Story of our Country: Labor’s Vision for Australia by Adrian Pabst Connor Court, September 2019 ISBN: 9781925826593 RRP $32.95 Reviewed by Keith Harvey This book is unusual and has entered into Australian political literature in an unusual way. Despite the implication in the title, Adrian Pabst is not an Australian but an active member of [...]
Noble Savages The Olivier Sisters – Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling Jonathan Cape London 2019 ISBN: 9781473549333 RRP $49.99 (hb) By Anne Henderson In an age when so much importance is given to the study of children’s education, the biographical Noble Savages The Olivier Sisters – Four Lives in Seven Fragments by [...]
D-Day Girls – The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose Sphere 2018 ISBN: 9780451495082 RRP $49.99 (hb) Les Parisiennes - How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s By Anne Sebba Orion Publishing Company 2016 ISBN10 0297870971 [...]
King of the Air - The Turbulent Life of Charles Kingsford Smith by Ann Blainey Black Ink, December 2018 ISBN: 9781760641078 RRP $49.99 (hb) Reviewed by Anne Henderson Students and fans of Australia’s greatest pioneering aviator, Charles Kingsford Smith, should be thankful that historian and biographer Ann Blainey chose to spend her recent years researching the [...]
Condé Nast, The Man and his Empire by Susan Ronald, St Martin’s Press, 2019 ISBN: 9781250180025 RRP $44.99 Reviewed by Shelley Gare Condé Nast, the New York magazine mogul who gave us Vogue, Vanity Fair, House & Garden and Glamour, elite titles that dominated the twentieth century, was sometimes a tightwad “in true millionaire tradition” [...]
The Liberal Party turns 75 this Sunday. It was on Friday October 13, 1944 that – at the invitation of Robert Menzies – delegates assembled at Canberra’s (old) Masonic Hall to discuss the establishment of a nationwide political movement. The conference commenced on a Friday and continued on Saturday and Monday. At the time, there [...]
It’s not surprising why quite a few prominent Australians refuse to appear on ABC TV’s Q&A. Including Prime Minister Scott Morrison who declined an invitation in the lead-up to the 2019 election. Despite a warning of sorts from presenter Tony Jones that appearing on Q&A would provide the prime minister with a great opportunity to [...]
As with so many contemporary discussions, what is missing from the debate about the impact of climate change on drought and fire in Australia is a historical perspective. Along with a willingness by some to understand the principle of causality. On December 6, commentator Jane Caro forwarded a tweet to Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, the member [...]
What was worrying about the self-proclaimed world exclusive story China’s Spy Secrets on the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes was the absence of doubt. Nine journalist Nick McKenzie introduced the program with evident certitude when he declared: “It’s probably a safe bet that the all-powerful Chinese President Xi Jinping is not a regular viewer of 60 [...]
Along with 45 per cent of fellow Australians, I voted “Yes” on November 6, 1999 in the referendum as to whether Australia should become a republic. I would do so again – provided the question was similar. It has been claimed by some republicans that the (then) constitutional monarchist prime minister John Howard rigged the [...]
