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Bridget Griffen Foley

The small picture

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May 2006, no. 281

The Sydney Morning Herald has been ‘Celebrating 175 Years’ all year. The words adorn every front page; the Herald ran a number of commemorative features to mark the actual anniversary on April 18; and The Big Picture: Diary of a Nation, consisting of essays by journalists and photographs from the Herald’s magnificent photographic library, has been published (see John Thompson’s review in the March issue).

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Redneck radio?

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February 2006, no. 278

On Saturday, 3 December 2005, the day after Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore, David Marr contributed a major article, ‘Death of compassion’, to the Sydney Morning Herald’s News Review section. A year earlier, Marr had made a welcome return to the SMH following his spell as host of Media Watch. He is always worth reading: informed by broad interests in the arts, politics and religion, an ongoing commitment to investigative journalism following his years at the National Times, and sometimes by moral outrage, Marr’s writings are some of the most elegant and insightful to grace Australia’s daily press.

This particular Saturday, I finished reading his piece feeling curiously frustrated. Marr explored public reaction to the execution, from the deliberately low-key strategy of the convicted drug runner’s legal team and supporters to the public campaign they ran to save him following his failed appeal for clemency. The article was based on a central premise: ‘roughly half the nation was happy to see him [Nguyen] swing.’ The evidence for this claim? ‘Talkback.’ 

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Best Books of the Year 2005

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December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

To celebrate the best books of 2005 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Morag Fraser, Peter Porter, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Nicholas Jose and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

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Bring on Warnie

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October 2005, no. 275

An Indian fast-food outlet has named itself after Mahatma Gandhi and features a caricature of his face in neon lights. Tacky? Certainly. Only in America? Only in Australia, actually, or at least that’s what a major cable television channel would like to suggest.

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Best Books of the Year 2004

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December 2004–January 2005, no. 267

To celebrate the best books of 2004 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors included Dennis Altman, Brenda Niall, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Morag Fraser and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

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The Murdoch Archipelago by Bruce Page

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November 2003, no. 256
Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews 'The Murdoch Archipelago' by Bruce Page

Rupert Murdoch certainly attracts a good class of biographer. There was George Munster, who contributed so much to Australian politics and culture by helping to establish and edit Nation, and William Shawcross, one of Britain’s most prominent journalists. There were other biographies, too, before the efforts of Bruce Page ...

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Compulsive Viewing by Gerald Stone

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October 2000, no. 225
Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews 'Compulsive Viewing' by Gerald Stone

If Gerald Stone had gone to a publisher with a proposal for a book about Channel Seven or Channel Ten, it is doubtful whether it would ever have seen the light of day. But Stone – who would have endured more than a few pitches in his time as a television executive – had the sense to propose a book about his former employer, Channel Nine, and Compulsive Viewing is the result.

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'Red Ted': The Life of E.G. Theodore by Ross Fitzgerald

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November 1994, no. 166
Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews '"Red Ted": The Life of E.G. Theodore' by Ross Fitzgerald

On the day of the last Federal election, I became engaged in an unlikely conversation with a helper for the ‘Call-to-Australia’ cause at my local polling booth. When I revealed that I had recently completed a research project on Dr H.V. Evatt, my elderly companion asserted that Evatt should not be hailed as the hero of the labour movement. Australia’s greatest politician, this former member of the Australian Labor Party informed me, was ‘Edward Granville Theodore’.

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Doc Evatt: Patriot, Internationalist, Fighter and Scholar by Ken Buckley, Barbara Dale and Wayne Reynolds

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July 1994, no. 162
Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews 'Doc Evatt: Patriot, Internationalist, Fighter and Scholar' by Ken Buckley, Barbara Dale and Wayne Reynolds

In his foreword to Doc Evatt, Jim Hagan claims that this is the fourth full-length biography of Dr. H.V. Evatt and suggests that only one other Australian politician has scored as many. Leaving aside the fact that Allan Dalziel never pretended that his book, Evatt the Enigma, was anything more than a profile of the man he worked with for twenty years, these assertions create the misleading impression that a substantial body of literature on Evatt exists. Academics have long lamented the lack of a comprehensive and scholarly biography of one of Australia’s most important and complex judicial and political figures. The very recent appearance of Peter Crockett’s Evatt: A life, characterised by wide-ranging research but a crude psychoanalytical approach, chronic disorganisation, a weakness in the analysis of international affairs, and a lack of historical perspective, disappointed in many ways.

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