Criticisms of the book Dark Emu and its author, Bruce Pascoe, continue to appear, and to become more puzzling. It is as if the overwhelming popularity of Pascoe and his message have disturbed comfortable convictions about Australian history shared across a wide segment of Australian society.
Category: Arts
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Review: ‘Human Kind’ by Rutger Bregman
What a marvellous book! A powerful refutation of one of the most deeply entrenched and mistaken assumptions built into our taken-for-granted world view that human nature is nasty.
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Bringing ‘the Doc’ to the masses – review of Gideon Haigh’s new book
H. V. Evatt could be a massively polarising figure and that is more than unfortunate. It has closed many minds to what we should be celebrating and promulgating as true Australian values. Those values – not merely espoused, but judicially declared and enacted by and because of Evatt – are in evidence throughout Gideon Haigh’s new book on “the Doc”: The Brilliant Boy. (more…)
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Ships in the Night: A Vietnam war story, by Greg Dodds
Greg Dodds’ career began as a professional Australian soldier who served as an intelligence officer with the Australian Task Force in Vietnam in the late 1960s. In this racy 200-page monograph, Dodds disposes with scholarly requirements – no footnotes, no glossary, no reading list or sources. To appreciate its full context, the reader should have some knowledge of the war, its causes, its leading characters and its aftermath. Even without such background, however, this is a captivating memoir. (more…)
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A review of ‘The Dance of Folly: or how theatrics have tarnished the rule of law in Hong Kong
A series of acute points are made by Henry Litton in his new book, The Dance of Folly. These typically pivot on his observations of how judges, across various courts in Hong Kong, have been drawn away – by lawyers – from what he argues is the essence of well-grounded, common law reasoning towards playing dubious games with legalized expressions and theory-based arguments. The result is that dangerous stress has increasingly been placed on the operation of the One Country Two Systems (OCTS) framework, which governs the relationship between Hong Kong and China.
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The Mountbattens: the British Establishment at its most privileged and eccentric.
“There are four kinds of officers: hard-working and intelligent, lazy and intelligent, lazy and stupid and hard-working and stupid. The first are fit for top staff appointments, the second are fit for the highest commands, the third can be tolerated, but the fourth type could prove dangerous and should be instantly removed.”
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Unsettled – seeing First Nations histories represented in the Australian Museum
Museums, libraries and archives are traditionally not culturally safe spaces for First Nations peoples. As state institutions, they have supported the colonial process and they have privileged certain histories over others. The collections that they hold often position Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as objects or specimens of scientific and anthropological study. The historically biased nature of collecting institutions compounds the level of distrust they can raise for First Nations people, and access to them can cause significant discomfort when the materials deny or misrepresent First Nations peoples’ lived cultures and experiences. (more…)
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China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering by David Brophy
This is a truly excellent account of the “panic” surrounding Australia-China relations over the last few years, especially since 2017. It is well-researched, analytical, nuanced and very well written in a highly accessible style that is both scholarly and colloquial. One of the book’s strong features is a whole chapter covering the role China assumes in Australia’s universities and one each confronting two extremely controversial matters dogging bilateral relations over the last few years, namely Hong Kong and Xinjiang. (more…)
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Everyman as soldier: how men in suits in drawing rooms conned the people – and their families – into fighting on in WW1.
David Stephens reviews Douglas Newton’s Private Ryan and the Lost Peace: A Defiant Soldier and the Struggle against the Great War. (more…)
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Douglas Newton’s Private Ryan and how peace efforts were sabotaged in WW1
Every now and then a historian produces a book that gives a rational and compassionate insight into the war of 1914-18 and the origins of the Anzac legend. Douglas Newton has given Australia such a work in his story of Private Ryan set against the backdrop of war aims and peace movements.
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‘Mr Sin’ aka Abe Saffron had a little mate at ASIO headquarters
Abe Saffron, the king of Sydney’s vice rackets, had a long friendship with Dudley Doherty, a top spy with the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
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Beyond apocalypse fatigue
We can have economic growth without wrecking the planet, says economist Per Espen Stoknes.
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A tepid cry for change: Tanya Plibersek’s book “Upturn” and Labor’s prospects
In a world riven by crises, we need new ways of thinking, knowing, and relating. We also need courage. The challenge is huge. There will be no return to a pre-Covid-19 normal, which for many Australians meant poverty, hardship, and marginalization. This book had rich promise but is a missed opportunity. A comprehensive, coherent vision of a just society post pandemic society still needs to be written. (more…)
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What’s the point of Labor?
