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  • The new self-fu*king help books

    A G-rated version of this little article was published in The Spectator Australia – here. The original version, as submitted to The Spectator Australia, is below. In a bookshop at Adelaide airport last Christmas I saw a well-dressed woman, seemingly in her mid-sixties, looking studiously at the front and back covers of a book entitled…

  • Bagging Adelaide

    (My 3AW interview with Tom Elliott about this article can be heard here. The article was published by The Big Smoke under the title, ‘Interstate ribaldry: Why is Adelaide the national punching bag?‘) It’s been a bumper season for bagging Adelaide. The running ‘joke’ in Sydney and Melbourne that South Australia is the pits has…

  • The South Adelaide Football Club Colonial Years: 1876-1900

    This is a chapter for the forthcoming book, The Grand Old Blue & White: 150 years of the South Adelaide Football Club, 1876-2025. It can be downloaded at the tab.

  • Jonathan Swift – evidence that he was involved in a murder in 1724

    Jonathan Swift, privy to a murder? Could the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the champion of the Irish people and the man widely considered the greatest ever prose writer in the English language, have been party to the purposeful killing of another human being, his own printer? This is what I am asserting in an aspect…

  • ‘The death of Swift’s printer John Harding – new evidence that implicates Swift’, Melbourne Irish Studies Seminar Series, 17 November 2020

    With an introduction by Professor Dianne Hall. Zoom presentation accessible here.

  • ”Elegy on the death of John Harding’ (April 1725) – evidence of Swift’s authorship’, presented in the XVII David Nicol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies: Dark Enlightenments, virtual conference, 13 November – 11 December 2020

    Video presentation accessible here.

  • Ode to a patch of MCG turf

    Farewell, we bid thee, piece of turf three metres by one, As thou travelleth up the Hume, the truck that transports thee, we cannot outrun.For as long as the sun has risen in the east, thou hast glistened with morning dew,Now, as thou truckest, may thou receive the care that is thy due.May thou be…

  • The revolution is being televised

    In his 1971 cult classic, ‘The Revolution will not be televised’, Gil Scott-Heron envisions the African-American uprising in a song that oozes power, rhythm and classic African-American cool. ‘You will not be able to stay home, brother,’ he sings in the call-to-arms refrain, ‘because the revolution will not be televised.’ Fifty years on, the revolution…

  • The clear sky of these football-free days

    How good is this break from football? I say that as someone who has followed the game since the age of three and who still thinks it is one of the best spectator sports in the world. But of all the incidental benefits that have stemmed from the coronavirus, is there any more valuable than…

  • High Court sport

    We are approaching a period in which four of the seven judges on the High Court will have to retire. Two reach the mandatory retirement age within the next twelve months, another in October 2022, then the Chief Justice herself in January 2024. Not since the latter half of the 1990’s has there been a…