Lucas Grainger-Brown
Lucas Grainger-Brown is a Melbourne-based writer and former management consultant to the federal government. He is currently completing PhD student and tutor at The University of Melbourne, focusing on national identity and globalisation in the Howard era. He has written for numerous journals and news media and has authored two novellas, a short story collection, and the novel Cleopatra's Daughter (2016).
David Marr’s interlocking identities as consummate essayist, journalist of forty-five years, ferocious biographer, and staunch cosmopolitan increasingly eclipse his subject. He wears the condition honestly and inelegantly. ‘I’m a grumpy old guy who hasn’t found in twenty years another big life worth writing’, he remarked in his 2016 Seymour Biography Lecture. Instead, ‘I write little l ... (read more)
After he crossed the Rubicon, Julius Caesar marched on Rome and imposed an authoritarian rule that would alter history. The way in which Australia embraced Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrow of Prime Minister Tony Abbott in September 2015 suggests that some may have harboured similar hopes, on a slightly less grand scale, for the twenty-ninth prime minister. On the first anniversary of the coup, Wayne ... (read more)
Australians must start 'thinking like hawks, while moving like doves', James Brown asserts in his viscerally illustrated but poorly argued Firing Line: Australia's path to war. Amid a darkening security outlook – subtext: a rising China – Australia must awaken from its complacency and foster a new national strategy based upon genuine and informed debate about war and our place in the world. Un ... (read more)
In August 2014, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott gave a short speech disagreeing with the contention put forward in Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation (2014), Paul Kelly's history of the Rudd/ Gillard years. Australia's political system was not broken. Abbott's newly elected government would prove 'that the last six years – the six years between 2007 and 2013 – is not ... (read more)