Eleanor Dark was the most successful of the nationally-inclined writers of the 1930s and 40s, many of whom were women. Some had their literary limitations, but in their various ways they strived for accuracy about Australia and its society – a marked contrast with those of the past 50 years. Dark's wonderful 'The Timeless Land' leads the pack

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Seventy-nine years ago today -- December 1, 1942, the RAN corvette went down after a desperate fight with Japanese aircraft, an action that many decades later saw Seaman Teddy Sheean rightly and finally awarded the VC his gallantry warranted. With that injustice righted, there are two others matters that need to be examined and set straight

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Was the coronavirus really worth stopping the world for? No one really knows, or can know. Opinions will differ, and reasonably so. Is the coronavirus still a sufficiently serious threat to continue stopping the world for? No

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For most Australian authors the writing life is far from lucrative, with typical earnings less than might be gained by going on the dole. Ah, but that's not the sorry lot of all authors! If you write from the port side of politics, manage a little-read compendium of intersectionality such as Meanjin or Overland or if your name is Bruce Pascoe, check the mail for another cheque from the Copyright Agency

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Miranda Devine's newly released 'Laptop from Hell' is a magisterial recounting of Hunter Biden's misadventures, corruption and the astonishing extent to which he has traded on his father's influence. Not, mind you, that the current US President is any better when it comes lies and self-interest. The fruit, as they say, seldom falls far from the tree

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If ever you learn your children are being subjected to the offensive inanities foisted on innocent kids by the ABC's 'The School That Tried to End Racism', make it your parental duty to stress that visiting race hucksters aren't teachers, deserve politeness but not respect and, most of all, that they make wonderful targets for irreverent sarcasm. Get to it, young 'uns!

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It is a sad day when sportsmen are required to lead blameless lives and sporting administrators set themselves up as moral arbiters to judge and punish those who have strayed. Let us set Cricket Australia's Mr Richard Freudenstein an example by declining to ask, as Christ once did, if a man so quick to judge is himself free of transgressions' private stains

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Twelve ordinary Americans defied the baying of the leftist mob, ignored the media's slanderous misreporting, saw through prosecutorial misconduct and acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse on the strength of the evidence and only the evidence. George Pell should have been so blessed, but it seems brave and rational jurors are in short supply in our part of the world

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Politicians, CMOs and the press have never done citizens the courtesy of getting their stories straight. Masks are essential, then they're not, now they are again. Vaccines banish the Wuhan curse until, upon reflection, the serried chorus of quotable experts proclaim the need for boosters. Public trust is fraying, and that can only enhance the gain of function for chaos and confusion

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Federal governments have successfully relied upon the Constitution's external affairs power to support the enactment of a great number of laws over the years. Accordingly, were the the Morrison government inclined to act against the states' vaccine mandates, it would be simplicity itself step in and protect Australians from their premiers and chief health officers

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That the virus emerged within a few minutes' travel of the Wuhan lab has always been the prima facie case for doubting the denials of the CCP, its associates, advocates and acolytes in academia. Sharri Markson's book is the best sort of journalism: curious, uncowed and, most of all, an indictment of all the reporters who think stenography an adequate substitute for the pursuit of truth

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The problem with the Massacre Map, as with the Dark Emu hoax, is how to correct errors and distortions when those who should be expected to police these things and defend truth in history support the distorters. Instead, as I have learnt, the academics' solution to plagiarism, inaccuracy and invention is yet more plagiarism, inaccuracy and invention

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The obits for Melbourne University's Stuart Macintyre, dead at 74, will be replete with paeans for his role in shaping the history curriculum taught in Australian schools. Less noted, and certainly not critically, will be his Marxist adherence to the class struggle, his slight academic achievements and, as Keith Windschuttle noted in 2008, his shameful and unseemly defenestration of Geoffrey Blainey. One normally shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but in this instance it is unavoidable

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The great error in much of the writings on conservative thought has been to separate out the role of the market economy as, at best, a minor element in the structure of conservative thought. In fact, it is at the very core of what must be understood and defended

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Patrick Moore's 'Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom' was published in 2020, but deserves a better fate than a transitory flash across the bookshop shelves. Logical, making no claims without evidence and, surprisingly, courteous despite the slanders he has endured at the hands of former green comrades, it is the perfect Christmas gift for the carbon hysterics in your circle

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The Greeks’ Furies would be kinder than Patsy Millett in outing Mary Durack’s torments and tormenters, for there are enough grenades in her engrossing family saga to sustain a 100-year war among the upper reaches of Perth society. For starters, there is poor Mary’s thankless marriage to brutish pioneer aviator Horrie Miller. After that, the aired linen is even more soiled

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As a result of the culture wars and cancel culture, Western nations such as Australia are facing an existential threat, where what should be most acknowledged and valued is either ignored or condemned as obsolete and oppressive. Yes, a world where hundreds of academics oppose the Ramsay Centre is a grim place, but there are green shoots of hope

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One of the reasons I stopped watching the ABC was to break my habit of shouting at the telly. It’s unbecoming, completely futile, raises one’s blood pressure, causes nervous dyspepsia and might well shorten life. Alas, even amongst Sky's conservative talking heads these days there are vexations aplenty

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Stalin understood his workers' paradise could not tolerate the existence and influence of the Judeo-Christian legacy and murdered millions to achieve that end. The motive and goal of so-called progressives remains unchanged: the humbling of any rival system of belief that challenges the State creed of secular, humanist values

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The modern West has no need for a Stasi, as the Left has demonstrated in denouncing Michael Leunig, its former ornament, for a cartoon that challenged vaccination mandates. In the kingdom of the thick, the thinker who deviates from ideology and doctrine is a hooligan who must be crushed

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'The Courier' dramatises what John le Carré called the greatest coup of the Cold war -- the story of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky and British businessman Greville Wynne, who between them provided the intelligence that enabled President Kennedy to prevail during the Cuban Missile Crisis

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After 80 years, DNA analysis has finally put a name to HMAS Sydney's 'Unknown Sailor', Able Seaman Thomas Clark. His was the sole body ever found from the doomed cruiser, which went the bottom after a point-blank gunnery duel with disguised German raider Kormoran. This is how he and 644 other Australians laid down their lives

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Forced to quit the classroom, an unvaccinated Victorian teacher writes: 'The lunacy of it all is that the protected are demanding that the unprotected partake of the protection that the protected have used, because the protection that the protected have used isn’t protecting them from either the protected or the unprotected. It’s like something out of Monty Python

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Vaccine passports have been abandoned in Britain where, quite apart from revulsion at the sort of coercion we are seeing in Australia, COVID itself has made them beside the point. With deaths there among the vaccinated currently running at twice the rate of those who have spurned the jab, what useful purpose can they possibly serve?

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