A MAVERICK MP presents a passionate, moving and unsurprisingly idiosyncratic history of Australia.
As National Party minister for Aboriginal and Islander affairs in Queensland, the flamboyant Bob Katter was extremely well thought of by indigenous Australians. Having become disenchanted with the National Party’s support of ”economic rationalist” policies, Katter has been a popular independent MP since 2001 for the vast federal North Queensland seat of Kennedy and is now leader of Katter’s Australian Party.

As it happens, Katter’s parliamentary office in Canberra features a large version of the cover of my biography …

AUSTRALIA hasn’t traditionally been a country where dynasties have held much sway. Taken to extremes dynastic succession can be problematic – look at North Korea.
This is not to say we don’t have them and one of the best known, particularly if you’re a Victorian, is the Baillieu family. They are obviously cognisant of their own place in the scheme of things because they commissioned this fascinating biography, by Peter Yule, of the person who founded what Yule regards as Australia’s greatest and most diversified business empire.
Born at Queenscliffe, Victoria, in …

AUSTRALIA’S transformation from the Whitlam years onward gets an ambitious, if occasionally uncertain, reappraisal.
Politics is a funny old business. Who would have thought, for example, that one day Malcolm Fraser would be praising Gough Whitlam? According to Fraser, Whitlam had a sense of Australian identity and a bold vision for our future as an independent country. Although Fraser argues that ”a succession of ministers, including Rex Connor, seriously let Gough down”, Whitlam had ”a grand idea of Australia with which I really wouldn’t disagree”.
For this ambitious and often engaging book, …

BORN in London on February 24, 1733, educated at Eton and Clare Hall, Cambridge, and elected unopposed for the family seat of Whitchurch, Tommy Townshend entered the House of Commons when he was just 21.

At 49 he became secretary of state for home affairs with ministerial responsibility for the peace negotiations with the Americans. Although he had expressed some sympathy for the rebellious Americans during their war of independence, as a negotiator he held fast to what he perceived to be British interests, especially in what is now Canada.
Physically beefy …

THEY may not be as lauded as chefs, but architects have helped shape the world we live in. So it’s timely that they have their own encyclopedia, which will help them and their buildings achieve at least a modicum of the sort of fame that the likes of Neil Perry and Matt Moran have achieved for feeding people.
Commissioned by Cambridge University Press, The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture – the first undertaking of its kind in this country – contains more than 1000 entries from 225 contributors, a number of whom …

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 – …