Cirrus@Austlit

'A biographer explores the impact of biographies of living politicians' 

'Frank Moorhouse was a complicated man. His writing pushed the boundaries of postwar bourgeois morality, as did his life with his many and varied lovers and his determined refusal of domesticity. Yet he was fascinated by social etiquette and the rituals of bureaucratic and democratic political life. When does the pursuit of pleasure collapse into social chaos, and when do order and rules become repressive? These are the key questions Catharine Lumby threads through her very readable telling of Moorhouse’s long and productive life.' (Introduction)   

'It is very gratifying to have Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People included in History Australia’s Landmarks series, and I thank the editors for the honour and Sybil Nolan for her thoughtful discussion of the book and its reception. I thank her too for publishing a second edition in 2007 with Melbourne University Press which has kept the book in print. I wrote a long introduction to this second edition, in which I reflected on the book’s origins in a course I was teaching on political parties at the University of Melbourne in 1980. Back then, I was looking for readings on the Liberal Party – its history, what it stood for and the reasons for its electoral success. Everything I found was from the left, describing the party as a vehicle for capital and the ruling class. I wanted something from inside, which captured the party’s self-understandings, when I found a copy of Menzies’ 1942 radio broadcast, ‘The Forgotten People’, in the basement of the Baillieu Library. I had just finished my PhD on the fin-de-siècle Austrian writer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which used a close reading of Hofmannsthal’s writing to develop a psycho-biographical argument about his transition from a gifted young lyric poet to Richard Strauss’s librettist. I was good at close reading, and I started to apply my skill to Menzies’ broadcast, mostly to the ‘Forgotten People’ broadcast itself but also to other of his writing, including his occasional verse.'  (Publication abstract)

'James Scullin and John Curtin were both Labor Prime Ministers at times of national crises. Scullin led Labor to electoral victory in October 1929. Prime Minister Bruce had called an early election after he was unable to pass legislation to streamline Australia’s arbitration system. Less than two weeks later, Wall Street crashed and Scullin had to manage the ensuing Depression. Curtin became Prime Minister after the Coalition government fell on the floor of the house in October 1941. Two months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. Scullin’s government was torn apart by the conflicting demands of labour and capital, whereas Curtin’s government successfully mobilised the country for war. Where Curtin’s achievements have been lauded and intensely researched, Scullin has been seen as a tragic figure and has attracted little historical interest. This book remedies this somewhat, bringing him into the same frame as Curtin to explore their shared political formations in the early labour movement.'  (Introduction)

'This book is about two brilliant boys. The first is the gifted and driven Bert or Doc Evatt. Of lower- middle-class origins, he went to Sydney’s Fort Street Boys’ High and on to law at Sydney University, winning prizes and scholarships all the way. Evatt shone at the Sydney bar in the early 1920s before entering the New South Wales parliament for Labor when Jack Lang was premier. Like his friend, Vere Gordon Childe, Evatt was a Labor intellectual – a difficult position in the party of the workers – but he established his credentials when he successfully prevented the Bruce government’s deportation of two union organisers, Tom Walsh and Jacob Johnson of the Seamen’s Union. Although born overseas, both were long-time Australian residents and Evatt argued successfully before the High Court that they were beyond the reach of the Immigration Act.' (Introduction)

'A brilliant collection of the best essays by award-winning writer Judith Brett, long revered by those in the know as Australia's brightest and most astute political commentator.

'Since the 1980s Judith Brett has been helping to shape Australians' conversations about politics, bringing a historian's eye to contemporary issues and probing the psychology of our prime ministers. Her writings about Liberal Party leaders have been widely influential, especially her famous 1984 essay 'Robert Menzies' Forgotten People' and her prize-winning book of the same name, as well as her analysis of John Howard's nationalism.

'She has interrogated some our most perplexing issues- multiculturalism, the politics of rural Australia, the republic, mining and climate change, our electoral traditions, the way ordinary people do politics, the decline of universities. Always she writes as a citizen for her fellow citizens, in her distinctive voice- probing, accessible and wry.

