'Have you turned conservative?' It was the early 1980s, I was back in Australia, and the speaker was a friend I had made during the campaign for Whitlam in London. It was the last time I saw her. Those on the Left are very aware that something is wrong with us even before we are. They are a sensitive lot, ever ready to scent dissent

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Bruce Pascoe has robbed Aboriginal Australia of its essential and millennial experience of hunter-gathering and its associated beliefs and traditions and replaced them with an elderly counter-culturalist’s fantasy of Earth Garden agriculturists, hippie cooking and Green Left Weekly village/commune dwellers

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Evan Pederick, the subject of Imre Salusinszky's new book, is an Anglican priest, but in 1978 he was the Ananda Marga cultist who atomised four innocent men outside the Sydney Hilton. Phillip Adams deems the killer 'brave'. Brave? Brave are those who suffered, not the reformed butcher the account of whose youth suggests an absurdist anti-hero and outsider

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Alex didn’t know that Betty’s husband had tried to have him tortured and murdered. Neither did Eileen, Alex’s wife. By the time this was revealed in Peter Hruby’s book Dangerous Dreamers (2010) they had all died natural deaths. I knew these people at the time of the Vietnam War when Whitlam was just moving into […]

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'It seems impossible for many Muslims to admit that 'Charlie Hebdo' was not guilty of any crime in publishing caricatures of Mohammed,' writes the artist Riss in his survivor's memoir of the 2015 attack. Rightly, he is especially critical of the 'collabos' who politely turn their gaze from the destruction of free speech and traditional freedoms by Islamic fascism

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That the Sydney Morning Herald once boasted a sane, erudite and balanced editorial writer will strike those who have only known that sad publication in its current and debased manifestation as inconceivable. But once, when adults ruled the editorial floor, just such a man helmed its leader page

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The 'Police Gazette' description of my grandmother is concise: 'About 40 years old, 5 foot 7 inches, medium build, fair complexion and hair: dresses shabbily and is addicted to drink.' God knows what the country girl had been through to arrive in this state. Selina is not the grandmother I expected to find when I started my family searches

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If the impresario is remembered these days, it is for his later career as a producer of 'Neighbours'. But before that he brought heresy to the proscenium arch with his popular and long-running Music Hall plays, which he wrote and produced. Unlike so many others then and now, he grasped the simple fact that theatre is about un-boredom

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The pages of the Argus, advertisements and reportage, represent Australia as a patchwork of colourful but ill-fitting swatches of narrative fabric. The past, in its archived pages, is a chaos from which bits of history are carefully extracted by writers constructing their books and articles. But there is so much more, my forebears' antics amongst them

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Dark Mofo thrives on controversy. In 2016 art students protested when their school was surrounded by poster artworks saying “Your work is shit” and last year, as the ABC reported, one event 'included mock crucifixions set to music, culminating in a frenzied squabble by blood-soaked participants writhing in the entrails from a freshly slaughtered bull'

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