Melbourne University Press

By the end of April 2020, more than 600,000 Australians had lost their jobs as the economy was locked down in response to the emerging Covid-19 crisis. Images of long lines queuing outside Centrelink offices inspired despondent think pieces and tweets. Here was proof of what had become of Australia’s welfare state – not quite dead but hollowed to a shell after decades of retrenchment and privatisation driven by a neo-liberal ideology embraced by both major political parties. Amid a national shutdown, the social security net appeared to have been cut to shreds.

Jenny Macklin was an unusual politician, so it should not surprise that hers is an unusual political memoir. Anyone looking to Making Progress for salacious tales from the internecine warfare of the Rudd-Gillard Government, in which Macklin was a senior minister, will be disappointed. Macklin is widely regarded as the most serious policy thinker among her generation of Labor politicians, and this account of her career, written in collaboration with Joel Deane, will only enhance that reputation. It is a book for policy wonks, and one that is perfectly timed to remind readers that, for all the sound and fury of the recent election campaign, government is a serious business.

Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.

In his 1928 collection of poems, Odd Jobs, Ernest ‘Kodak’ O’Ferrall caricatures recitation as an onerous entertainment that has passed its use by date:

John Tregenza’s 1963 study of Australian Little Magazines noted that neither Meanjin nor its near-contemporary Southerly could be characterised as ‘little’, unlike their predecessors and earlier selves. No longer solely dependent on subscription income from a small local band of devotees, both had attracted a wide following. Indeed on transferring his journal from Brisbane to the University of Melbourne in 1945, Meanjin’s Clem Christesen claimed that it had become ‘a well-established quarterly ... with a circulation of 4,000 copies per issue’.

Australian liberals and the Liberal Party were once thought laggards in attending to their own history in comparison with the Labor Party. Even so, Robert Menzies’ life and career had been well documented, with multiple biographies and memoirs, including Allan Martin’s masterful two-volume biography (1993-99) and Judith Brett’s influential analysis of Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ speech as a key to understanding the ‘public life’ (1992). More recently, liberal political history has become a cottage industry.

The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.

Imagine the uproar if Nick Daicos left Collingwood tomorrow, seduced by a huge financial offer from a rival Australian football competition. Imagine if the reigning Brownlow Medallist, Patrick Cripps, followed suit, then Christian Petracca and Charlie Curnow and more. Chaos would ensue.

In this important book, Colin Golvan – a distinguished senior counsel – recounts some of the most notorious cases of copyright abuses endured by Indigenous artists, their work taken without permission, attribution, or adequate compensation and used on objects ranging from souvenir T-shirts to expensive carpets. An intellectual property barrister, Golvan leads us through the intricacies of these cases with lawyerly precision and poise, championing the role of copyright in bringing justice to Indigenous people.

Mark Raphael Baker started writing this memoir on his first night in hospital after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2022. His wife, Kerryn, had died of a rare gastric cancer seven years before. His brother, Johnny, died of oesophageal cancer just two years after Kerryn. He is also reckoning with the death of his elderly father. The emotional intensity of these losses is the foundation of A Season of Death. ‘Three graves in five years,’ Baker writes. ‘While no number of deaths could make me indifferent to what awaits me, watching a sequence of deaths in the family has made me more prepared. I feel as though I have been trained or mentored in the art of dying.’