Ross Fitzgerald

Neither a conventional biography nor an autobiography, Billy Snedden is a story told in two quite distinct and authentic voices. There is that of the late Sir Billy Snedden, Liberal Party leader from 1972 to 1975, and Dr Bernie Schedvin, lecturer in politics at La Trobe University. The pairing of the honest ‘liberal Liberal’ whose working class Scots coal-mining father deserted the Snedden fa ... (read more)

The intriguing story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party began the day before the first Federal Parliament convened in Melbourne on 9 May 1901. At 11 a.m. on 8 May 1901, Labor’s twenty-two federal parliamentarians met in a stuffy basement room in Victoria’s Parliament House. This historic first Federal Caucus was chaired by Queensland Senator Anderson Dawson who from 1 to7 December 1899, ... (read more)

The fascinating remembrance of the first two decades of the Communist Party of Australia is the first general history of Australian communism since Alastair Davidson’s The Communist Party of Australia: A short history appeared in 1969. Stuart Macintyre’s The Reds is both erudite and, as befits a former CPA member of Presbyterian background, is infused with moral vision. The dreadful realities ... (read more)

Remarkably to some, this cultural history of the drafting of the Australian constitution is an exciting and triumphant book. Helen Irving manages to fill in adroitly the blank pages of our constitution as a cultural artefact and to celebrate the complicated processes whereby Australia became a nation on the first day of the new century. To actually write the framework for a nation by agreement in ... (read more)