Jon Piccini Jon Piccini i(A149966 works by) (a.k.a. John Piccini)
Gender: Male
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 (Review) Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen-Murray Smith of Overland Jon Piccini , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 47 no. 1 2023; (p. 228-230)

— Review of Emperors in Lilliput : Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland Jim Davidson , 2022 single work biography

'Overland and Meanjin, Australia’s longest-running literary journals, have already been chronicled in a depth befitting their statuses, and that of their venerable foundation editors, Stephen Murray-Smith (1922–1988) and Clem Christesen (1911–2003): Meanjin in the form of a (semi)approved history, Just City and Mirrors by Lynne Stahan, and Overland thanks in large part to the accumulated efforts of former editor John McLaren.'  (Introduction)

1 Review of Coming of Age in the War on Terror Jon Piccini , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 46 no. 4 2022; (p. 540-542)

— Review of Coming of Age in the War on Terror Randa Abdel-Fattah , 2021 multi chapter work criticism

'Students entering Australian universities today have lived their entire lives in the War on Terror (WOT). Declared in September 2001, following attacks on the US mainland by militant Islamist terrorists that claimed over 3,000 lives, the WOT is defined by both its conceptual vagueness—as American commentator Michael Moore has asked, how can you wage war on an emotion?—and temporal fluidity. US Vise President Dick Cheney famously declared: “It [the WOT] is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.” If earlier conflicts had been total—mobilising a nation’s manpower and resources—the WOT would be forever.' (Introduction)

1 [Review] Democratic Adventurer : Graham Berry and the Making of Australian Politics Jon Piccini , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 53 no. 1 2022; (p. 172-173)

'In Democratic Adventurer, Sean Scalmer seeks to do two things. One is to save from posterity’s condescension the Victorian colonial politician Graham Berry – draper, shopkeeper, editor, Member of Parliament, cabinet minister and Premier – ‘the most important and influential reformer of a dauntless reforming age’ (xi). Secondly, and somewhat more ambitiously, he seeks to use Berry to ‘explore the workings of political power: the quest for position and influence, the methods through which authority is accumulated and exercised’ (xii). Aping the work of the great Robert Caro, biographer of Lyndon Johnson, Scalmer wants to use the story of one man to explore the history of Australian politics, and hint at where it might have gone wrong along the way.' (Introduction)

1 Reading Humphrey McQueen's A New Britannia in Decolonial Time Jon Piccini , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Overland , Spring no. 244 2021; (p. 12-19)

'There are books that, without you even knowing it, have shaped who you are as a thinker. I was reminded of as much on re-reading Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia: An argument concerning the social origins of Australian radicalism and nationalism. First published in 1970, my well-thumbed third edition from 1986 had been picked up at a second-hand store to replace an earlier fourth edition published in 2004 and now yellowing on some long-lost acquaintance’s bookshelf.' (Introduction)

1 An Endless Tussle with the Past :Two Different Readings of the Palace Letters Jon Piccini , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , January–February no. 428 2021; (p. 9-10)

— Review of The Palace Letters Jenny Hocking , 2020 single work prose biography
'In April 2011, the landmark High Court victory of four elderly Kenyans revealed a dark episode in British colonial history. Between 1952 and 1960, barbaric practices, including forced removal and torture, were widely employed against ‘Mau Mau’ rebels, real or imagined. Upon the granting of independence in 1963, thousands of files documenting such atrocities were ‘retained’ by the British authorities, eventually coming to rest in the vast, secret Foreign and Commonwealth Office archives at Hanslope Park. Now a small portion of that archive was opened to scrutiny, and a tiny ray of light shone on one of history’s greatest cover-ups.' (Introduction)
1 y separately published work icon A Tussle with the Past : Jon Piccini on Two New Books Interrogating the Palace Letters Jon Piccini (presenter), 2020 23440109 2020 single work podcast
1 'Green Shirt Just Visible' : A Restless Marxist and Archaeologist Jon Piccini , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 423 2020; (p. 26-27)

— Review of The Fatal Lure of Politics : The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe Terry Irving , 2020 single work biography
'A young Australian radical, who finds academic success later in life, struggles with an inexorable question: what is the relationship between these two worlds — the activist and the scholar? This question animated the life of Vere Gordon Childe, the Australian Marxist and intellectual whose The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) helped establish modern archaeology, as it has his most recent biographer, activist and labour historian Terry Irving, whose Class Structure in Australian History (1981, with Raewyn Connell) remains a key text.' (Introduction) 
 
1 [Review Essay] Dissent : The Student Press in 1960s Australia Jon Piccini , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Politics and History , March vol. 65 no. 1 2019; (p. 144-145)

'Australia never proved fertile territory for the notorious “underground” newspapers of the United States and Europe in the “long” 1960s: from Texas’ Rag to the Berkley Barb, London’s Black Dwarf and Paris’ Tout. Instead, Australia’s young radicals appropriated often quite staid campus newspapers and transformed them into means of political and cultural agitation. Sally Percival Wood’s Dissent does a splendid job in bringing these publications to light, demonstrating their roles in pushing envelopes in areas like censorship, sex, the Vietnam war, women’s and Indigenous rights as the nation grappled with a crisis of post‐colonial identity.' (Introduction)

1 [Review Essay] The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero Jon Piccini , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Politics and History , September vol. 63 no. 3 2017; (p. 474-475)

'James Colman makes clear in the opening pages of this new work on the life of Australian unionist and conservationist Jack Mundey that what follows is not a “Life of Mundey”. Instead Coleman’s book, published with the assistance of the City of Sydney’s History Publication Sponsorship Program and the former Communist Party of Australia’s Search Foundation, pays “tribute” to Mundey’s contribution to the emergence of heritage consciousness and legislation in New South Wales.'  (Introduction)

1 Indigenous Activism in a Global Frame Jon Piccini , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 13 no. 1 2016; (p. 180-181)
'Blackfella Films/SBS’s Black Panther Woman (directed by Rachel Perkins) provides a fine portrait of its protagonist, Marlene Cummins, as well as an at times fascinating, frustrating, sad and inspiring tale of the interconnections of global ideas, local activism and ingrained misogyny, making a significant contribution to a field with relatively little scholarly engagement.' (Introduction)
1 [Review] The Aboriginal Tent Embassy : Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State Jon Piccini , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , February vol. 40 no. 1 2016; (p. 120-121)

— Review of The Aboriginal Tent Embassy : Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State 2013 single work criticism
1 Untitled Jon Piccini , 2012 single work review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , June vol. 36 no. 2 2012; (p. 258-259)

— Review of Australians in Britain : The Twentieth Century Experience 2009 anthology criticism
X