Review by ROSS FITZGERALD
Tony Abbott and the Times of Revolution
by Gerard Charles Wilson
Self-published, 2019, 393 pages, $44.95
 
Decades before Tony Abbott, as our 28th prime minister, was challenging the zeitgeist by scrapping the carbon tax, stopping the boats and knighting Prince Philip, he’d been annoying the hell out of the campus left as a student leader, as this fascinating book revels in telling. In Tony Abbott and the Times of Revolution, Gerard Wilson sets out to do three things: to claim Abbott as Australia’s leading “Burkean conservative”; to analyse the university counter-culture that …

by ROSS FITZGERALD
Just now, the Morrison government still seems secure. Its narrow but decisive win has shattered an opposition that had thought it was coasting to victory. The Labor Party is about to begin a civil war between green-left ideologues and old-fashioned pragmatists that the ideologues are likely to win, at least in the short-term. Even so, governments are expected to tackle problems, not just to play politics and in a host of areas, the Morrison government confronts practical challenges that it shows little sign of fixing.
The government has no …

Sundowner of the Skies: The Story of Oscar Garden, The Forgotten Aviator
By Mary Garden. New Holland, 192pp, $29.95
review by ROSS FITZGERALD
They arrived out of nowhere at sundown and were gone by morning. They called them “sundowners”, these swaggies who once wandered our wide brown land with the green bits around the edge. Their life was hard but there was a certain romance to the notion.

With that in mind The Sun newspaper called aviator Oscar Garden the “Sundowner of the Skies” after he landed on November 4, 1930, at Wyndham aerodrome in Western …

by ROSS FITZGERALD
Australians’ greatest resource is not what’s under the ground but what’s between our ears. That’s so obvious when you think about it. The trouble is we rarely do. We endlessly ponder the challenges to our prosperity and security but take our education systems largely for granted. This even though a good grounding in the core culture, a sound grasp of the “three Rs”, and an unquenchable intellectual curiosity are the essential pre-requisites for our future well-being. If we are to continue to flourish, Australians must be at least …

Australian Books
Vengeful pygmies
by ROSS FITZGERALD  
Plots and Prayers: Malcolm Turnbull’s Demise and Scott Morrison’s Ascension 
 by Niki Savva
Scribe, $35.00 (paperback) 408pp
ISBN : 9781925849189
   It says almost everything that needs to be said about Niki Savva’s latest book that its original title was Highway to Hell: The Coup that Destroyed Malcolm Turnbull and Left the Liberals in Ruins.
      Savva denies that the book was rewritten after the election, insisting that just about all she did at that point was compose the final chapter. Quite possibly, she’s telling the truth because the book reads …

Before I Forget – Geoffrey Blainey

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2019
ISBN: 9781760890339
RRP: $45

Reviewed by Ross Fitzgerald
As the Kenny Rogers country song says, you’ve got to know when to hold them and when to fold them. Here Rogers is talking about playing cards as a metaphor for life.
Historian and author Geoffrey Blainey certainly knows when to fold them, although he may have done so too early in the piece. Hence his wryly-titled memoir Before I Forget, tells the story of only the first half of his remarkable and often controversial life.  This captivating book comes to a …

REVIEW
The Catalpa Rescue: The Gripping Story of the Most Dramatic and Successful Prison Break in Australian History’
By Peter FitzSimons. Hachette, 405pp, $34.95
BY ROSS FITZGERALD
Peter FitzSimons’s new book, ‘The Catalpa Rescue’, passionately and dramatically canvasses one of the great jail breaks of Australian history.
Until now this 19th-century tale, set in England, Ireland, Australia and the US, has been relatively unknown to general readers, especially in the eastern two-thirds of our nation.
As befits the chairman of the Australian Republic Movement, FitzSimons regards the rescue of a clutch of Irish republican radicals as …

The prolific and popular historian charts his own peripatetic past
BY ROSS FITZGERALD
Geoffrey Blainey’s long-awaited memoir, ‘Before I Forget’, is out ­tomorrow.

Blainey, one of Australia’s most popular, prolific and influential historians, was born in Melbourne on March 11, 1930. He was the second eldest of five children, born to a country schoolmistress and a Methodist minister who was an ardent teetotaller.
Much of Blainey’s relatively humble childhood was spent in country Victoria, ranging from Terang to Leongatha, Newtown (a suburb of Geelong near Corio Bay) to Ballarat, where he attended the local …

Libs must now lead
After the euphoria, where’s the dynamism?
ROSS FITZGERALD   
The euphoria is understandable. After trailing Labor in the polls throughout the last parliament, the Liberals can be forgiven a degree of triumphalism after their against-the-odds victory. But beware hubris. It was a narrow victory; and it could easily be different next time if the Liberals learn the wrong lessons from their win and Labor learns the right lessons from their loss.
Yes, the Liberals won because voters were alarmed at Labor’s soak-the-middle-class tax policies and Labor’s extreme climate policy. Average voters …

Lofty: My Life in Short
By Ian Fulton, with Nicole Partridge.
HarperCollins, 343pp, $19.99

by ROSS FITZGERALD
His grandmother reckoned Ian “Lofty” Fulton should have just stayed at home and be locked away from the world.

But for better and worse Fulton, the Australian-based voice-over artist who was born with achondroplasia (a form of dwarfism) had other ideas. Despite suffering from a condition that results in the shortening of the arms and legs and enlargement of the skull, Fulton has flourished. And he grew to be taller than expected, reaching 142cm.
Born in Launceston, Tasmania, on …

The PM navigated a tricky path to election victory. Now he must turn his attention to nailing his agenda.
BY ROSS FITZGERALD
Scott Morrison’s “quiet Australians”, like Sir Robert Menzies’ “forgotten people” and John Howard’s “battlers”, were the key to the federal election win and are at the heart of the Liberals’ electoral success. These “quiet Australians” are the people who preferred a Liberal government that had rolled two elected PMs to a Labor Party that was promising to steal their savings, increase their rent, reduce the …