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Frank Bongiorno

Acts of community

by Sarah Holland-Batt et al.
May 2025, no. 475

When I think of Peter Rose’s legacy and his immense contributions to Australian letters as Editor of Australian Book Review, there are manifold achievements I might highlight. Peter has wholly transformed the magazine’s ambitions and horizons over his tenure, elevating ABR into an indispensable, world-class publication offering outstanding commentary, criticism, creative work, and coverage of the performing arts. He has shaped the national conversation in infinite ways, offering our best minds scope to debate the pressing issues of our times in complex, nuanced exchanges that are vanishingly rare elsewhere. He has served as a distinguished and tireless public advocate for the value of criticism, the arts, and the humanities, and has done so much to advocate for writers and writing, building prizes, fellowships, and other initiatives that continue to create vital opportunities and recognition for writers today. More quietly but no less diligently, he has also worked tirelessly to protect and preserve ABR as a jewel of Australian literature for generations to come.

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Letters – May 2025

by Wilfrid Prest et al.
May 2025, no. 475

The Wakefield Companion

Dear Editor,

Bob Ellis’s disappointment with the new edition of The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History, reviewed by Frank Bongiorno (ABR, April 2025), is naturally disappointing to me as general editor. But in justice to the contributors, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, his claim that our work deals largely with ‘European items of interest and Eastern European [sic] artists’ is simply puzzling. This especially when the first eleven articles range from ‘Aboriginal −European Frontier Conflict’ through ‘Aboriginal Histories’ and ‘Aboriginal Land Rights’ (including a whole paragraph on native title) to ‘Aborigines Protection Board’. 

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The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History announced itself in 2001 as ‘a landmark publication, the first such work of reference for any Australian state or territory’. This new edition, which adds entries, updates others, and lands with a thump at almost 200 pages more than the previous volume, is especially timely in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which magnified awareness of the differences between the histories and cultures of the Australian states.

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William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world (Bloomsbury, reviewed in ABR, 10/24) explores the ways in which India shaped the ancient (and by extension modern) world. This expansive work is brilliantly readable. I enjoyed it so much that I downloaded the recorded version, which Dalrymple himself narrates. This I have listened to twice. Dalrymple challenges the Western-centric view of history and highlights India’s under-appreciated impact on Asian and Western cultural and economic developments. My second selection is almost a diametrical opposite: a slim book written in incredible haste. Gideon Haigh’s My Brother Jaz (MUP) is an exploration of grief, guilt, remorse, and survival. In January 2024, Haigh impulsively and, one imagines, frenetically began writing about the night his seventeen-year-old brother Jasper was killed. He finished seventy-two hours later. My Brother Jaz is unflinching, painful, and anguished. It is also a remarkable exploration of what it means to go on, to live, to reconcile and remember. ... (read more)

Raimond Gaita is quoted in his close friend Robert Manne’s new memoir as saying that a ‘dispassionate judgement is not one which is uninformed by feeling, but one which is undistorted by feeling’. That distinction points to one of the many attractive qualities of A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars.

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It is a sign of the times that A Better Australia: Politics, public policy and how to achieve lasting reform begins with a discussion of climate and energy policy. No policy field better illustrates the deficiencies in Australia’s politics over the past generation. It is a tale, as one of the book’s authors, John Brumby, reminds us, of avoidable failure and lost opportunities, as the issue was subjected to the narrower, more immediate incentives offered by partisanship and opportunism.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Frank Bongiorno assesses the Albanese government, which has recently completed the first half of its first term in office. Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University, President of the Australian Historical Association, and the author of books including Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia. Listen to Frank Bongiorno’s ‘‘‘Thin labourism” How is the Albanese government travelling?’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.

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Frank Bongiorno is a historian based at the Australian National University in Canberra. His most recent book, Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia, won the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Non-fiction, ACT Book of the Year, and the Henry Mayer Book Prize. He is president of the Australian Historical Association and the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

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Read the advances from the advances from the March 2024 issue of ABR.

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