The first boat in Australian history with asylum seekers on board reached our northern coastline in April 1976. Over the next 34 years a further 24,000 boatpeople, as they came to be called, arrived. One of the most intriguing and puzzling questions of …

In the history of Australian politics there has never been a collapse as dramatic, unexpected and unnecessary as the one experienced by Kevin Rudd during the past two months. Those who have been supporters of the prime minister and his government must …

Tony Judt’s 'Ill Fares the Land'

In 2010, Manne hoped Abbott would exit early

Over 200 years ago human beings began burning large quantities of the coal, oil and natural gas that had been buried under the Earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. This may eventually come to be seen as the most fatal misstep in the history …

Late last year, to a strangely muffled fanfare from his friends, the third volume of Keith Windschuttle’s self-published magnum opus, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, appeared. Its subject is the stolen generations. Windschuttle must …

Paul Keating and John Howard were early players in what Australians have come to call the History Wars, whose main field of battle is the bitter and still unresolved cultural struggle over the nature of the Indigenous dispossession and the place it should …

Paul Kelly’s ‘The March of Patriots’

John Howard appeared to be a practical and commonsensical man of affairs. In reality, he was not only an unusually ideological prime minister but also, according to an entirely accurate self-estimation, the most conservative leader in the history of Australia. …

The Victorian bushfires and the royal commission

The Labor government of James Scullin was elected in October 1929, the month of the Wall Street crash, which history regards as the beginning of the Great Depression. In November 2007, the Labor government of Kevin Rudd was elected ten months before the …

Introduction

The response to the Prime Minister’s essay

Before he became the Labor leader in late 2006, I held in my mind three wildly contradictory images of Kevin Rudd. In the first - derived from the memorably scurrilous portrait in The Latham Diaries - Rudd was a media-obsessed, vaultingly ambitious, duplicitous …

An Exchange on Australian anticommunism and the Indonesian massacre of 1965-6 between Gerard Henderson and Robert Manne