Jeff Sparrow

When Ben Roberts-Smith brought his suit against Fairfax Media and journalists Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie, much commentary ensued about the chilling effect of Australian defamation law. But Masters’ new book, Flawed Hero: Truth, lies and war …

A few weeks ago, Melbourne’s Trades Hall unveiled a long-overdue monument honouring Zelda D’Aprano, a fierce campaigner for equal pay for women. Anyone concerned about climate change could not help but notice the irony of former Labor prime minister …

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we …

Most of us associate terra nullius – the doctrine that legalised the English occupation of a purportedly “empty” Australia – with 1788 and the very beginnings of white settlement. But Thomas Ford and Justin Clemens explain that the concept became …

If you had a cool $22,000, a reseller could have supplied you with an early ticket to Taylor Swift’s recently announced American tour. If you didn’t, you confronted a glitching website, long delays and, eventually, the cancellation of all public sales. The …

In late September this year, an American court released a trove of messages sent to the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk. They revealed a private Musk remarkably like the public one: an unmoored narcissist revelling in attention from celebrities and sycophantic …

A decade or so ago, the online magazine Slate launched a feature series called “If it happened there”, in which correspondents described United States politics through the tropes usually reserved for overseas stories. A pre-Covid story on …

In 1984, the historian Geoffrey Blainey sparked a nationwide debate by denouncing the government for its supposed preference towards Asian migrants. The subsequent normalisation of the far right means Blainey’s comments no longer shock as they once …

Katharine Susannah Prichard published her first short story in 1899 and her final novel in 1967. At last we have a definitive biography, a book tracing her life and the formation of the Australian literary culture she helped to create. Nathan Hobby reminds …

When we recall the British atomic bomb tests in Australia, most of us think of Maralinga, still a byword for imperial indifference to Country and people. Few remember Emu Field – even though, as Elizabeth Tynan shows, the 1953 Totem 1 and Totem 2 detonations …

After absorbing the first pages of this book, most readers will, one suspects, mentally substitute “the bastards” for “them” in its title. Keeping Them Honest: The case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic …

“We need to talk about fascism, particularly here in Australia. We need, as Australians, to talk about it because the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre grew up in this country – and the crimes he is being prosecuted for in New Zealand, killing …”