Bob Hawke

Forty years since ‘It’s Time’

Messages for Gough

By Michael Gurr

The moment comes well into the night. Jonathan Biggins is at the lectern. The satirist isn’t joking as he holds up a walking stick and tells us that it has been found in the Ladies’. Would anyone like to claim it? The occasion is the 40th anniversary of Gough Whitlam’s “It’s Time” speech, delivered here in Sydney’s Blacktown Civic Centre on 13 November 1972. There are a fair few

Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard in Retirement

Love thy Leader

By George Megalogenis

A curious feature of our political debate is the way it compels former prime ministers to lose their dignity in the endless feedback loop of the legacy war. The Americans, despite their more openly hostile political culture, treat their ex-leaders with sufficient deference to absolve them of the need for after-the-fact combat. When a memoir is written by a Bush, a Clinton or a Carter, no othe

Life of Brian

By Paul Barry

Burke struck me, during those two off-the-record conversations, as a rather pathetic figure, a man in denial. He seemed to be living in his own little bubble, no longer able to listen to anybody except his supporters. This stunning court victory reveals, though, just why he has stuck so close to friends and family.It’s no secret that Burke and his supporters are adamant he’s never done anything wrong: not when, as premier, he rorted

Frank Sinatra & Bob Hawke

By Shane Maloney

“A funny thing happened in Australia,” Frank Sinatra told a New York audience. “I made a mistake and got off the plane.”The plane in question – the private jet of one of Sinatra’s Las Vegas casino connections – landed in Melbourne on 9 July 1974. Fresh out of self-imposed retirement, the 58-year-old Sinatra was visiting Australia for the first

Forty-three Years at the ABC

Hidden Treasure

By Chris Masters

Despite that dismal episode, I still see the ABC as a national treasure. It can be snobbishly self-important and oafishly bureaucratic. There are a lot of cardigans in those corridors. Managers come and go with the barest understanding of broadcasting, the cen

Hideout

By Mark Aarons

Australians can for the most part be proud of our international reputation for promoting human rights and opposing and punishing those who violate them. Australia is not perfect, but it nevertheless ranks among the world's best nations.Except when it comes to

Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow

By Galarrwuy Yunupingu

My land is that of the Gumatj clan nation, which is carefully defined, with boundaries and borders set out in the maps of our minds and, today, on djurra, or paper. We have our own laws, repeated in ceremonial song cycles and known to all members of our clan nation. Sun

Jung at Heart

By Mungo MacCallum

A seldom-noted characteristic of the Australian political class is that almost all its members - participants, commentators and spectators - are fervent disciples of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung, along with Sigmund Freud, was one of the founders of modern psychology

Old House

By Mungo MacCallum

Kevin Rudd personifies generational change in Australian politics, in part because he is the first prime minister not to have served an apprenticeship in Old Parliament House. Rudd entered parliament a mere ten years ago, and the amazing erection on Capital Hill has rec

Comment

By Mungo MacCallum

On the campaign trail with Maxine McKew

It's Bennelong Time

By Judith Brett

Some Australian examples

Political Courage

By John Hirst

My Australian collection begins early, at Sydney Cove in 1789, the second year of the convict settlement. The nature of this anomalous society is still not well understood. Since the population consisted of convicts and military it is assumed that the military controlle

Waterfront Blues

By John Button

In the classic film On the Waterfront, set in New York, the embittered young watersider Terry Malloy (played by a youthful Marlon Brando) asks an apparently meddlesome priest, "What's your racket?" "I don't have a racket," is the reply. "I'm a priest." "Everybody has a racket," says Malloy.This might have been a shrewd observation about the human condition.

Casey Bennetto’s 'Keating!'

A West Side Story

By Robert Forster

A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide

By Robert Manne

During the exact time Australian troops spent in hell on Gallipoli, another event of world-historical importance was taking place on contiguous ground: the Armenian Genocide. Some contemporary scholars think that during this catastrophe, one million people wer

25 Years of HIV & AIDS

The Margins of Our Attention

By Dennis Altman

Walk the Line

By Mungo MacCallum

King over all the children of prideIs the Press - the Press - the Press!Rudyard KiplingMark Latham's latest work, A Conga Line of Suckholes, takes its tasteful title from one of the author's own more memorable epithets. Boof was referring to Liberal ministers queuing to

The Ghost Gum of Garden City

By Mungo MacCallum

Australia isn't very good at political monuments. We have nothing to compare with the Lincoln Memorial, let alone Mount Rushmore. Our greatest leaders are seldom commemorated by more than a brass plate on the house where they were born, or, in the case of Harold Holt, the beach where he died (there's also that memorial swimming pool, of course). Even the doyen, Sir Robert Menzies, has to make do w