Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Skip to main content

Australian History

Silent Shock by Michael Magazanik

by •
August 2015, no. 373
Rachel Buchanan reviews 'Silent Shock' by Michael Magazanik

Silent Shock is an ambitious, important book. It is a work of history, a work of journalism, and a forensic exposé of hideous corporate negligence, all woven around the lives of one modest Melbourne family.

Former journalist turned lawyer Michael Magazanik was one of the dozens of lawyers, barristers, and researchers who worked on a recent class acti ...

Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War by James Curran

by •
August 2015, no. 373
Billy Griffiths reviews 'Unholy Fury' by James Curran

‘I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like.’ The half-compliment was the best President Richard Nixon could muster during a restrained exchange with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the Oval Office in July 1973. After the turbulent build-up to this meeting, rivetingly conveyed in James Curran’s history Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War, one almost e ...

Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture by Angela Woollacott

by •
August 2015, no. 373
Alan Atkinson reviews 'Settler Society in the Australian Colonies' by Angela Woollacott

Free settlement in Australia from 1788 to the 1850s is an old and favourite topic for historians in this country. It has engaged historical imagination for nearly two centuries, starting with William Charles Wentworth’s A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony ...

Australian Catholic Lives by Edmund Campion

by •
June-July 2015, no. 372
Simon Caterson reviews 'Australian Catholic Lives' by Edmund Campion

‘Most history is simply lost.’ By means of a regular biographical column in the Jesuit magazine Madonna published over the past twenty-five years, Father Edmund Campion has preserved pieces of Australian personal history that might otherwise have been neglected, if not forgotten altogether. In this, the author’s second collection of biographical sketche ...

Trendyville: The Battle for Australia's inner cities by Renate Howe, David Nichols, and Graeme Davison

by •
June-July 2015, no. 372
Frank Bongiorno reviews 'Trendyville' by Renate Howe, David Nichols, and Graeme Davison

In the Melbourne suburb where I spent my childhood, a café was a place where ethnic men played cards and backgammon, puffed on cigarettes, and looked up from time to time to watch through the window the passing parade on the footpath outside. Now, when I return to Northcote, I am often served in hip cafés by boyish men with Ned Kelly beards and stylishly informal ...

Reading Australia: 'For the Term of His Natural Life' by Marcus Clarke

by •
Reading Australia

In his essay ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1856), Frederick Sinnett conducts an inquiry ‘into the feasibility of writing Australian novels; or, to use other words, into the suitability of Australian life and scenery for the novel writers’ purpose and, secondly, into the right manner of their treatment’.

Lost Relations: Fortunes of My Family in Australia's Golden Age by Graeme Davison

by •
June-July 2015, no. 372
John Thompson reviews 'Lost Relations' by Graeme Davison

Clear-eyed, unsentimental, but compassionate, with a nicely honed flair for story-telling, Graeme Davison is one of Australia’s master historians. Now Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University, his early training was in R.M. Crawford’s so-called Melbourne History School, where it was simply assumed that books would be written. Crawford’s department at ...

Bearing Witness: The Remarkable Life of Charles Bean, Australia's Greatest War Correspondent by Peter Rees

by •
June-July 2015, no. 372
Geoffrey Blainey reviews 'Bearing Witness' by Peter Rees

Charles Bean is now seen as one of the classiest journalists and historians Australia has produced. Like many talented historians, he had no prior training in his craft, except as a war correspondent during World War I, when he wrote in the face of daily and nightly dangers such as most war journalists no longer have to confront.

I have the strong impression ...

Tony Birch on 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' by Thomas Keneally for Reading Australia

by •
June-July 2015, no. 372

Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) is based in part on historical events, particularly the crimes committed by Jimmy Governor, an Aboriginal man from New South Wales. In 1900, Governor was a key figure involved in the killing of nine Europeans, including five women and children. The killings followed Governor’s marriage t ...

Deadline Gallipoli

by •
14 April 2015

If ever there were to be an exception to Winston Churchill’s military aphorism, ‘History is written by the victors’, the Anzac story would make a promising candidate. One doubts that those on the ground at Gallipoli would consider themselves victors. Yet here we are, one hundred years on, celebrating the Anzac tradition with mo ...

Page 18 of 65