull my books recently. As old age approaches I routinely decide that I need to gain more space, and to really get rid of what I will never get around to reading, sort of like “use it, or lose it”…. Continue reading »
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JUDITH WHITE. Whatever happened to Whitlam’s vision for the arts?
In 1972 Gough Whitlam’s election campaign promised “to promote a standard of excellence in the arts, to widen access to, and the understanding and application of, the arts in the community generally, to help establish and express an Australian identity through the arts and to promote an awareness of Australian culture abroad”…. Continue reading »
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DAVID SHEARMAN.-Doctors urged to engage with water policy concerns and a timely review
he climate and health emergency must remind doctors and the community that water is one of our life support systems and its scarcity in Australia will bring human misery, displacement of individuals and towns, and failures in food production…. Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. David Walker’s Stranded Nation
Professor David Walker’s Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region is a work of great and very readable erudition, which does something new: places Australian cultural, political and diplomatic history in its regional context at the time of Asian decolonisation…. Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. ‘Things you learn along the way’.
Occasionally friends suggest to me that I should write my autobiography. Ruefully I explain that I wrote ‘Things you learn along the way’ twenty years ago. The book sold about 8,000 copies but as far as I know is no longer available. The book covers many aspects of my life: The early days as a footloose… Continue reading »
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JUDITH WHITE. NSW arts policy officially in ruins
Arm’s length funding of the arts is the hallmark of a government attempting to work in the interests of the people. It prevents the arts being used as a political football, and together with peer assessment fosters the development of creativity. It was the founding principle in 1946 of the Arts Council of Great Britain,… Continue reading »
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GRAHAM FREUDENBERG. Vale Evan Williams
No Australian adorned the professions of politics and journalism like Evan Williams. He was much more than a beautiful writer. He was a beautiful man, who brought a shining light and grace to thousands of lives. He died a few days ago…. Continue reading »
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KATE McDOWELL. Together or not in the performing arts.
The way the performing arts is funded in Australia hasn’t changed since the 1990s, but the Australian cultural landscape has changed dramatically. … Continue reading »
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GRAHAM ENGLISH. Virtue signallers, the left wing, and the politically correct
I try to follow the advice of one of my old teachers that if you cannot write as well as Jane Austen or one of the greats you can at least aim to be intelligible. Avoiding clichés and popular catch phrases is always a good start…. Continue reading »
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ANDREW FROST. Alternative Histories, the ANZAC legend re-imagined on canvas
The assumption of ANZAC as the foundation of conservative Australia has been used to mobilise popular sentiment into dubious alliances in wars of questionable purpose. In this context, Rodney Pople’s latest exhibition, Shell Shocked, has urgency. His paintings are a vehicle for questioning more than a century of myth-making…. Continue reading »
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CLAIR WILLS. Prodigal Fathers (The New York Review of Books).
More than twenty years ago, writing about Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, Colm Tóibín recalled what it was like to study history in Ireland in the 1970s—to be on the cusp of the revisionist wave, questioning all the old narratives. “Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction,” he wrote, “how free and happy we could be!… Continue reading »
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MICHAEL MULLINS. Abstract thinkers living in bubbles.
During the Christmas break I read Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt, which is one of the more acclaimed Australian memoirs published during 2018. It details the wretched life he’s led and also challenges the culture warriors of the left and the right. Speaking about politicians as well as journalists, he says: ‘We don’t… Continue reading »
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ROBERT KUTTNER. The crash that failed.
Review of “Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world” by Adam Tooze, Viking. The historian G.M. Trevelyan said that the democratic revolutions of 1848, all of which were quickly crushed, represented “a turning point at which modern history failed to turn”. The same can be said of the financial collapse of 2008…. Continue reading »
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