Nicholas Brown
Nicholas Brown is a professor in the School of History, ANU, with research interests encompassing Australian history, with a particular focus on twentieth-century social, environmental, and biographical history, and on historical perspectives on public policy development and processes. His most recent book is A History of Canberra (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
This is a heavy book with which to make a leap of faith: to trust that one life can make a difference in the deeply compromised pursuit of international justice and security. In the epilogue to her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, Samantha Power suggests ‘if there was anyone who could have wrung from the UN whatever reform and promise it could muster, it was he’. In this long book, depicti ... (read more)
Andrew Fisher fares well in the new Museum of Australian Democracy, at Old Parliament House, Canberra. The entrance to the galleries is framed, on one side, by E. Phillips Fox’s dark 1913 portrait of an imposing and resolute Fisher, in contrast to the garish, spreading corpulence of George Lambert’s 1924 Sir George Reid on the other. Inside, in the procession of prime ministers, Fisher is repr ... (read more)
A couple of anniversaries explain the occasion of this collection: one hundred and fifty years of responsible government in New South Wales, and the bicentenary of Lachlan Macquarie’s arrival as the governor who, Brian Fletcher argues, has had the most ‘persistent hold over public consciousness’ in reflecting the ambiguities of a convict colony. The volume is framed by Rod Cavalier’s forew ... (read more)
I am ashamed to recall that when our high-school history class in the late 1970s was set K.S. Inglis’s The Australian Colonists (1974), I – and I don’t think I was alone – didn’t quite know what to do with a text that focused on ‘ceremonies, monuments and rhetoric’, one that began as a study on 26 January 1788 but worked back as an historical enquiry from 25 April 1915.
Inglis decla ... (read more)