Journal
Articles
An empty house
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are...
Transforming the bush
THESE COWS ARE in no hurry. Each just meanders to the dairy, all rolling hindquarters, swishing tails and loping...
Persephone’s picnic
THE OLD STONE quarry sits in the range high above Ilparpa Valley, on the south side of Alice Springs....
From soft drinks to soft politics
WHAT DOES IT say about a public’s appetite for change when even an iconic brand like Coca-Cola, with a...
On ‘The Seven Stages of Grieving’, by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman
IS IT POSSIBLE to feel too much? For millennia, stories from around the world have had as their explicit...
On ‘Collected Poems’, by Les Murray
A poem…can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief...
Tongues tied about tongue-tie
‘I HOPE WE’RE NOT boring you,’ I say politely to my friend’s husband. (Since boredom isn’t an option for...
On the abolition of Question Time
IN 2014, EIGHTEEN years after Paul Keating lost the prime ministership, a collection of his prize insults appeared in...
Beyond the nadir of political leadership
SHORTLY AFTER SEIZING the prime ministership in September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull told reporters covering their third leadership coup against...
The memory ladder
THERE APPEARS TO be a deep attraction to the naive idea that we can re-create ourselves and our societies...
Need, greed or deeds
AT THE BEGINNING of the First World War, a fifty-something German academic, vigorous but not fit enough for the...
The good old days
Over the last thirty years I have sought to explore how our top political executives exercised their power, whether they were prime ministers, ministers or departmental secretaries. My books include a study of the ways that the Australian Cabinets have changed over the past hundred and fifteen years, and two books on particular prime ministers, one from each side of the political divide. My interest has always been on how they do the job, how they define their responsibilities, what being prime minister means. Perhaps inevitably, when current circumstances are compared to, and placed in the context of, past leaders, it is the continuities rather than the differences that strike me as the most significant.
