Non Fiction

As people around the world watch events in the United States, many will agree that it is indeed an exceptional, if conflicted, nation. The sole superpower, with the world’s largest economy and the most powerful military ever known, is hugely in debt, and struggles agonisingly just to produce a federal budget ...

Susan Sheridan’s Nine Lives, a ‘group biography’, analyses the life stories and literary achievements of nine Australian women writers. The purpose, according to Sheridan, is not only to rediscover the life story of each, but also, by exploring their publishing and aesthetic context, to create a ‘fresh configuration’ of our literary history.

Roy Porter wrote that ‘the portrait (above all the self-portrait), the diary and the biography (especially the autobiography) – reveal heightened perceptions of individuality, the proud ego vaunting and flaunting his own being’. This may be so, but self-portraiture is a genre that crosses many secret thresholds ...

Lacking a titled aristocracy and the leisured class that went with it, Australian colonial society encouraged an egalitarianism of manners. This, however, did not reflect the absence of social stratification: rather, as it has been argued, it was a means of being reconciled to it in a new setting ...

A few months after the 2010 federal election, Geoff Gallop delivered the annual Hawke Lecture at the University of South Australia. In an address focused upon political engagement, he canvassed some possible reforms to the Australian political system. Among a number of other proposals ...

Anthropology’s significant contribution to both academic and applied research focused on Indigenous Australia has intensified over the last four decades. Among Aboriginal people and anthropologists themselves, debates have occurred as to the discipline’s earlier alignments with colonialism ...