AustLit

'This article investigates the reception of Judith Brett’s landmark study, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, on its publication in 1992, a moment when many Australians living under neoliberal economic reform and recession were rethinking what it meant to be middle class. Brett argued that Menzies thought it meant individuals living the best lives they could, lives defined by independence and the possession of superior moral qualities. Her account resonated with contemporary Australian experience and remains highly influential. Yet within political history, reviews were mixed as traditionalists resisted the psychoanalytic theory Brett employed to understand Menzies’ public language. Her strategic defence of her interdisciplinary approach has ultimately helped to keep the idea of moral liberalism alive in political discourse.'  (Publication abstract)

'Eilean Giblin touched much that was formative in twentieth-century Australia'

'The Saturday Paper displays both the strengths and limitations of a primarily print-based publication, writes Sybil Nolan'

'Readers and journalists are mostly missing from two recent books about the troubles at Fairfax, writes Sybil Nolan'

''The whole woman' argues that for all women's hard-won advances, many of the problems that concerned second-wave feminists are still with us and, in some cases, have grown worse. This might be a powerful argument to someone who has been around long enough to compare then with now, but it isn't a winning line to run on a generation that has grown up with a revulsion towards radical feminism. You can draw a direct link from Greer to impressive younger writers like the Australian media feminist Catharine Lumby, whose book about tabloid culture, Gotcha, has recently been published. Lumby is the quintessential postmodern girl intellectual, an Arts- Law graduate who studied the postmodern thinkers as well as the law of torts. Not unlike the young Greer, she has had two overlapping careers, one as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Bulletin, and the other as an academic at Macquarie and Sydney Universities. Her first book. 'Bad girls: the media, Sex and Feminism in the 90's' had strong affinities with The female eunuch. It touched on some similar issues, and its approach-Lumby described it as 'roam[ing] across traditional boundaries between academic theory, reportage and journalistic polemic''-was the same as Greer's a generation before. Its cover was a raunchy send-up of the famous female torso displayed on Greer's bestseller. The book was praised, deservedly, as one of the most readable feminist works published in Australia in a very long time.' (Publisher's summary)