Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Ross McMullin

An interview with Ross McMullin

by Australian Book Review
June 2023, no. 454

Ross McMullin’s latest book Life So Full of Promise: Further biographies of Australia’s lost generation (2023) is his sequel to Farewell, Dear People (2012), which was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His previous biographies include Pompey Elliott (2002) and Will Dyson: Australia’s radical genius (2006). His political histories are The Light on the Hill (1991) and So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the World’s first national labour government (2004). 

... (read more)

Just over a decade ago, Ross McMullin published Farewell, Dear People (2012), a magisterial biography of ten remarkable Australians killed in World War I. The book met with much acclaim, including the award of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2013. Life So Full of Promise, a sequel to this volume, provides three more biographies of men whose early lives suggested that they would have made extraordinary contributions to Australian public life, had they survived the war.

... (read more)

General ‘Pompey’ Elliott was a famous Australian in 1918, half forgotten seventy years later, and is now a national military hero. This Anzac Day he stood high. On French soil he was praised by France’s prime minister, Édouard Philippe, in one of the most mesmerising and sensitive speeches ever offered by a European leader to Australian ears ...

... (read more)

The Whitlam Legacy edited by Troy Bramston

by
March 2014, no. 359

Having edited multi-authored retrospectives of The Wran Era (2006) and The Hawke Government (2003) together with For the True Believers: Great Labor Speeches (2013), Troy Bramston has now turned his attention to The Whitlam Legacy. It is a comprehensive survey, not confined to assessments of how much the government’s initiatives remain ...

Ross McMullin’s Will Dyson is a new edition of a book that first appeared twenty years ago. Over that time,  the author has promoted his subject, according to the book’s subtitle, from ‘Cartoonist, Etcher and Australia’s Finest War Artist’ to ‘Australia’s Radical Genius’. ‘Genius’ is a strong word, and the new edition does not make a case for its use any more than the old one did. But Dyson is certainly an important, often unregarded, figure in the history of political cartooning. The story of this talented, likeable, thoroughly political man is well worth knowing on many fronts: as a saga of early Melbourne working-class bohemian culture, as an example of the invigorating effect on English political cartooning by antipodean artists in the early part of the twentieth century (the career of David Low shadows that of Dyson), and as an account of the way that World War I registered on a sensitive, and responsible, Australian imagination.

... (read more)

The true believers, proud of their history and with hope for the future, assembled in Melbourne on 27 April 2004 to celebrate the first time the Labor Party formed a federal ministry a century before – and, of course, to attend the launch of the obligatory book commemorating the event, So Monstrous a Travesty.

... (read more)

In September 1929 John Monash, ex-commander of the Australian Corps in France, sat down to reply to his former subordinate, Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, a National Party senator and militia major-general. Elliott had asked why he had been passed over for a division in 1918. What ‘secret offence’ had he committed that General Birdwood, the English chief of Australian forces, had denied him advancement? Monash was disturbed that Elliott’s sense of injury should be so raw a decade after the guns had fallen silent. In a tactful, compassionate reply, he set aside the idea of a secret offence and gently reminded Elliott that others, too, had had complaints, and had left them behind. The affection of their men mattered more than honours: ‘This same affection and confidence you have enjoyed in rich measure, and no one can question that it was well deserved. After all, you commanded a celebrated Brigade during the period of its greatest successes … Then why worry as to the verdict of posterity upon so brilliant and soldierly a career?’

... (read more)