Melbourne University Press

History was work for Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021), writing was his pleasure, and he excelled at both. Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski, scholars from outside Macintyre’s own discipline of history, underscore the breadth of his interests and networks by initiating this collection of twenty-seven essays. They wish to honour Macintyre’s work and interrogate ‘the Macintyre effect’. That effect stemmed from prodigious scholarly output, intervention in national debates, political connections, service to professional bodies and key cultural institutions, a long career of teaching and leadership at the University of Melbourne, and mentorship. 

Sir Paul Hasluck has written a most interesting account of Australia’s foreign policy during the war and the period 1945 to 1947. His impressionistic narrative which seeks to illuminate a period of history through one pair of eyes, as a central witness, giving evidence of how it was, works quite well despite the difficulties and unintentional distortions of the historical record that such an approach can often involve. I suspect that in the fullness of time his account of this period will be substantially upheld by future professional historians.

Axel Clark’s is the first full-length biography of Christopher Brennan, and its publication has drawn attention to what was a lamentable deficiency in Australian literary studies.

At a time when critics are becoming increasingly interested in Australia’s war literature, Robin Gerster turns to it for an understanding of how national legends are created and perpetuated.

This book will at times quite literally take your breath away. A deeply reported account of the fall of Afghanistan’s capital, August in Kabul tells the harrowing stories of those who escaped and those who were left behind in the maelstrom of those two weeks between the arrival of the Taliban on 15 August 2021 and the final US flight to depart – at one minute to midnight on 30 August. Compelling, vivid, and distressing all at once, it is a damning indictment of the Taliban’s wanton cruelty and of the domestic and foreign policy failures that allowed them to return. It is an impressive book-length début by one of Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalists.

B.A. Santamaria is given to self-dramatization. His autobiography (1981) was subtitled Against the tide but he was not metaphorically explicit as to whether the tide was going out or coming in. For myself I do not want to think of Santamaria behaving with Canute-like megalomania; I prefer to envisage him backstroking towards shore with a rear-vision snorkel, spouting against the undertow of inevitable social change, and praying for some apocalyptic dumper to preserve him from the future agoraphobic shock of an ever-widening ocean.