John McEwen: Right Man, Right Place, Right Time
 By Bridget McKenzie, 
Connor Court, 180pp, $24.95 (PB)
review by ROSS FITZGERALD
Thirty-seven years a Country Party politician and 23 days the prime minister, John ‘‘Black Jack’’ McEwen was our longest-serving trade minister, where his primary commitment was protecting key elements of the economy.

An orphan who became a farmer, McEwen was born in Chiltern, Victoria, in March 1900. This brief biography of him is written by Bridget McKenzie, a Nationals senator for Victoria since 2010.
And although McKenzie denies it was her intention, this little book is …

Dissenting Opinions
By Michael Sexton, 
Connor Court, 315pp, $39.99 (PB)
review by ROSS FITZGERALD
Michael Sexton has been Solicitor-General for NSW since 1988. A specialist in defamation law, he has published widely, including one of my favourite books, On the Edges of History (2015).

As Sexton notes, the phrase from which his new book takes its title, Dissenting Opinions, is normally used in the law to describe the judgments of those members of appellate courts who take a different view in a particular case from their colleagues who form the majority and effectively decide the question …

Robert Hadler,
Dark Secrets – The True Story of Murder in HMAS Australia
Wilkinson Publishing: Melbourne, 2020, pp 319, $29.99
ISBN 9781925927436
Review by ROSS FITZGERALD
It’s the story navy recruiters won’t want you to read. In March 1942, with a Japanese invasion imminent, the 840 men aboard the Royal Australian Navy’s flagship were unprepared for the brutal murder of a young sailor by two shipmates who were rumoured to be part of a homosexual cabal.
This murder has been covered before. One of the highlights of Mike Carlton’s magnificent 2016 naval history, Flagship, was his exploration of …

Comrades! Lives of Australian Communists
Edited by Bob Boughton, Danny Blackman, Mike Donaldson,
Carmel Shute and Beverley Symons,
SEARCH Foundation and the Australian Society for the
Study of Labour History (ASSLH), 2020, 440pp
Comrades! Lives of Australian Communists brings together 100 short biographies of members of the original Communist Party of Australia (CPA), active between the party’s founding in October 1920 and its dissolution in 1991.
The stories, outlining the lives of communist women and men, reveal their commitment to creating a socialist world, and their critical role in a variety of working-class organisations and movements for progressive …

Books
Born comics die laughing
ROSS FITZGERALD
The Comedy of Error: Why evolution made us laugh.
By Jonathan Silvertown, Scribe, 2020, 192pp, $29.99
ISBN: 9781922310095

   Evolutionary theory is primarily about survival but, as Jonathan Silvertown makes clear in this intriguing book,  as well as having survival value, laughter allows us to share in the fun.
The need to laugh seems to be universal. When I was a child my Uncle George told me, ‘Laughter is the best medicine.’ When, in later life, I told George that he was my favourite relative, he responded, ‘There wasn’t much competition.’ A sense …

Son of the Brush
by Tim Olsen
Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2020, pp 485, $34.95
ISBN : 9781743318058 
Review by ROSS FITZGERALD
   Being the son of the revered John Olsen has often been intriguing, and sometimes difficult. 
Olsen, 92, is arguably Australia’s greatest living artist, and is still painting.
His son, Tim, 58, the author of this fine memoir, runs one of Australia’s leading art galleries in Woollahra, Sydney.
In Son of the Brush (a play on the laconic expression ‘son of a gun’ ), Tim Olsen brilliantly encapsulates the contours of what now seems to be his ultimately fortunate life – it’s triumphs its failures, its tragedies and its joys …

 
Maybe a Dip. Wellness from The Gunnedah Institute does not qualify a canine like Jackie to become an art critic.  Except for the fact that almost everyone is an art critic these days.  And like most critics Jackie doesn’t know much about  art but she knows what she likes – as the saying goes (or went).
And so it came to pass that Jackie has decided to recommend each year that one portrait from those that made the final cut is currently on display at the Art Gallery of NSW and …

RADIO GIRL: The story of the extraordinary Mrs Mac, pioneering engineer and wartime legend by David Dufty. Publisher: Allen&Unwin, 2020, pp 302, $22.99
Review by ROSS FITZGERALD
Florence Violet McKenzie, nee Wallace (1890-1982), usually known as Violet or Mrs Mac, is someone who, up to now, I’d never heard of.
But thanks to David Dufty, an expert in Australia’s military intelligence during World War Two, I now realise how crucial she  was in training our first women code-breakers (initially in signals, not in code-breaking as such) and also, as an early feminist, in persuading the navy to establish the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service (WRANS).
Importantly, Mrs Mac was Australia’s first female electrical …

Deborah Cassrels, ‘Gods and Demons’ (ABC Books, 336pp, $34.99).
Review by ROSS FITZGERALD
Bali is a special place for Australians. For some of us it’s a touchstone, a much-loved haven.

Until she died in January, my darling wife Lyndal, who spoke Bahasa Indonesian and some Balinese, travelled with me each year to Bali. We always stayed at the Puri Saraswati Bungalows, a home away from home in culturally rich Ubud, next to the Royal Palace.
Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. Yet despite an influx of immigrants, mainly from Java, Bali remains predominantly …

ROSS FITZGERALD
 

I’m at risk, but I don’t want lockdowns

It’s hard to credit in a democracy like Australia, but five and a half million Melburnians are set to continue under virtual house arrest almost indefinitely. On Sunday, Premier Dan Andrews‘ roadmap to reopening turned out to be a plan for even more lockdowns. Unless cases in Victoria drop to below current New South Wales levels, the curfew will continue beyond October 26; and restaurants won’t be open for indoor service until after November 23, and then only if there are no …

by ROSS FITZGERALD

Cigarettes in Australia have never been subjected to prohibition. Advances in manufacturing, marketing and advertising of cigarettes, starting over a century ago, saw cigarette smoking steadily increase for half a century. Soon after World War II, a majority of Australian men smoked, although smoking rates among women never reached such high levels.

After World War II, shocking research about the dangers of smoking began to appear. First a trickle of research, then a flood. Now we know that up to two of every three long-term smokers will die from …