Category: History
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Out on 1 May! My New Book, HERE BE MONSTERS: IS TECHNOLOGY REDUCING OUR HUMANITY?
Order your copy here!
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The Wolvadoodles: A Review of Sub-Imperial Power
Of all the recent failures of the Australian mainstream media, the failure to properly report and analyse the trilateral security partnership known as AUKUS must surely qualify as the most pitiable.
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How the sausage is made: A review Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and Schemers
Towards the end of Dreamers and Schemers, his ‘political history of Australia’, Frank Bongiorno tells us that the term ‘democracy sausage’ first entered public discourse in 2012. The date, he suggests, is significant, for while the coinage seemed on one level to speak to the relaxedness and egalitarianism of the Australian electorate, and even to…
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How to secede without really trying: A review of How to Rule Your Own Country
In How to Rule Your Own Country, Harry Hobbs and George Williams consider the phenomenon of micronations, which is to say territorial entities whose members claim independence or sovereignty but which lack diplomatic recognition.
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As Politics Narrows, Divisions Widen (a Note on the Election and the Left)
When Bob Hawke died in 2019, two days before the federal election, many mainstream commentators took the opportunity to remind the prime ministerial hopefuls that in terms of charisma, persuasiveness and popularity they didn’t exactly measure up to the example of the Silver Bodgie.
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Review of Who’s Black and Why?
In 1741, the exalted members of the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences met to consider sixteen essays written in response to the following question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’
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Review of The First Astronomers
‘When profound ideas are introduced to the world for the first time,’ writes Professor Marcia Langton, in her foreword to The First Astronomers, ‘our world is fundamentally changed and the previous understandings consigned to history. There are those who continue to deny the intelligence and scientific traditions of Indigenous people. The idea that the only…
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Review of Harlem Nights, by Deidre O’Connell
‘As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’
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Review of Rogue Forces, by Mark Willacy
The publication of Mark Willacy’s Rogue Forces coincided almost exactly with the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The coincidence was a happy one, no less so for occurring in unhappy circumstances.
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Identity Crisis: Radical Gender Theory and the Left
In his latest series of documentaries Can’t Get You Out of My Head (reviewed by Guy Rundle in Arena Quarterly No. 6), sociologist and filmmaker Adam Curtis focuses on a number of individuals who sit at the uneasy intersection of modern individualism, an increasingly technologised vision of the human mind and human behaviour, and a…