Brian Harradine, Independent Senator for Tasmania from 1975 to 2004, refutes the view that independent parliamentarians have no place in our political system and exert no influence. On the contrary, this former Labor stalwart and trade union official, expelled from the ALP before entering parliament, shows just what an independent can achieve. Prime Minister John Howard acknowledged that although Harradine was "supportive of many the Government's positions on social issues" but when it came to industrial relations reforms he "remained at heart a Labor man" and was less helpful. In other words, he was no pushover. Harradine made governments stop, think and consult before they could legislate and act. So, it is for readers of this new, much overdue volume on the late Brian Harradine, to assess how to view this man, and, for many, this principled man. This new monograph is researched and written by Keith Harvey. Keith worked for 40 years in the Australian trade union movement, retiring in 2011. He is a member of the Australian Labor Party. His memoir - Memoirs of a Cold War Warrior - was published by Connor Court in 2021 and recounts his experiences as an anti-Communist activist in the union movement. Keith is interested in the intersection of religion with social policy and action, especially Catholic social teaching. These issues were an important influence in the life and work of Brian Harradine. Signed by Tony Abbott & Keith Harvey
The time has come for Australia and India to forge closer ties - and reap the benefits. But will Australia seize the opportunity? India is on the rise to become the next global superpower, with a population expected to be larger than the United States and China combined by 2050. For Australia, as the world grows more volatile, India has emerged as a new geopolitical partner offering hope for a more secure and balanced Indo-Pacific region. Australian cities are full of thriving 'Little Indias' created by a rapidly growing Indian diaspora estimated to become the largest migrant group in the nation in just over two decades. In Australia's Pivot to India, Andrew Charlton provides an authoritative analysis of Australia's relationship with India, explains why now is the time to seize the opportunity for collaboration and cooperation, and outlines a vision for the Australia-India partnership that will enhance Australia's security and prosperity in the twenty-first century. He argues that both Indians and Australians have an outdated view of each other, trapped in decades-old stereotypes and misunderstandings. Lively, thought-provoking and timely, Australia's Pivot to India is the go-to source for anyone interested in Australia-India relations, India's role in reshaping the global order and the impact this will have on Australia's future.
Acclaimed historian and biographer Ross McMullin has again combined prodigious research and narrative flair in this sequel to Farewell, Dear People, the winner of multiple awards including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. Life So Full of Promise, his second multi-biography about Australia’s lost generation of World War I, features a collection of interwoven stories set in that defining era. The rich cast includes a talented barrister whose outstanding leadership enabled a momentous victory in France; an eminent newspaper editor who kept his community informed about the war while his sons were in the trenches; an energetic soldiers’ mother who became a political activist and a Red Cross dynamo; an admired farmer whose unit was rushed to the rescue in the climax of the conflict; the close sisters from Melbourne who found their lives transformed; a popular doctor who was more fervently mourned than any other Australian casualty; and a bohemian Scandinavian blonde who disrupted one of Sydney’s best-known families.
