You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Sydney: a beautiful international city with impressive buildings, harbour-side walkways, public gardens, cafes, restaurants, theatres and hotels. This is the way Sydney is represented to its citizens and to the rest of the world. But there has always been another Sydney not viewed so fondly by the city's rulers, a radical part of Sydney. The working-class suburbs to the south and west of the city were large and explosive places of marginalised ideas, bohemian neighbourhoods, dissident politics and contentious action. Through a series of snapshots, Radical Sydney traces its development from The Rocks in the 1830s to the inner suburbs of the 1980s. It includes a range of incidents, people and places, from freeing protestors in the anti-conscription movement, resident action movements in Kings Cross, anarchists in Glebe, to Gay Rights marches on Oxford Street and Black Power in Redfern.
Many know Alex Mitchell as a political journalist. Few know that he was also a revolutionary. This revealing memoir is a rollicking tale of chain-smoking newspapermen, unionists and revolutionaries, crooked cops and corrupt politicians, spies and dictators; made real by the struggles of ordinary working people.
A groundbreaking study of labor unions that advances a new theory of organizational leadership and governance In the Interest of Others develops a new theory of organizational leadership and governance to explain why some organizations expand their scope of action in ways that do not benefit their members directly. John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi document eighty years of such activism by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the United States and the Waterside Workers Federation in Australia. They systematically compare the ILWU and WWF to the Teamsters and the International Longshoremen's Association, two American transport industry labor unions that actively discouraged the pu...
'A Book of Doors' is based upon the student radical and cultural movements at The University of Queensland and inner-city Brisbane in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It frames one young woman's perspective of the Vietnam Moratorium protest, and the dramatic personal consequences that resulted from her involvement in this intense period of revolutionary change. The story recalls the violence of the Springbok Tours, the growing Black Rights movement and the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin in 1973.
The Sixties – an era of protest, free love, civil disobedience, duffel coats, flower power, giant afros and desert boots, all recorded on grainy black and white film footage – marked a turning point for change. Radicals found their voices and used them. While the initial trigger for protest was opposition to the Vietnam War, this anger quickly escalated to include Aboriginal Land Rights, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, Apartheid, Student Power and ‘workers’ control’. In Radicals some of the people doing the changing – including David Marr, Margret RoadKnight, Gary Foley, Jozefa Sobski and Geoffrey Robertson – reflect on how the decade changed them and Australian society f...
Who would imagine that democracy in NSW was won through fierce political battles and street rallies? The Southern Tree of Liberty sheds light on this turbulent and violent period in Australian history. For twenty years, the advocates of democracy mobilised the working class and fought hard to bring popular rule to the colony. The elites, on the other hand, used their legislative powers to halt this march towards liberty, most notably in the Constitution of 1853. There were many colourful characters involved in the push for self-government: Charles Harpur, the native-born poet who wrote ‘The Tree of Liberty (A Song for the Future)’; Johann Lhotsky, the revolutionary who spent five years i...
Hal Colebatch's new book, AUSTRALIA'S SECRET WAR, tells the shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions against their own society and against the men and women of their own country's fighting forces at the time of its gravest peril. His conclusions are based on a broad range of sources, from letters and first-person interviews between the author and ex-servicemen to official and unofficial documents from the archives of World War II. Between 1939 and 1945 virtually every major Australian warship, including at different times its entire force of cruisers, was targeted by strikes, go-slows and sabotage. Australian soldiers operating in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands went without food, radio equipment and munitions, and Australian warships sailed to and from combat zones without ammunition, because of strikes at home. Planned rescue missions for Australian prisoners-of-war in Borneo were abandoned because wharf strikes left rescuers without heavy weapons. Officers had to restrain Australian and American troops from killing striking trade unionists.
A new and radically different biography of the Australian-born archaeologist and prehistorian, Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957). In his early life he was active in the Australian labour movement and wrote How Labour Governs (1923), the world's first study of parliamentary socialism. At the end of the First World War, he decided to pursue a life of scholarship to 'escape the fatal lure' of politics and Australian labour's 'politicalism, ' his term for its misguided emphasis on parliamentary representation. In Britain, with the publication of The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925), he began a career that would establish him as preeminent in his field and one of the most distinguished scholars ...
In this moving, funny and sometimes chilling book, leading Australians open their ASIO files and read what the state's security apparatus said about them. Writers from across the political spectrum including Mark Aarons, Phillip Adams, Nadia Wheatley, Michael Kirby, Peter Cundall, Gary Foley and Anne Summers confront – and in some cases reclaim – their pasts. Reflecting on the interpretations, observations and proclamations that anonymous officials make about your personal life is not easy. Yet we see outrage mixed with humour, not least as ASIO officers got basic information wrong a lot of the time, though many writers have to contend with personal betrayal. Some reflect on the way their political views have – or haven’t – changed. Meredith Burgmann and all those who were spied on have produced an extraordinary book where those being watched look right back.