Jan McGuinness
Jan McGuinness has more than thirty years’ experience in print and television journalism. She teaches feature writing in the School of Journalism at Monash University and is researching a biography of Shirley Hazzard.
In his introduction to Bob Ellis: In his own words, Bob’s son Jack says of his father that ‘writing was his reason for being ... and through his writing he saw himself in conversation with the world’. That conversation stopped on 3 April 2016 with Ellis’s death from neuroendocrine cancer. He was seventy-three. For devotees or those merely curious about his life and times, the conversation ... (read more)
With James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch grinning smugly on its cover, Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the Ultimate Revenge projects a strong message that they are indeed the company’s smiling assassins. Pamela Williams mounts a case that these scions of Australia’s traditional media families landed killer blows through their investments in Internet start-ups, which were ultimately responsib ... (read more)
Andrea Goldsmith, in her seventh novel, plunges once more into a world of characters whose ideas and relationships swirl and churn around a psychological trigger. This time it is memory in all its errant, bewitching manifestations. Memory plays tricks as the old adage goes, and for the novel’s main characters it is the trick of emersion in an idealised but ruptured past.
Two sisters (Zoe and Ni ... (read more)
Reading two books about Gina Rinehart back to back is far from edifying. So rich, so controlling, so opinionated, so entitled – and these are among her less objectionable qualities, as described in the two biographies published since she burst into the headlines amid reports of family litigation, media buy-ins, and escalating wealth. Indeed, whatever she did would captivate widespread interest, ... (read more)
Get in line, Bruce. The world is full of those who have been done over by Rupert Murdoch. In the immortal words of George Cukor to an aggrieved actor: ‘Will you stop about being fired. Everybody’s been fired.’ So what makes Bruce Guthrie, sacked as Editor-in-Chief of the Herald Sun, so special that he should write a book about it? The answer is that Guthrie bit back and sued News Ltd (the Au ... (read more)