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  • An inquiry into the death of Swift’s printer, John Harding:

    Part 1: evidence through to August 1725 The full-length paper can be freely accessed as a PDF at the ‘Download’ tab below.

  • Australia needs the more authentic Albo

    The personal and political transformation of Anthony Albanese since he came to office in May has been something to behold. On the personal level, he has shaken off his lowly-born tags like few before him. The tough western Sydney teenager now has the appearance of a learned Cambridge don. Then, politically, he has shown a…

  • Is Angus Houston too close to China?

    My interview about this article with Alan Jones on ADH TV on 14 September 2022 can be accessed here – the interview begins at 28:40 on the programme. And a follow-up by Alan in the opening of his show the next night is here). On Wednesday 3 August the Albanese government announced that a review…

  • What does China know about MH370?

    Australia deserves some credit for its role in the search for MH370. It was a flight connected with the interests of China more than any other country, in that its intended destination was Beijing, it first met with trouble whilst over the militarised South China Sea, and of the 239 passengers and crew who lost…

  • An alternative South Australian perspective

    An edited version of this article was published on Flat White – here. The Flat White article, ‘A South Australian perspective’, written by Ross Eastcoast, will win him plenty of admirers in Sydney and Melbourne. Of all of the articles written by journalists who seek popularity by slipping a boot into Adelaide or South Australia,…

  • Evidence that Swift’s Drapier’s Letters were prepared by Sarah Harding, not John Harding

    This paper was published in Notes & Queries on 3 November 2023. Swift’s Drapier’s Letters all state on their title pages that they were ‘Printed by John Harding of Molesworth’s Court’ but new evidence shows that the actual printing work was performed by Harding’s wife, Sarah. Continued in Notes & Queries.

  • 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…