Home

Tag: Australian history

  • John Rowe and the seed of South Australian secession

    This was published in Quadrant Online under the title, ‘You’ll be Sorry When We’re Gone’ – here. In his 1972 novel, McCabe PM, John Rowe tells the story of a maverick Prime Minister from New South Wales Prime whose authoritarian tendencies reach the point where, after South Australia and Western Australia announce their intentions to…

  • Perrottet’s ‘Adelaide card’ in the NSW election

    For the people of South Australia, one point of interest in the upcoming NSW election concerns Dominic Perrottet’s repeated comparisons between Sydney and Adelaide. In Perrottet’s view, Sydney’s greatness is best measured against Adelaide because the South Australian capital leads the country in one respect only – dysfunctionality. His comments to this effect, which include…

  • The sliding scale of Australian boganhood

    There has been some high-brow analysis of Australian boganhood recently. The 2022 compilation of essays, Class in Australia, where writers ‘take class as their analytic focus, bringing empirical and conceptual light to the ways in which class offers a relational and structural understanding of inequality, social and cultural relations, and affective modalities’, includes the essay,…

  • My kingdom for a horse in Australia

    In his new book, The Brothers York: An English Tragedy, Thomas Penn patches over an important detail relating to Edward IV, who reigned from 1461 to 1483. Penn describes Edward as having been the legitimate son of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and his wife Lady Cecily Neville. However, Edward’s legitimacy was a point of…

  • Wouter Looes and Jans Pelgrom: A Dutch Stake in ‘Australia Day’

    Television advertisements in the lead up to Australia Day on 26 January 2017 have been telling the Australian people to celebrate the day “how you want to”. It is an interesting message from the Australian government. A typical Australian reaction to it might be to ask, if now we are to celebrate it how we want…

  • Packing a Punch in Colonial Australia

    With Australian Heritage Week nearly upon us (16 – 24 April), the following is a post concerning a particular perspective of Australian colonial history, being a perspective that can be researched in detail with Gale’s Primary Source Collections. It concerns Australia’s paradoxical relationship with England since 1788, as reflected within the pages of London’s Punch…