Warren Osmond

Warren Osmond reviews 'Sceptical Sociology' by John Carroll

May 1981, no. 30 • 01 May 1981

Sceptical Sociology is really a set of essays, some of them previously published, by the Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University. It contains a long introductory piece which gives the book its title, a concluding confession, and a number of vignettes which Carroll calls ‘stories’. The book as a whole is a display of the perversity of brilliance. What are we to make, for example, of Carroll ... (read more)

Warren Osmond reviews 'The Boy Adeodatus: The portrait of a lucky young bastard' by Bernard Smith

March 2004, no. 259 • 09 September 2022

In the penultimate chapter, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NS ... (read more)

Warren Osmond reviews 'The Dunera Scandal: Deported by mistake' by Cyril Pearl

July 1983, no. 52 • 21 July 2022

‘This internment of ours is but a sideshow of the war’, says a former Dunera internee in this book. Yet this footnote to Britain’s war on the home front has acquired considerable importance for Australia. Approximately one thousand former Dunera internees became Australian citizens after the war, many of them highly gifted, even distinguished, post-war Australians. Historically, their warti ... (read more)

Warren Osmond reviews 'John Monash' by Geoffrey Serle

November 1982, no. 46 • 01 November 1982

Poor John Monash has waited a long time. Before he died in 1931, he clearly hoped for a friendly posthumous biography. He destroyed his collection of erotica and some extramarital love letters. This was characteristically called ‘Emergency Action’. Less characteristically, he instructed his son-in-law and executor, Gershon Bennett, not to ‘preserve indefinitely’ the enormous collection of ... (read more)

Warren Osmond reviews 'Trial Balance' by H.C. Coombs

May 1982, no. 40 • 01 May 1982

In the Australian administrative tradition, Dr H.C. Coombs is a remarkable survivor, a maximalist and an innovator, not least in his· preparedness to write in public. The key figure in the Post-War Reconstruction brains trust which flourished under Curtin, Chifley and Dedman in the 1940s, he became Governor of the Commonwealth and then the Reserve Bank for twenty years and then entered a new crea ... (read more)

Warren Osmond reviews 'The Boy Adeodatus: The portrait of a lucky young bastard' by Bernard Smith

September 1984, no. 64 • 01 September 1984

In the penultimate chapter of his memoir, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadeq ... (read more)