ALEX Mitchell began his journalistic career as a cadet reporter on the Townsville Daily Bulletin. After working at the Mount Isa Mail, Mitchell joined Rupert Murdoch’s tearaway tabloid The Daily Mirror, first in Sydney and then in the Canberra press gallery in 1964. This was a time when competition with rival The Sun, owned by the Fairfax family, was at its fiercest.
As this insightful and racy memoir makes clear, not only was Murdoch a hands-on proprietor but he was, for a time, quite radical and reformist in his views – …

THE irrepressible Mungo MacCallum has for decades been one of our most entertaining political journalists. This breezy book is vintage Mungo, although one can’t help noticing it contains neither footnotes nor an index.
Researching his subjects, MacCallum has leaned heavily on The Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian Prime Ministers, edited by Michelle Grattan, and Colin Hughes’s much earlier book Mr Prime Minister. He has filled in the gaps, often via news reports and what he loosely terms as “anecdotes”, of which he has a stash.
Since Australia became a nation in 1901, …

IN the modern age, autobiography is a strange and wonderful genre. Or should we be talking memoir here? I refer to the unexpurgated recollections of H.G. Nelson (aka Greig Pickhaver), which, rather like the ”autobiography” of Dame Edna Everage, is supposedly penned by the writer’s alter ego.
Intriguingly, unlike Barry Humphries’s hugely successful and ever-evolving creation, in My Life in Shorts the real person behind the comic character doesn’t crack a mention. This is consistent with the character but also a bit frustrating.
Never mind. As for the veracity of it all, …

WE pride ourselves on being the land of a fair go, a more egalitarian society than those of the old world of Europe and elsewhere.
But is this true? Peter Hartcher’s new book has something to say about all this and the subtitle contains a warning: ‘How Australia Made Its Own Luck – And Could Now Throw It All Away’.
After reading ‘The Sweet Spot’ I’m still unsure that we are or ever have been a land of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Also I am far from convinced by Hartcher’s championing of Adam Smith. In his 1776 work ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and …

WHEN I was six, my teetotal father Bill Fitzgerald, who for years had played in the ruck for Collingwood seconds, took me to see the 1950 Caulfield Cup. It was my first day at the races.
After walking from our deeply suburban home in nearby East Brighton, we positioned ourselves on the cheapest part of the racecourse, known as the Flat. On Dad’s urging, I had two bob each way on the favourite, Grey Boots, with a gnarled old bookmaker who scribbled down some hieroglyphics that looked to me indecipherable.
Ridden by …

TO a certain degree this lovingly one-sided book is an attempt to set the record straight as far as Sue Pieters-Hawke, the eldest daughter of Bob and Hazel Hawke, is concerned.
With that in mind I suppose it’s no surprise that neither Bob Hawke nor his second wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, were interviewed for the book; that no photograph of d’Alpuget appears; and that the final chapter is titled My Mother, My Hero.
This means this biography, written with the assistance of Hazel Flynn, is much closer to hagiography than to objective analysis …