This fascinating study canvasses four generations of an extended family of Jewish atheists and committed communists who challenged the “established order” in Australia and overseas.
The book’s author, Mark Aarons, came under the “adverse notice” of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in early 1965 when he was only 13, while his father’s ASIO files began when he was 14, in the early 1930s. Indeed, one of the great strengths of The Family File is the extensive use made of the detailed reports of the many ASIO agents who successfully infiltrated the …

Colonial Australia was a dumping ground for activists who fought for the freedoms that we take for granted today.
This concisely written, effectively illustrated “history from below” focuses on all those rebels and political malcontents banished by British authorities to the ends of the earth in the Antipodes.
Death or Liberty: Rebel Exiles Transported to Australia 1788-1868 usefully adopts the historiographical approach of the leading 20th-century scholars E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude to understand and elucidate the forces producing rebellion in the mother country. As Moore explains, studies by these …

RADICAL Sydney is primarily about remembering and restoring some of the most radical and unruly elements to the history of Australia’s largest and most demographically diverse city.
As the introduction to this superbly illustrated book explains, it discovers “the street corners where they spoke, their union offices and lecture halls, the pubs and cafes in which they socialised”, and so much more.
A pivotal chapter concerns Australia’s famous short-story writer and poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922) and his mother, Louisa Lawson, one of this nation’s most important feminist authors and longstanding editor …

JAMES Walter, who co-edited with Brian Heads the 1988 study Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, has produced a valuable account of the politics of ideas in Australia. Walter, professor of political science at Monash University, argues at the outset that in endeavouring to understand politics, “nothing is more important . . . than recognising that it deals in ideas”.
This is the fundamental thesis of What were They Thinking? It is an argument that Walter and his research assistant Tod Moore (who wrote two key chapters) advance with skill and clarity. …

Timed to coincide with the 95th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign, this third edition of THE ANZAC BOOK features a reproduction of the original manuscript first published in 1916, as well as a very fine foreword by the distinguished military historian, Les Carlyon.
Superbly illustrated, it also contains intriguing and highly moving material originally excluded by the original editor, the official war correspondent Charles Bean, but carefully and lovingly preserved in the collections of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
A fascinating feature of this edition is a thoughtful introduction by Ashley …

How rare is it that two equally fine books appear at roughly the same time about the same, or similar, topics?
2008 saw the publication of Chloe Hooper’s remarkable non-fiction novel THE TALL MAN. This award-winning work deals with the death on 19 November 2004 of a 36 year old Palm Island man, Cameron Mulrunji Doomadgee, who swore at a policeman, Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley – then 33 years old, weighing 115 kilograms and 200 centimetres (6 feet and 7 inches) tall. Forty-five minutes later, Doomadgee was found dead in a …