Ken Haley
Melbourne
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University tutor, journalist, traveller (aka international vagrant), author, Saints fan, short-term stoic, long-term optimist.
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Articles by Ken Haley
Elvis, Bing, Sting and … Hildegarde
She sang for Truman, Eisenhower, and at George VI's coronation, but her greatest mark on history was introducing the world to the mono-monickered celeb Sep 14 2026 3 mins When not taking her inspiration from the charlatan Bruce Pascoe, essayist Melissa Lucashenko is spiteful, strident and, all too often, just plain silly Sep 14 2026 9 mins It would be foolish to assume that because today's AI systems depend on humans, tomorrow's always will Sep 14 2026 7 mins You will know every one of them...
Real-Time Impact Detection Saving Lives on Modern Roadways
Advanced alert systems and smart asset tracking streamline emergency response, reduce secondary crashes and optimize infrastructure maintenance. Smart device communication has reshaped industries across the globe, and road safety is no exception. The rapid detection and timely response to roadside collisions can mean the difference between a quick repair and a tragic secondary crash.
Chilling times: We have to talk about Greenland …
We live in an era when real-estate salespeople are regarded with a wariness once reserved for snake-oil vendors. It’s fair to presume that most people, on hearing the 45th and 47th US President threaten to take over Greenland, dismissed his words as just another kite-flying exercise in distraction to whet the insatiable appetites of his MAGA acolytes.
Enhance Work Zone Safety Response
Immediate impact detection and response can save asphalt workers’ lives in the work zone Smart device communication has reshaped industries across the globe, and road safety is no exception. The rapid detection and timely response to roadside collisions can mean the difference between a quick repair and a tragic secondary crash.
In the post-truth era, proof still matters
Prove It: A Scientific Guide for the Post-truth Era, by Elizabeth Finkel, La Trobe University Press & Black Inc., 310 pp., RRP $36.99 I recollect the excitement of debates back in college days, when the delight of discovering a nugget of truth in what we now call STEM subjects, or what appeared to be true in the humanities, was matched only by the thrill of the quest.
The Widow’s Story
What Tripp’s recounting of a gilded life has to say about the perils of fame and the process of mythmaking makes this re-creation of another realm, place and time well worth the investment. Aug 26 2025 7 mins Medical ‘requirements’ are stripping our professions of independent minds.
When democracies go into reverse
ARTS AND CULTURE
TrafFix Devices enhances roadside safety with immediate response systems
Smart device communication has reshaped industries across the globe, and road safety is no exception. The rapid detection and timely response to roadside collisions can mean the difference between a quick repair and a tragic secondary crash. Roadside safety devices like crash cushions, guardrails, and signs are essential tools for minimizing harm, but their effectiveness depends on knowing when they have been compromised and acting quickly.
The Shortest History of Scandinavia, by Mart Kuldkepp. Black Inc. 258 pp. RRP $35.00 In the Catholic tradition, envy is the fourth of the Seven Deadly Sins. But who could blame the world for turning green when considering the fact that ‘the contemporary Scandinavian states are some of the happiest nations in the world, frequently topping rankings for gender equality, environmental sustainability, participatory democracy and more’?
Is Australia ready for a Pacific future?
Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania, by Hamish McDonald. Black Inc. 330 pp. RRP $36.99 In the second debate of the Australian federal election campaign, moderator David Speers gently reminded candidates Albanese and Dutton that they were both property investors. Whatever else you say about him, Prime Minister John Howard wasn’t one – but his having grown up in moderate affluence certainly owes something to the fact that his father was.
Steve Vizard’s fresh views of Anzac myths and history
In the year that marks 110 years since the Gallipoli beach landings, funnyman turned serious-minded professorSteve Vizard examines our ANZAC ‘myth’. Vizard’s latest book,Nation, Memory, Myth looks at the worthy question of whether factual history enough to sustain collective self-belief, or do we need a higher power – the power that the ancient Greeks called myth?
Love Me, Love My Novel
As Fitzgerald's saw his masterpiece, Gatsby concerned itself with levels of 'huge incoherent failure' Mar 29 2025 13 mins Peter Porter, one of the twentieth century's leading poets, owed a lifelong debt to the Latin he studied as a schoolboy Mar 29 2025 14 mins Giffin’s book is an intricately-woven exploration of the cultural shifts that close in on the heritage of religion, theology and literary criticism Mar 29 2025 10 mins On the final day of 1925, and in his newish role as director of the...
Peter Porter’s Classical Education
Peter Porter, one of the twentieth century's leading poets, owed a lifelong debt to the Latin he studied as a schoolboy Mar 29 2025 14 mins Giffin’s book is an intricately-woven exploration of the cultural shifts that close in on the heritage of religion, theology and literary criticism Mar 29 2025 10 mins Robbie Coburn’s fourth poetry collection is a challenging read.
Spectral Wounds in a Cold Pastoral
Robbie Coburn’s fourth poetry collection is a challenging read. The language is simple, not so the narrative of depression, self-harm and suicide Mar 29 2025 8 mins David Williamson's standard fixations animate his latest play. Good manners recommends polite applause -- and suppressed yawns Mar 29 2025 11 mins Will Trump hold the reins only until his insatiable craving for power alienates the offsiders without whom he cannot hope to govern?
Failing to Achieve the Heights
David Williamson's standard fixations animate his latest play. Good manners recommends polite applause -- and suppressed yawns Mar 29 2025 11 mins Will Trump hold the reins only until his insatiable craving for power alienates the offsiders without whom he cannot hope to govern? Mar 29 2025 9 mins “Maybe it’s time you made your peace with him,” his wife had said, pouring the tea. Dick didn’t know what she was talking about.
