In A Foreign Return, Neha Kale uses paintings, photographs and installations to explore migration, memory and belonging. Joanna Mendelssohn reviews a book that finds the meaning of home in art, relationships and the places we carry with us. (more…)
Category: Books and Reviews
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The Big Steal: Paul Barry probes how steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta hoodwinked the powerful
Paul Barry’s ‘The Big Steal’ traces the wreckage left by Sanjeev Gupta and Lex Greensill – and the bankers, regulators, politicians and journalists whose credulity helped them along the way.
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Tech Bros: Making a fortune, finding fame and falling out
Atlassian’s rise made its founders Australian tech icons. ‘Tech Bros’ charts the company’s extraordinary success, immense wealth and the tensions now reshaping the relationship at its heart. (more…)
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Power in Numbers: recovering the hidden history of Australia’s female economists
‘Power in Numbers’ tells the stories of 16 women who helped shape Australian economics, while raising questions about why the profession remains so male-dominated. (more…)
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Paul Keating’s AUKUS hostility reflects his passion for hard‑nosed realism over subservience
James Curran’s ‘Grand Ambition’ traces Paul Keating’s attempt to reshape Australia’s place in Asia – and the enduring realism behind his opposition to AUKUS. (more…)
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Luna Park and Neville Wran’s bum
A chapter in Helen Pitt’s ‘Luna Park’ revives claims that Neville Wran blocked a lease for personal reasons, but official tender records point elsewhere. (more…)
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What Paul Keating wants for a country ‘swimming between sharks’
Paul Keating says Australia should resist strategic subordination to the United States without accepting Chinese dominance, and instead preserve its own sovereignty. (more…)
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What are we missing about Helen of Troy?
Debate over who can play Helen of Troy misses something more interesting: in Homer, she emerges as a rare figure capable of questioning fate, power and her own responsibility. (more…)
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Performance Politics: how Australian politicians write themselves into history
Joshua Black’s ‘Performance Politics’ traces how Australian politicians have used memoirs, publishing and television to shape public personas and secure their political legacies. (more…)
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Hard New World: Can Australia survive America’s decline?
Hugh White’s new book warns that declining US power and China’s rise are remaking Asia, while Australia remains dangerously attached to old assumptions about American protection. (more…)
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Heresies: Richard Flanagan is rarely heretical, but rarely dull
Richard Flanagan’s Heresies gathers 24 essays, speeches and reflections spanning politics, literature and public life – with moral force even when the heresy itself is harder to find. (more…)
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Why America’s political system has failed to contain Trump
Donald Trump’s political dominance reflects more than one man’s power. Hugh White writes that deep public discontent and failing institutions have left America vulnerable to a second political revolution. (more…)
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Peter Wilenski: Reformer
Peter Wilenski helped reshape Australia’s public service, championing responsiveness, equality and openness. But his rejection of political neutrality left a more complicated legacy for public administration and reform today. (more…)
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The lessons of Long Tan
Sixty years after the Battle of Long Tan, a simple Canberra commemoration offered a more thoughtful kind of remembrance – one that honours the dead on all sides and questions the mythology of victory. (more…)
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How to Sell a Genocide – libraries are for difficult books too
A confronting display can be reconsidered. Removing a documented critique of the war on Gaza from a public library collection would be another matter entirely.
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Regime Change: essential, chilling reading on Trump’s second term
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change documents the corruption, cruelty and concentration of power defining Donald Trump’s second presidency – and why the international restraints he is dismantling still matter. (more…)
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From Marat to Trump: what history tells us about terror and power
A new biography of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat offers a lens through which to consider two very different reigns of terror – and what their histories might tell us about Donald Trump’s America. (more…)
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Omar Musa’s Miles Franklin win rewards epic, ambitious writing with a global scope
Omar Musa’s Fierceland has won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, recognising a formally adventurous novel that links family inheritance, colonial violence and environmental destruction across borders.
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Not really like us – a new view of Trump’s America
Kieran Kelly’s Not Really Like Us traces a lifelong fascination with America that gives way to a more cautious view of the US as powerful, vital to Australia – and fundamentally different. (more…)
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The power of dreams – thanks to Freud
Neuroscience has challenged Freud’s ideas about dreams. Nevertheless, Freud was the one who made us realise dreams can be meaningful. (more…)
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Why Steinbeck’s East of Eden still stands the test of time
As East of Eden becomes a Netflix series, Steinbeck’s sprawling Californian saga still holds power through its moral ambition, regional depth and slow contest between destiny and choice.
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Confronting disruption and seeing it coming
A new book examines how to deal with the complex problems caused by natural and humanitarian disasters, technological failures and geopolitical tensions. (more…)
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Tim Wilson wrote the case for Labor’s tax reforms
Tim Wilson’s 2020 book, The New Social Contract, could be the basis of fruitful debate on tax reform. Instead, we get performative outrage. (more…)
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The five best films from Sydney Film Festival
This year’s Sydney Film Festival offered a strong field of films beyond Hollywood’s familiar moral economy, with strange melodramas, existential horror, childhood reverie, sporting tragedy and art-house pleasures among the standouts. (more…)
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Australia’s bookshops are disappearing – government can help
Independent bookshops are closing across Australia as costs rise and discount giants dominate sales, but policy options such as tax relief, GST reform and book pricing regulation could help protect the cultural role they play.
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Michael Jackson, funerals and the myth of the authentic self
How we remember people does not fit easily into a therapeutic framework of suffering, confession and healing. (more…)
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Gold standard? Revisiting the Hawke government’s reform legacy
A new collection of essays on the Hawke government shows why its reform legacy rested not only on policy ambition, but on evidence, public service advice, Cabinet debate, consultation and disciplined political communication. (more…)
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Hailing Australia’s under-appreciated life-saving heroes
Desmond Manderson’s High Time – How Australia changed its mind about illegal drugs, is a social history of Australia’s drug policy and a must-read for policymakers. (more…)
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Do we need another bio of Errol Flynn?
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The many careers of Miles Franklin
Miles Franklin has been the subject of several new artistic works in the last five years. Her brilliant life still has plenty to tell us about our nation. (more…)