Frank Bongiorno

It is a sign of the times that A Better Australia: Politics, public policy and how to achieve lasting reform begins with a discussion of climate and energy policy. No policy field better illustrates the deficiencies in Australia’s politics over the past generation. It is a tale, as one of the book’s authors, John Brumby, reminds us, of avoidable failure and lost opportunities, as the issue was subjected to the narrower, more immediate incentives offered by partisanship and opportunism.

In this week’s ABR Podcast, Frank Bongiorno assesses the Albanese government, which has recently completed the first half of its first term in office. Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University, President of the Australian Historical Association, and the author of books including Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia. Listen to Frank Bongiorno’s ‘‘‘Thin labourism” How is the Albanese government travelling?’, published in the April issue of ABR.

The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.

Frank Bongiorno is a historian based at the Australian National University in Canberra. His most recent book, Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia, won the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Non-fiction, ACT Book of the Year, and the Henry Mayer Book Prize. He is president of the Australian Historical Association and the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

Read the advances from the advances from the March 2024 issue of ABR.

For a man many would regard as the very epitome of the type, Raimond Gaita seems rather hostile to the concept of the intellectual. It is ‘irredeemably mediocre’, he explains, inferior to the kinds of moral and political responsibility that attach to teacher or politician. Intellectuals are active in the public domain, grappling with ideas, culture, and politics, but they have often lacked independence of mind, he says, ‘because they never had it or because they sacrificed it to the cause’.

Max Dupain's portrait of Jean Lorraine, a favourite model among Sydney’s artists and photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, graces the elegant cover of Paul Dalgarno’s Prudish Nation. All that gives a somewhat misleading impression of the nature of this book. It is not a work of history. Nor is it an investigation of whether Australia is a notably prudish nation. The variety of gender and sexual identities examined certainly does not leave an impression of prudishness. If Australia was once prudish, it is obviously less so now.

What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.

Publishers rarely become big news in Australia, university presses even less often. It was notable therefore that the departure in early 2019 of Melbourne University Publishing’s CEO, Louise Adler, and some members of the MUP board, became a matter on which so many of the nation’s political and cultural élite felt they needed to have an opinion. A strong coterie came out in her defence. This had much to do with Adler herself, who had courted their attention, published their books, and made MUP a story in its own right.

There was a moment there, in the opening chapter of How to Rule Your Own Country: The weird and wonderful world of micronations, when I thought I was about to undertake an improving academic tour. The authors, Harry Hobbs and George Williams, are after all both legal academics. That first chapter has sections with earnest headings such as ‘What is a micronation?’ and ‘Why do people set up micronations?’. There are seemingly well-chosen quotations from experts, and a careful weighing up of definitions and opinions.