As the Labor Opposition jettisons policies on negative gearing, capital gains taxes, franking credits and climate change policies that don’t embrace coal you have to ask – what’s the point of Labor? (more…)
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Upturn: all too familiar ideas but an advance on Coalition’s limited offerings
An eclectic set of essays, the book Upturn: A better normal after Covid-19 tries to put forward a serious reform agenda. While there is a wealth of enthusiastic ideas, Upturn is unfortunately stronger on identifying problems than solutions. This post concentrates on the chapters discussing economic and social welfare. Reviews of other chapters will be posted in coming days.
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Inspirational heroes abound – discover and promote them
Gellibrand MP Tim Watts draws on his family experience – his children, Hong Kong Chinese wife and in-laws – for his book “The Golden Country: Australia’s Changing Identity”. A modern response to Donald Horne’s 1960s “Lucky Country”, Watts see our future as a “golden country”, reflecting a largely Asian Australia. (more…)
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There’s nothing entrepreneurial about Rentier Capitalism, as it sucks up more of the wealth pie
‘Rentier Capitalism’ is a cracking thesis on a cruel economic order. Read it and you’ll start seeing rentiers everywhere, hearing them in every news bulletin, all involved in massive anti-competitive behaviour and impoverishing the rest of society. (more…)
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Humanity in medicine. The life of physician Dr Stanley Goulston
Proverbs 22.v.6 states: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it.” I suspect Stan’s character was shaped by his deeply ingrained Jewish faith, the character of his father and father-in-law, the loss of a mother he never knew, an acute observation of inter-family relationships and a respectful obedience to authority. (more…)
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Review: Cruelty or Humanity by Stuart Rees
Cruelty or Humanity by Em.Prof. Stuart Rees, is essential reading in our present tumult and bedlam of human cruelty.
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P&I ISSUES in Stuart Rees’ Cruelty or Humanity , Bristol: Policy Press 2020
Regarded by international jurist Richard Falk as ‘A road map for humanity’ and by Noam Chomsky as ‘a wonderful guide to the challenges we face’, Stuart Rees’ ‘Cruelty or Humanity‘ identifies world-wide threats to freedom and democracy and displays the humanitarian alternatives.
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What can possibly be done with our political and policy malaise.Part 1.
Two new books are available or soon will be; (“How to Win an Election” by Chris Wallace and “What is to be Done?” by Barry Jones). Both focus on the state of the nation and the state of the ALP.
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Exposing the Hidden Hand
Clive Hamilton’s new book Hidden Hand: “Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World” is a diatribe. We do not need this hysteria when we are trying to maintain a modicum of practical relations with the People’s Republic of China. (more…)
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Book Review: “Hidden Hand” – Exposing how the Chinese communist party is reshaping the world (The Conversation 10.7.20)
In Hidden Hand, China scholars Clive Hamilton and Marieke Ohlberg examine the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Europe and North America in a similar way to how Hamilton dissected the CCP’s influence in Australia in his 2018 book, Silent Invasion.
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KIM WINGEREI. My week with Malcolm and a faltering democracy.
Otto von Bismarck (in)famously said: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best”. It is a sentiment I abhor. (more…)
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JUDITH WHITE. The Australia Council latest funding – the arts betrayed.
The latest round of The Australia Council funding, announced on 3 April, marks a new level of government interference in the arts. The council was never meant to police the arts on behalf of government, but under the Coalition that has become its function. (more…)
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GREG LOCKHART.- Quarantined in the Jazz Age
A friend mailed me recently to ask if I was well and safely distanced socially. He also pasted the following letter and asked me if I’d seen it. I hadn’t. (more…)
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MARK BUCKLEY. Rita Hayworth via Graham Green
I started to cull my books recently. As old age approaches I routinely decide that I need to gain more space, and to really get rid of what I will never get around to reading, sort of like “use it, or lose it”.
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JUDITH WHITE. Whatever happened to Whitlam’s vision for the arts?
In 1972 Gough Whitlam’s election campaign promised “to promote a standard of excellence in the arts, to widen access to, and the understanding and application of, the arts in the community generally, to help establish and express an Australian identity through the arts and to promote an awareness of Australian culture abroad”.
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David Walker’s Stranded Nation
Professor David Walker’s Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region is a work of great and very readable erudition, which does something new: places Australian cultural, political and diplomatic history in its regional context at the time of Asian decolonisation. (more…)