History
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On August 16, 1947, the Chifley government announced its proposed […]
August 12, 2024
25 mins
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Traveling incognito and with help from 'six stalwart Meccans', Sir Richard Francis Burton eventually reached the Black Stone -- a meteorite, he thought -- when some Bedouin turned on him for being too pushy. They had no daggers and resembled 'living mummies', leading Burton to recall he 'could have managed single-handed half a dozen of them'
August 7, 2024
14 mins
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Central to the new strategy of Holocaust denial are foreign historians and intellectuals eager to provide examples of 'genocide' their own countries have allegedly committed. Does it come as a surprise that Australia's professorial peddlers of massacre myths and legends were on the first plane, metaphorically speaking, for a revisionist conference in Berlin
August 1, 2024
38 mins
The latest
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The Jewish people are facing the greatest threat to their existence since the catastrophic Roman siege of Jerusalem nearly two millennia ago. Consequently, it is well worth recalling that epoch-defining tragedy in all its world-historical significance
July 10, 2024
18 mins
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Modern activists might be more kindly disposed to Captain Cook if he had honoured Aboriginal customs and eaten the children abandoned by their parents at Botany Bay, rather than gifting them cloth and trinkets. To do so would have been a form of communion, of commonality, between the English navigator and the locals
May 16, 2024
13 mins
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Preface: Incredible as it may seem, it is now no […]
April 29, 2024
32 mins
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On the day Whitlam was re-elected leader after Labor's 1975 election drubbing, Clyde Cameron noted in his diary that Gough 'looked uncomfortable ... chastened and worried'. It was a prescient appraisal. Dark and compromising secrets held in Moscow and Baghdad were soon to spill onto Australia's front pages
April 26, 2024
14 mins
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According to Geoffrey Robertson, the most notable Australian item in the British Museum is the Gweagal Shield, which he maintains was 'plundered' at Botany Bay by James Cook, whom he also holds responsible the 'bullet hole' at its centre. Not a word of that is true, as the most cursory checking of readily available sources would have shown
April 24, 2024
9 mins
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If Anna Funder wishes to attack George Orwell, as she does for page after page in Wifedom, that is, of course, her right. The sad truth, though, is that her efforts to present Eileen Blair as the genius behind Animal Farm are ludicrous. This book is the work of a fact-mangling crank, unworthy of a major publisher's imprint
April 6, 2024
27 mins
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Gabriele Tergit's Käsebier Takes Berlin was a German publishing success in 1931, and then it slept. Though its author was a Jewish journalist it was not even noticed when books were burnt in 1933, by which time the author had fled Germany for Czechoslovakia, then Israel, finally settling. Then, in 1977, the novel was republished and a glorious, captivating mess brought fame to an 83-year-old
March 23, 2024
10 mins
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The Tory model to avoid a low-wage economy that prevailed during the Regency years reflected a uniquely British school of conservative pragmatism, one that greatly facilitated innovations in science and their industrial application. Railways, gas lighting, the ambitions and achievements of Brunel, McAdam and the others who harnessed science to commerce, they were the first kicks of embryonic modernity
February 5, 2024
23 mins
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Wounded twice, first at Gallipoli and later on the Western Front, the man who is perhaps our most overlooked Prime Minister confided the thought he had been spared for a reason. That purpose, as Paul Hasluck noted upon his death in 1967, was to serve Australia. In that cause, at home and abroad, he admirably succeeded
January 30, 2024
29 mins