“There is no doubt Grenville is one of our greatest writers.”- Sunday Mail “[Grenville] is a gift of a writer.”- Age “…a work of history, biography, story and memoir, all fused into a novel that suggests the great potential of literary art as redeemer, healer and pathway to understanding.” - Guardian “Grenville’s quiet and insightful prose makes this book a joy and an inspiration to read.” - Readings Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with. This is the story of a woman, working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who was able—if at a cost—to make a life she could call her own. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.- Out of stock
For a long time, the Australian Signals intelligence (or Sigint) story has been kept secret. Until now… Why does Australia have a national signals intelligence agency? What does it do and why is it controversial? And how significant are its ties with key partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, to this arrangement? Revealing Secrets is a compelling account of Australian Signals intelligence, its efforts at revealing the secrets of other nations, and keeping ours safe. It brings to light those clever Australians whose efforts were for so long entirely unknown or overlooked. Blaxland and Birgin traverse the royal commissions and reviews that shaped Australia’s intelligence community in the 20th century and consider the advent and the impact of cyber. In unearthing this integral, if hidden and little understood, part of Australian statecraft, this book increases our understanding of the past, present and what lies ahead. ‘George Orwell famously wrote during World War Two, “we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm”. Reading this superb history by John Blaxland and Clare Birgin on Australia’s involvement with Sigint and cyber we can contemplate a new formula. We sleep safer because 24/7 intelligent, technologically competent patriotic men and women who work for our agencies, develop and work our electronic defence and offence capacities at world class standard. This in a world now in which we are constantly under attack. The work so secret it is proving impossible to produce an official history. This is the closest we can get and it is very good. If you are seriously interested in our defence and survival, or you would just like a good read, this belongs on your bookshelf.’ — Kim Beazley, former Defence Minister 
A fascinating story of a personal rivalry that shaped Australian politics. - Professor Geoffrey Blainey AC
Menzies and Evatt are painted in their strengths and flaws, with their shared endeavours and their irreconcilable differences and with their competing views of Australia and the world. Anne Henderson’s account is fresh and compelling, a study in the triumphs, tribulations and tragedies that are the nature of politics. – Dr Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large, The Australian
Liberal Party founder and long-serving prime minister Robert (Bob) Menzies along with Labor foreign minister and attorney-general Bert (the Doc) Evatt were two of the biggest names in 20th century Australian politics. The former led his party to election victories, the latter to defeats. Menzies and Evatt were born in 1894. Both men, from relatively modest backgrounds, were brilliant students who starred at law before entering the Commonwealth Parliament.
From the early 1940s to the early 1960s, they took different sides on such issues as bank nationalisation, the attempt to ban the Communist Party and the Petrov affair – ideological disagreements which co-existed with mutual distrust and personal rivalries. Signed by Anne Henderson- Out of stock
Political Lives is an intimate history of image-making and image-breaking in national politics. What was the story behind Bob Hawke’s famed biography? Why does Paul Keating think biographies of serving politicians are ‘like Polaroids of a busy life’ while John Howard considers them a big mistake? Where is the ‘missing’ Menzies biography? Why are our early prime ministers largely absent from historical memory? Chris Wallace writes Australian political history anew through this account of prime ministers, their biographies and their biographers. Lively and astute, the book takes us into their motivations and relationships, some well-known and some hidden, and in doing so shows us Australian politics in a fresh light. ‘For years there has been no shrewder or sharper commentator on Canberra politics than Chris Wallace. In this compelling, typically acute and unique study she contrives to illuminate all at once — and often as if for the first time — both the character of Australia’s prime ministers and the way Australian political history has been made.’ — Don Watson ‘Chris Wallace, scholar–journalist, has written this superb and fascinating analysis of political biography since Federation. Everyone interested in political history will love it. It concludes with a vital oath all her colleagues should observe: “First do no harm – unless it’s deserved and intentional”.’ — Kim Beazley 
Sir Robert Menzies is a towering figure in Australian history. As the nation's longest-serving prime minister, he transformed and ultimately dominated the political landscape, implementing policies that laid the foundations of modern Australia. The story of Menzies and his governments is essential to the Australian narrative: the centrality of political liberalism, the defence of democracy through trying times, and the expanding horizons of our identity, prosperity and appreciation The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894-1942 explores the formative period of Menzies's life, when his personal outlook and system of beliefs that would help shape modern Australia were themselves still being formed. Contributors look at Menzies's ideas prior to their political practice and examine their context and origins. This period is also the time in which Menzies first attained power, though in difficult circumstances, when the focus of the nation was on survival.- Out of stock
Sir Joseph Cook was Australia’s sixth Prime Minister and a truly remarkable man. His greatest political achievement was becoming the first leader of the Australian centre-right to win a federal parliamentary majority in their own right, directly shaping the enduring and unique understanding of what liberalism means in this country. This political story is inherently intertwined with an astounding personal one, as Cook lifted himself up by the bootstraps from an adolescence spent providing for his family in an English coalmine to become a knight and statesman.
