The small Australian city of Ballarat is a gold rush town that was built on the boom of the mid-1800s. It is a deeply conservative place, divided down the middle between those with money and those without. Rural, semi-rural and urban in one – it is middle Australia. In Ballarat, beneath ...
When I started working on my bookBorn in a Tent, I thought I would be writing a history of holiday camping. It turned out to be a history of Australia, for the story of settlement is inescapably a story of camping. Tents spread across the continent from the time the ...
In the 2013 Australian federal election campaign, the major parties have been largely silent on health system reform. Health is not currently arousing the same political passions that it did in the 1970s and 1980s, when the introduction of Australia’s first universal health insurance scheme was debated furiously, and ...
I believe that I was born to be a general surgeon. Yes, I admit it, I have always loved to squeeze pimples, pick scabs, release pus and generally unclog things. When you break it down, this is what a general surgeon does, so it is definitely the right job for ...
‘At last a book that demonstrates the coal industry’s bogus claims of environmental and economic responsibility.’– David Suzuki
The great Viennese dramatist, Franz Grillparzer, wrote the funeral oration for that city’s most famous citizen and his friend: Ludwig van Beethoven. Grillparzer asked the question: ‘He was an artist – and who shall arise to stand beside him?’ The answer to the challenge posed in 1827 is still, ‘No ...
Researching the jihadi movement in Indonesia is not easy. Darul Islam, Jema'ah Islamiyah and their ilk are clandestine movements. Their leaders and activists generally refuse interviews with people outside of their circles. Accordingly, before I tried to interview them, I first assembled information from various books, newspaper clippings and ...
Once, if a newspaper or magazine wanted to sell extra copies, it would put a banner headline 'What Do Women Want?' on the front page. These days, the attention-grabber is 'Can Women Have It All?'
Moby Dick was not entirely a fictional creation. This was one of the most surprising facts I uncovered while writingA Savage History: Whaling in the Pacific and Southern Oceans. There was also Mocha Dick, ‘an old bull whale of prodigious size and strength … white as wool’, described in 1839 by ...
