Category Archives: Political history

(2022) McKell

This 73-page booklet by David Clune, one of a series commissioned and edited by Scott Prasser for the Connor Court Australian political biographical monographs, provides an excellent overview of the life of Sir William McKell KC KSG (1891-1985; NSW Labor Leader, 1939-47; Premier of NSW, 1941-47; Governor-General of Australia, 1947-53) who in 1939 inherited the leadership of a party in total disarray and then fashioned a winning combination and style known ever since as the McKell Model.

(2022) Large in Stature and Character: Peter McMahon

16 July 1931 – 13 March 2022

Peter McMahon, champion of garbologists – as he proudly said, local government union leader, NSW Upper House Labor politician, industrial tribunal member, historian, and community activist, had many significant achievements, including improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees, and recruiting Paul Keating to work as a young research officer for the Municipal Employees’ Union (MEU) before the budding politician propelled himself, aged 25, into the Federal parliament in 1969.

(2022) Live Like It Matters: Senator Kimberley Kitching

It is achingly sad that the whip-smart, vivacious, principled, Senator Kimberley Kitching died on Thursday in Melbourne, aged 52, apparently of a sudden heart-attack.

(2021) Labouring People

Chris Bowen, the former Treasurer, now Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, is an avid reader, and curious about the motivation, thinking, and conflicts that rule the hearts and minds of political folk.

(2021) Australian Politics in the Shadow of the Cross

This book of essays continues the work of the P.M. Glynn Institute of the Australian Catholic University (ACU), whose 12 book-length, and other, publications under the Kapunda Press imprint over the past six-years encourage espousal, renewal, and debate about Catholic traditions and ideas.

(2021) Australian Jurists and Christianity

This is a collection of 24 essays on jurists, politicians, and related others, who made a mark on Australian history and whose Christian faith in and/or reaction to Christian ideas made an interesting impact.

(2021) Their Fiery Cross of Union

Here is a radical reassessment of 1901, the formation of Australia viewed as a less than glorious moment in Australian history. Economist, economic historian, and Australian Federation critic William Oliver Coleman argues and writes well, though leaving room for doubt about his critique and conclusions.

(2021) “Doc” Evatt: Labor’s “Lost” Leader

Until now, despite several appealing attempts, the brilliant, complex, exasperating, shrewd, and naïve Herbert Vere Evatt QC, PC, KStJ (1894-1965), Labor politician, judge, and historian, lacked a compelling biography.

(2021) Memoirs of a Cold War Warrior

This is a lucid and interesting story by Keith Harvey: From university activist in the Democrat Club at Monash University in the early 1970s, gradual attraction to the ideals and works of the National Civic Council (NCC), conversion to Catholicism, marriage, children, recruitment to the anti-communist union cause, union work, including the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) in 1977-78 (it did not end well), then the Federated Clerks Union (FCU) to retirement, and attraction to the ideals of the Australian Labor Party in coalition with Christians concerned with social justice.

(2021) Conscience, Religious Tolerance, and Why It Matters to the ALP

Rodney Cavalier’s review (Newsletter 241) of the book The Write Stuff (Connor Court, 2020) comments on my Chapter, ‘Faithful and Labor: What Labor Ignores at Its Peril’ and argues that there is no problem.