Historians

Elisabeth Badinter’s 'The Conflict: Woman and Mother'

Children’s Lib

By Anne Manne

The sixteenth-century essayist, Michel de Montaigne, was sent away at birth from his aristocratic father’s house to a poor peasant wet nurse in the French countryside. In the custom of that time he was brought back into the household at about three years of age, with his parents as strangers to him. Yet little Michel was lucky to survive, for the death rate of children sent out to nurse was

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

'Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now' Art Gallery of South Australia

By Terry Smith

Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now is another instalment in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s effort to re-badge itself as a contemporary art space. Already this year audiences have been treated to strong shows by Tracey Moffatt and Patricia Piccinini, both original and provocative Australian artists. Last year only three out of eight temporary exhibitions were devoted to colonial Australia and European old masters – th

Peter Robb’s 'Street Fight in Naples: A Book of Art and Insurrection'

Shadow Play

By Sebastian Smee

The first time I read Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily was also the first time I travelled around Sicily. The first and only. I remember at the time feeling terribly nervous about displaying the book in public. Robb’s portrait of Mafia activities in the ’80s and ’90s was so nerve-racking, so coolly damning, that I felt sure it must have earned him a p

Delia Falconer’s 'Sydney'

Under the Bridge

By Drusilla Modjeska

Returning to Sydney can be an ambivalent experience. And it was for me, this winter, after three months in London. Ducks were swimming on Snails Bay, near where I live in Balmain, and the wattle was out in the newly planted Ballast Point Park. The winter light

Yann Martel's 'Beatrice and Virgil'

End of History

By Inga Clendinnen

Not many people had heard of Yann Martel, the implausibly named Canadian novelist, before he won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for an implausible tale about an Indian boy marooned in a lifeboat with a Royal Bengal tiger travelling under the name of Richard Parker.

Keith Windschuttle

Comment

By Robert Manne

Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the

Recent Australian History Writing

Genesis

By Alan Atkinson

Australian history writing is on the move. For a long time, the stories of our origins were completely subordinate to our history as a whole, particularly the long legacy of Aboriginal dispossession. But our historians are beginning to recognise that origins i

Keith Windschuttle and Robert Edgerton: a comparison of texts

By Robert Manne

James Boyce’s ‘Van Diemen’s Land’

Before Little England

By Nicholas Shakespeare

The Official History

Australia

By John Hirst

Howard adopted narrative history as part of his political program in a speech on Australia Day 2006, when he attacked the current practice of history teaching in schools. He wanted students to be offered a "structured narrative" instead of "a fragmented stew o

The paradox of art and creative writing

Lies that Tell the Truth

By Simon Leys

Sven Lindqvist’s 'Terra Nullius' & Louis Nowra’s 'Bad Dreaming'

The Lost Enchanted World

By Robert Manne

I am an enthusiastic, although not unqualified, admirer of Sven Lindqvist's Exterminate All the Brutes, a book whose title best explains its theme. When he was a boy in postwar Sweden, Lindqvist read Heart of Darkness. He interpreted Kurtz's deranged annotation at the conclusion of his report on colonialism and the civilising process - "exterminate all the b

Norman Mailer’s 'The Castle in the Forest'

Lost in the Woods

By Inga Clendinnen

Lately I have been pursuing novelists who seem to think they are writing near-enough history, when in fact they are making it up. Now two heavyweights have slipped into the ring: Nobel-winner JM Coetzee, and the long-time champ of the American Middleweight Literary Division, Norman ‘Maler-Than-Thou' Mailer. This is how Coetzee opens his New York Review of Books review of Mailer's most recent nov

The Strange History of Manning Clark

Being There

By Mark McKenna

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

The Best Australian History Books

The First XI

By John Hirst

Gods of War and Rain

By Ashley Hay

In a cavernous hall of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, things are in a state of disarray. Curators stride past with rolls of tissue paper and soft material, and strong-armed blokes lift large paintings down from the walls. An exhibition is being taken down; behind a partition at the back of the room, the next show sits packed and padded in its boxes.At its centre are 350 objects gath