6 days ago · Books, ideas, current affairs and culture from a (mainly) Australian perspective

Dec 9, 2024 · After a distinguished career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Geoff Raby has become a consultant and widely published commentator on the dovish side of the debate about China’s ambitions. His latest book, Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy, a readable and thought-provoking mixture of history and musings on geopolitics, is enlivened by vignettes of ...

Nov 15, 2022 · “T he history I would like to see written would bring into the main flow of its narrative the life and times of men like David Unaipon, Albert Namatjira, Robert Tudawali, Durmugam, Douglas Nicholls, Dexter Daniels, and many others. Not to scrape up significance for them but because they typify so vividly the other side of a story over which the great Australian silence reigns; the story of ...

Nov 22, 2024 · In the old Chief Secretary’s Building, a sandstone relic of colonial New South Wales not far from Circular Quay, an episode in the state’s more recent history is being picked apart. In what is now a venue for judicial inquiries, a succession of retired policemen have testified this year about their role in events forty-five years ago. …

Inside Story is an independent, non-profit magazine featuring analysis, commentary and reporting by leading writers and researchers from Australia and beyond. Editor: Peter Browne Contributing editor: Peter Mares Publisher: Mark Baker Inside Story Publishing Pty Ltd, PO Box 1170, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia • ABN 40 617 195 230 We acknowledge and pay respect to …

Jan 28, 2025 · In the national gloom of Gradgrind schooling policy, South Australia is a flicker of light. The Malinauskas government came to office in 2022 promising a “we’re different” approach to schooling. By the end of that year, after much consulting, reviewing and surveying, it released a …

Jan 28, 2025 · When he was invited to work for Gough Whitlam in September 1967, Race Mathews was thirty-two, a teacher and Education Department speech therapist, married with three children. He’d been active in the Labor Party and served on the local council in the outer-eastern Melbourne suburb of Croydon. As ...

For much if not all of Australia’s history, the foreign ministry has been a place where over-talented cabinet colleagues and defeated leadership rivals can be parked in the hope they find the job an interesting enough distraction from bread-and-butter, vote-winning domestic policies. They might even impress the foreigners too. It is usually a one-way street. In the decades since 1945, Billy ...

Donald Horne, citizen intellectual A compelling biography captures the trajectory of the man who named the lucky country, writes Frank Bongiorno Buckle and strain In probing the shortcomings of George Orwell’s biographers has Anna Funder fallen into traps of her own, asks Patrick Mullins Stolen moments Caught between their home villages and the city, a generation of Chinese migrant workers ...

Nov 4, 2024 · When John Howard announced that Australians were heading for the polls in late 2007 I was in my second year as editor of the Canberra Times. I had been hired when the paper was the flagship of Rural Press, the regional and rural publishing house built by John Brehmer Fairfax — great, great grandson of the founder of the family newspaper empire. The company would soon merge with John Fairfax ...