TOWARDS the end of fifth form, after I had devoured The Communist Manifesto and endeavoured to understand Das Kapital, I tried, unsuccessfully, to join the Communist Party of Australia. Along with my fellow student at Melbourne Boys High School, Alan Piper (with whom I had played cricket for the Victorian schoolboys team and who later became a multi-millionaire Brisbane car dealer) I met a CPA organiser outside the Bryant & May match factory in Richmond, near Melbourne High.
That afternoon after school I’d had a few beers but I wasn’t drunk. …

THE reality is that Manning Charles Hope Clark was never an objectively inclined academic scholar. Thus his magnum opus, the six-volume A History of Australia, had more in common with the vision of 19th-century English writer Thomas Carlyle, whose three-volume History of the French Revolution was inspired by a distinctly personal vision spelled out in an epic narrative style.
Indeed, Clark sometimes admitted there wasn’t very much difference between literary fiction and “his kind of history”.
As academic Mark McKenna tellingly puts it, in the romantic tradition of Carlyle, who spoke from …

FOR reasons that are unclear, the University of Queensland Press parted company from Philip Luker over publication of his biography of “the ideas man”, Phillip Adams.
Perhaps some clues can be found in Luker’s acknowledgements to this controversial book. There he states that the veteran columnist for The Weekend Australian Magazine and long-running broadcaster for ABC’s Radio National “seemed to believe that I had agreed not to delve into his private life. He never asked me to agree and I did not do so, either verbally or in writing.” Luker continues: …

THERE is an old adage that, to avoid heated arguments and acrimony, sex, politics and religion should never be discussed at the dinner table. In many parts of Australia, fresh water should be added to the list.
Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world, with most of our landmass regarded as desert, arid or semi-arid. However, the far north receives huge amounts of mostly summer rain, with vast volumes of water wastefully flowing out to sea.
Many thinkers have been fascinated by the potential for diverting some of this water …

WITH what seems to be his somewhat premature decision to prevent the merger of the Singapore and Australian stock exchanges, Treasurer Wayne Swan is once again in the media spotlight.
This concentrated attention can only increase when Swan who is Acting Prime Minister until Julia Gillard returns from leave tomorrow hands down the May 10 federal budget. One doesn’t have to have a crystal ball to predict that the 2011 budget will be one of the toughest in the last decade, as the Gillard Government fights to bring the books back …

A COMPANY or product brand is a highly valuable asset that can change customer behaviour and shift demand through the creation of a positive image.
A brand’s equity is derived from the goodwill and name recognition earned over time, which in business translates into higher sales and profit margins over those of competitors.
Take Facebook. Over a remarkably short period, Facebook has built a brand image that represents all that is current, creative and cool in the technology world. IBM, on the other hand, has struggled with its brand over decades but …