NewSouth
Judith Brett reviews 'The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia' by Jane R. Goodall
The commons, the common good, the commonwealth: all words for humans’ shared right to the fruits of the earth to sustain their lives, and all words with deep political histories. In The Politics of the Common Good, Jane R. Goodall excavates some of these deep histories, beginning with the Diggers and Levellers of mid-seventeenth-century England who, in pr ...
If you’ve somehow avoided listening to podcasts, you will have missed out on the recent explosion of long-form audio storytelling – and I mean it, you’ve really missed out. The show which pioneered the form, This American Life (TAL), pulls a cool four to five million listeners each week ...
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James Dunk is not the first Australian historian to notice that mental breakdown was surprisingly common during the first two European generations in New South Wales. Malcolm Ellis linked the ‘Botany Bay disease’ to rheumatic fever, rife on shipboard, which ‘ruined the lives or unbalanced the minds of … many pioneers’. Manning Clark spoke of ...
... (read more)Michael Sexton reviews 'Australia's Vietnam: Myth vs history' by Mark Dapin
Almost all historical events are attended by myths, some of them remarkably persistent, but Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War has perhaps more than its fair share. Mark Dapin has set out to dispel what he sees as six of these myths, which he first encountered working on his book The Nashos’ War ...
... (read more)Philip Jones reviews Capturing Nature: Early scientific photography at the Australian Museum 1857–1893 by Vanessa Finney
The photographic resources of museums and their archives have emerged as key sources for studying the natural world and human cultures, particularly as those studies have widened to include the techniques and modus operandi of scientists and anthropologists themselves. Their notebooks and field equipment ...
... (read more)Stephen A. Russell reviews 'Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s journey to marriage equality' by Alex Greenwich and Shirleene Robinson and 'Going Postal: More than ‘yes’ or ‘no’, one year on' edited by Quinn Eades and Son Vivienne
Glitter canons erupted at colourful gatherings across the country on 15 November 2017 as the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that 61.6 per cent of participants had voted yes in the marriage equality plebiscite. Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s journey to marriage equality, published on the anniversary of that historic day ...
... (read more)Johanna Leggatt reviews The Thinking Woman by Julienne van Loon
Novelist and academic Julienne van Loon does not doubt that the thinking woman is ‘alive and well’, but when she scans the (mostly) male names in bookstore philosophy sections and the (mostly) male staff lists of university philosophy departments, she wonders where they are hiding ...
... (read more)Michael McGirr reviews A New History of the Irish in Australia by Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall
There is much to admire about this detailed and painstaking book. The authors have entered a field that is replete with stereotypes and even gags. They will have none of it. The result is an account of the Irish in Australia subtly modulated and insistent on evidence. It is suspicious of the lore and yarns that have sometimes been made to take their place ...
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To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2018 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite books of 2018 – all published by other companies.
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The poet James McAuley once told a group of Sydney university students – ‘forcefully’, as Geoffrey Lehmann recalls – that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. Lehmann had already imbibed a related injunction from his mother: ‘One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer ...
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