Cook’s life demonstrates that Australia was and is a land of tremendous opportunity and social mobility - and that is precisely why he argued passionately for the necessity of individual freedom and personal responsibility as the true driving force behind national progress. These values were informed by a profound belief in Christian tenets, and the agency, autonomy and duty of each human being. Initially entering NSW Parliament as a foundational member of the Labor Party before leaving on a principled opposition to the caucus pledge, Cook’s career charts the how and the why of the emergence of the Australian party system and the philosophical lines of cleavage which continue to shape our nation.
Dr Zachary Gorman is the Academic Coordinator for the Robert Menzies Institute at the University of Melbourne. A professional historian who has specialised in the history of Australian liberalism, he has a PhD from the University of Wollongong where he worked for several years. He has authored two other books, Sir Joseph Carruthers: Founder of the New South Wales Liberal Party, and Summoning Magna Carta: Freedom’s Symbol Over a Millennium. He also edited Captain James Cook, R.N.: 150 Years After, and The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942.
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Signed copies of Whitlam's Foreign Policy In the last 50 years no Australian political leader has had as much influence on politics as Gough Whitlam. Some of his greatest impacts were on Australian foreign policy.As Prime Minister from 1972-1975, he established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China; reached a settlement with the United States on vital defence facilities; revitalised the ANZUS alliance, in the context of a more robustly independent Australia; presided over the establishment of an independent Papua New Guinea; actively engaged with the rest of the world – forging relations with world leaders, like no one before him. It was a period of optimism, excitement and challenge. Some changes were immense and long lasting, others ephemeral.In foreign policy, no previous prime minister exercised such untrammelled power. Whitlam made mistakes, unnecessarily annoyed some allies, was sometimes careless in the niceties of diplomacy. Indonesian relations, Vietnamese refugees, East Timor independence, Baltic states’ recognition, Middle East policy, are key controversies, and part of the story. This monograph in a humanely critical spirit, is concerned with international politics, and evaluates the realist Whitlam, the idealist Whitlam, the great reformer, the flawed man. 
Signed copies of Cardinal Pell, The Media Pile-On & Collective Guilt“…It is evident that there is a possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof.”
- Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, High Court of Australia quoting from the judgment of all seven judges of the High Court – Chief Justice Susan Kiefel and Justices Virginia Bell, Stephen Gageler, Patrick Keane, Geoffrey Nettle, Michelle Gordon and James Edelman in George Pell v The Queen, 7 April 2020
The trial, re-trial and conviction for historical child sexual assault of Cardinal George Pell, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy at the Holy See in Rome, gained international attention. In April 2020, in a remarkable unanimous decision, the High Court of Australia quashed the conviction.
In Cardinal Pell, The Media Pile-On & Collective Guilt, Gerard Henderson takes apart the events of nearly two decades that entrapped Australia’s highest ranking Catholic figure Cardinal George Pell. This commenced in sections of the media, initially the ABC and The Age newspaper, and was taken up by Victoria Police which charged Pell on 26 counts of historical child sexual abuse. Only five charges made it to trial and all five convictions were quashed by the High Court of Australia in a seven to zero decision. Before the High Court, the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions could not explain how the alleged offences took place.
Henderson names and follows the media campaign, over the years, against Pell, a campaign led by the ABC’s Louise Milligan, author and commentator David Marr, The New Daily’s Lucie Morris- Marr and The Guardian Australia’s Melissa Davey. Media reports repeatedly amounted to a pile-on against George Pell, allowing only a one-sided analysis and reducing the Cardinal to a figure of guilt long before his trial. Some media commentators also pushed the line that Pell should be convicted for the collective guilt of the Catholic Church’s mishandling of historical child sexual abuse of three to four decades before.
Henderson also examines forensically the deliberations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, headed by Justice Peter McClellan, and shows how the Commission’s findings in relation to Pell were contradictory and, at times, devoid of due process.
