Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)