In Australia, stupidity rises, totalitarianism descends. Between them, the judges of the prestigious premiers’ literary awards in Victoria and New South Wales gave prize money of $165,000 to honour a play script in which the central male Aboriginal character is so phoney he confuses European and Australian trees: “We start our walkabout just before the […]

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Did Malcolm Fraser confuse his memories of what was said on the telephone and what took place later at Government House? Sir John Kerr said he did and Fraser insisted his version was correct, so who to believe? Certainly not the latter, a most unreliable source

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Two effeminate young men in dresses prance onto the stage. When the laughter and cheering stop one of them agreeably lisps to the other, “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.” When King James saw The Merchant of Venice in 1605 this is probably what Portia looked and sounded […]

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If Australia’s pre-eminent Aboriginal historian is incapable of reading a wedding certificate dealing with his own family history one can only imagine what fantasies might inform his work. As to his extended speculation about an Indigenous bloodline, why not a DNA test?

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The authorised version of what happened in Canberra on November 11, 1975, was crafted and tirelessly promoted by Labor sympathisers in academia and the press. It is the inspirational story of Gough Whitlam, a great man wronged, and his defiant eloquence. Trouble is, it's just not true

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On the evening of April 8, 1971, some 24 Labor opposition parliamentarians enjoyed a politically seasoned meal in the Soviet embassy. Some 21 months later, when those guests were the government, Attorney-General Lionel Murphy told ASIO to drop its interception of the Soviet embassy’s phones

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Between us, it’s personal. There was a time, I was an admirer. His short stories, of course, and I even enjoyed his novels. That was the problem, I suppose. Sometime in the mid-1990s I chanced upon a copy of Montague Summers’s posthumously published autobiography, The Galanty Show, in the James Cook University library in Townsville. […]

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It would take only small changes to update Goebbels' vision for an upright, uptight BDS audience. The star on the money-lender's chest would not be the familiar yellow one, but a blue Star of David ripped from a flag the thugs have yet to burn. Replace 'Jew' with 'Israeli' and await thunderous applause

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US academic John Greenway first visited Australia in 1955, finding himself enthralled by the country in general and Aborigines in particular. Gloriously opinionated, enthusiastic and entirely admirable, his often grim truths have seen him 'disremembered' for being far too honest

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Espionage story, family story, incredible story -- that's the essence of Victor and Frances Metianen's journey from the cricket-club social scene of suburban Sydney in the 1930s to the dark world of what they believed in their fervent innocence to be Stalin's workers' paradise

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