Mary Durack, 1959 Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles (1959) is also an intensely imaginative piece of non-fiction though its use of fictionalising technique is at an opposite pole to Jeannie Gunn’s in something the same way that Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore has little in [...]

Michael Cathcart (editor), 1989 Sitting down in his flat at Balliol College, Oxford, in October 1938, the drum beat of war growing louder across Europe, a twenty-three year old Manning Clark wrote an impassioned letter to his future wife, Dymphna. I feel certain that I can write [...]

David Kemp, 2021 David Kemp chronicles how an ascendant utopian socialism dragged Australia down, until believers in freedom regrouped and fought back. It is rare to be able to say when a task is 80 per cent complete that it is already a classic, but [...]

Keith Hancock, 1930 In 1930, young historian W.K. Hancock published a book simply titled Australia. During the 90 subsequent years many other Australian historians have sought to explain the country in a single volume. Indeed, a distinctive feature of the national historiography is that so many [...]

Geoffrey Blainey, 1966 Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance is among the most important books ever written about Australia. Through the lens of distance—distance to and distances within Australia—it explains much about our origins, our economy and society, as well as our triumphs and failures. Blainey [...]