(2025) Hawke and His Legend
This is a competent telling of the Hawke PM story.
(2025) Whitlam’s Fall was the High Art of Political Bastardry
No one looks great, fifty years after the dismissal of the Whitlam Government.
(2025) The Rise, Fall, and Flailing of Jacinta Price
It was not long ago that Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was the hope of the Trump-admiring, MAGA-lite faction of the Liberal Party. Her campaign against the Voice referendum, her earthy wisdom and admirable life story, enthused the “after dark” crowd.
(2025) BROWNIE
With a complacent title, published by admirers (the imprint Good Times Press is revealing), un-stocked in ‘leading’ bookstores, with word-of-mouth sales, this is the last of the memoirs of Hawke government ministers, published forty years after its election.
Thumbs Up, Craggy
David Keith Cragg, 16.09.1957 -17.03.2025
(2025) Show Me the Evidence
The Assassination of Neville Wran is Milton Cockburn’s indignant rebuttal of corruption allegations against former NSW Premier Neville Wran AC QC (1926-2014; NSW Labor Premier 1976-86).
(2025) How Far Can You Go? A Note on Curtin, Australian Labor, and Conscription in WW II
Many of us broadly familiar with John Curtin, admire his stance to defeat naysayers and introduce conscription for the defence of Australia during World War II.
(2025) Piling on the Criticism: A Comment on McMullin’s Review
Besides alluding to my typo, spelling “abrasives” instead of “abrasiveness” in quoting him, Ross McMullin in the December Recorder, offers a thought-provoking review of my In Search of Chris Watson.
(2024) Three Launches of the James Scullin Monograph
An address on 9 October 2024 at the Sydney Institute, Phillip Street, Sydney, on the launch of James Scullin, Australian Biographical Monographs # 24, Connor Court publishers, subsequently published in The Sydney Papers, 2024.
(2024) Secular & Catholic Social Democracy: The Race Mathews Biography
It is a spectacular irony that in the 21st century, so far, the Australian whom in sympathy most popularised Catholic social thought is a committed atheist and Fabian socialist who youthfully flirted with joining the Communist Party. This is only one of the fascinating features of the life of Race Mathews (1935- ), explored in a well-researched biography by his wife and noted author, Iola Mathews.