George Munster

A gap of eight years is a big slice in a writer’s life: at the end, a changed man speaks in a different context. Al McCoy’s Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972) and his Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia (1980) have the same publisher and the same villain, but they are very different books. With Politics, an anti-war graduate student dealt a body blow to the CIA f ... (read more)

Bert Kelly has had three careers and one idea. He was a farmer by inheritance and turned himself into an agricultural whiz who could pick flaws in subsidised projects from the Ord River to Kathmandu. He was a federal politician for eighteen years, holding the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wakefield and scraping a couple of ministries under John Gorton. And he has become widely known as a folksy colu ... (read more)

‘In fifty years’ time,’ Robert Haupt and Michelle Grattan write in 31 Days to Power, ‘historians will look at the 1983 elections, see that inflation, unemployment and interest rates were at high levels compared to the past, and conclude that Fraser could never have won’. Anxious to know which of these three economic scourges most assisted Bob Hawke and unable to wait for half a cen ... (read more)