'Doing Politics brings together the finest essays by the author of The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage and the Quarterly Essay 'The Coal Curse'.' (Publication summary)

'Why didn’t the federal government increase funding for the National Archives of Australia in its recent budget?' 

'Vera Deakin was Alfred and Pattie Deakin’s third and youngest daughter. Born on Christmas Day 1891 as Melbourne slid into depression, she grew up in a political household, well aware of her father’s dedication to the service of the Australian nation, not only in the Federation movement but later as attorney-general and three times as prime minister.' (Introduction)

'Malcolm Turnbull looks us straight in the eye from the cover of this handsome book, with just a hint of a smile. He looks calm, healthy, and confident; if there are scars from his loss of the prime ministership in August 2018, they don’t show. The book’s voice is the engaging one we heard when Turnbull challenged Tony Abbott in July 2015 and promised a style of leadership that respected people’s intelligence. He takes us from his childhood in a very unhappy marriage, through school and university, his astonishing successes in media, business, and the law, his entry into politics as the member for Wentworth, and ends with his exit from parliament.'  (Introduction)

'A young George Seddon smiles boyishly from the cover of his Selected Writings, a mid-twentieth-century nerd with short back and sides and horn-rimmed glasses. This collection of Seddon’s writings on landscape, place, and the environment is the third in the series on Australian thinkers published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. The other two, Hugh Stretton and Donald Horne, were also on mid-century men. Born in the 1920s and reaching their intellectual adulthood in the expansive years after World War II, these three were all of wide and eclectic learning. They taught in universities, participated in public debates, and engaged with governments in the making of informed public policy in the areas in which they had special knowledge and interest: Stretton with economics, housing, and urban planning; Horne with citizenship and the arts; and Seddon with environmental policy. Their politics were formed before the rise of neoliberalism, and they shared a social democrat’s faith in the capacity of governments to solve problems. They were also confident in their autonomy as public intellectuals, inhabiting a very different academy from the audit-driven universities of today, where publication in prestigious international journals reaps more points than sustained engagement with one’s fellow citizens on matters of shared concern.' (Introduction)

'Six authors nominated for the National Biography awards reveal what most surprised them about their subjects.' (Publication abstract)

'This insightful and accessible new biography of Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister, shines fresh light on one of the nation’s most significant figures. It brings out from behind the image of a worthy, bearded father of federation the gifted, passionate and intriguing man whose contributions continue to shape the contours of Australian politics.

'The acclaimed political scientist Judith Brett scrutinises both Deakin’s public life and his inner life. Deakin’s private papers reveal a solitary, religious character who found distasteful much of the business of politics, with its unabashed self-interest, double-dealing, and mediocre intellectual levels. And yet politics is where Deakin chose to do his life’s work.

'Destined to become a classic of biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin is a masterly portrait of a complex man who was instrumental in creating modern Australia.' (Publication Summary)

'Judith Brett reviews Heather Henderson’s collection of letters from her father, Robert Menzies'

'Once the country believed itself to be the true face of Australia: sunburnt men and capable women raising crops and children, enduring isolation and a fickle environment, carrying the nation on their sturdy backs. For almost 200 years after white settlement began, city Australia needed the country: to feed it, to earn its export income, to fill the empty land, to provide it with distinctive images of the nation being built in the great south land. But Australia no longer rides on the sheep's back, and since the 1980s, when "economic rationalism" became the new creed, the country has felt abandoned, its contribution to the nation dismissed, its historic purpose forgotten.

In Fair Share, Judith Brett argues that our federation was built on the idea of a big country and a fair share, no matter where one lived. We also looked to the bush for our legends and we still look to it for our food. These are not things we can just abandon. In late 2010, with the country independents deciding who would form federal government, it seemed that rural and regional Australia's time had come again. But, as Murray-Darling water reform shows, the politics of dependence are complicated. The question remains: what will be the fate of the country in an era of user-pays, water cutbacks, climate change, droughts and flooding rains? What are the prospects for a new compact between country and city in Australia in the twenty-first century?' Source: www.quarterlyessay.com/ (Sighted 21/07/2011).