History
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As Michael Easson notes in his new Chris Watson biography, Labor's first PM sought to civilise capitalism, not bring it downSeptember 15, 2024
9 mins
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The Arabs lost in1948 and have since used a motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejectionSeptember 11, 2024
10 mins
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From a perspective of some eighty years it is possible to misunderstand or underestimate the intensity of the fears—but also the hopes and aspirations—of the British people as they faced up to another colossal existential challenge, less than a full generation after what, it was now suddenly clear, had only been the first world warSeptember 10, 2024
12 mins
The latest
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You can imagine my surprise when I recently became aware, courtesy of my cousin Paul, of the letter below, addressed to Mr J.A, Farquar, Commissioner of the South Australian Railways.August 31, 2024
4 mins
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Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”August 29, 2024
16 mins
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This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?August 29, 2024
13 mins
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John Thewall is released from prison with his hands damaged from torture. Coleridge and Sara are conflicted as to whether it is safe to let him stay in the country with them and he is asked to leave.August 29, 2024
17 mins
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Pascoe invents Aboriginal farmers; Harney looked at Darwin and knew individuals who were trying to enter a white world: “Let them grow a garden and they soon felt the full weight of kinship ties when, at harvest time, their hosts of relations came to help them—not to gather, but to eat the crop.”August 29, 2024
14 mins
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Clark’s account is dizzying, traversing what he sagely calls the only truly European revolution. He moves across France, Prussia, Hungary, Wallachia, Poland, Croatia, Spain, and beyond.August 29, 2024
9 mins
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It is unlikely that the young Culshaw ever gave more than three minutes’ thought to antipodean residence. Yet lo and behold, the 1970s found him doing consultancy work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and even giving lectures at the University of Western Australia.August 29, 2024
18 mins
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The total failure of pre-contact Aboriginal society to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology is indicative of what Aboriginal society was actually like. To put the matter bluntly, pre-contact Aboriginal society consisted of 65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery.August 29, 2024
19 mins
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The life of John Clancy as a squatter, the land he had to walk off due to poverty, and the Overflow where he worked, a wealthy squatting sheep run that remains today, are emblematic of the settlement of rural Australia in the nineteenth century.August 25, 2024
12 mins