Sinclair Lewis’s 2020s Vision
Will Trump hold the reins only until his insatiable craving for power alienates the offsiders without whom he cannot hope to govern? Mar 29 2025 9 mins “Maybe it’s time you made your peace with him,” his wife had said, pouring the tea. Dick didn’t know what she was talking about.
Mary wrote crime; George committed it • Ken Haley
Dual biographies are a flavourful dish spiced by the interactions between their subjects — be they political rivals (like Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins in T. Lyle Dwyer’s Big Fellow, Long Fellow, or Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in Harrison Salisbury’s The New Emperors) or studies of sibling rivalry run amok (Samantha Morris’s Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia).
What have the Romans done for us? • Ken Haley
We call a book good if it entertains or educates us. But when it deal with such a well-covered topic as “the glory that was Rome,” about which you could be excused for thinking there was little new to relate, it had better fulfil both functions or its intended readers will find better things to do with their time.
At the heart of the deal
War by Bob Woodward, published by Simon and Schuster, October 2024, 410 pp., RRP $55 If facts alone could bring down a President of the United States … but why begin any review of a Bob Woodward book in a speculative mood when facts alone once did, and Woodward was instrumental in unearthing them?
'Tisn't the season to be jolly
As 2024 hurtles to its end, the urge to forecast what lies ahead is as tempting as it is tenuous. It is idle to wonder if 2025 will plunge us into a major global conflict when we cannot even be sure about the next upheaval to come out of the Middle East, or whether the United States will face a constitutional crisis that makes the events of January 6 seem restrained. What we can say is that, despite centuries of the most astonishing technological advances, human nature remains unchanged.
Lessons in leadership from the wild blue yonder
When Brisbane pilot Chris Smith flew his final Jetstar flight from Townsville to Brisbane in September 2023, it was an emotional trip. More so because his daughter Lauren was sitting next to him in the cockpit. Which sounds nice but it does beg the question: What was she doing there? Not to worry. “She’s a trainee captain with Jetstar,” Smith explains. “I had other family aboard that flight too.
Seminal record: Reliving the days of rage of the Age of Rock
In Year Nine I spent a lot of time in the school library, poring over Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia. No, it wasn’t a geology textbook, but a comprehensive and addictive guide to popular music of the 1960s and ’70s. This wasn’t just any rock encyclopedia – it was the first rock encyclopedia ever published.
Love, war and the birth of Impressionism
Impressionism is probably the most widely known and loved of all art movements. Crowds flock to exhibitions by its greatest artists: Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgard Degas, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. What most of us don’t know is the political and social background that led to this movement and how it was born out of a time of tumult in Paris. We all know French politics is complicated – just look at the current situation.
Poem: Cunjiwindi Fair
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Ain't no river long enough. Ain't no mountain high enough: Remembering the man who mapped Australia
What Clancy was to the Overflow, Thomas Scott Townsend was to Australia’s loftiest reaches. Yet few have heard his name. He ought to have been famous in his time and ever since as Townsend was the surveyor who from 1831 to 1854 put one town after another on the map. Towns like Portland, Eden, Albury, Tumut and Wagga (twice). He also, as this new study argues, might have been the first European to reach the continent’s highest point.
The way we lived then
One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, when halfway through the journey of his life he finds himself in a gloomy wood, having lost his way. In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood. In the face of the Covid pandemic, many of us felt a similar sense of isolation and uncertainty, confined to our homes, disconnected, and grappling with the unknown.
Poem: Evening Stroll by the Canal
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The power of one: Champion of the reef remembered
John Büsst was an unsung Australian hero. Born into affluence, he became a university dropout when such a move had the power to shock. He also became a member of Melbourne’s avant-garde art scene in the 1930s in the middle of the Great Depression.
Legislating the right to a home of our own
Of course, the importance to our physical and psychological welfare of having a home is not a recent discovery: it’s no accident that 1948’s UN Declaration of Human Rights – which Australian jurist and politician ‘Doc’ Evatt was instrumental in drafting – states: ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including … housing.’ That proclamation was itself a waypoint on the path to a more explicit imperative spelt out two...
Old men for an old order
But today, that old whole world order is teetering on the brink. With autocracy ascendant, belief in a superman (the mythical strongman) is, by definition, a threat to democracy. We live in clarifying times, just as those generations did. What is different today? Unawareness of history is greater. The blurring of once clear left-right divides. Again in the world there is an overabundance of weapons, and not much interest in ploughshares. But all of these are differences in degree.
In praise of the human kind
ARTS AND CULTURE
Opera soars in our great outdoors
Just as dining outdoors can enhance the taste of food, there’s something irresistible about hearing classical music out in the open. Opera is tagged as elitist and dependent on dazzling theatrical sets. Yet, during Opera Queensland’s six-day Festival of Outback Opera, a young woman in riding boots from the University of Queensland stood outside the Winton hardware store and sang her heart out to statues of sheep and bovines on the main street’s nature strip.
Poem: Festering
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When our WWI Diggers went on to Russia, with love
History has many definitions. One view is that every history worth the name is a mass of biographies brought together by a single event – or, in the case of military history, a campaign. What writer Damien Wright has done in detailing how a posse of Anzacs went to war again after the 1918 Armistice – is compile 12 chapters of epic daring by multiple protagonists across the world’s biggest land mass.
The legendary King O’Malley • Ken Haley
Should residents in the most populous Australian city of the late-Victorian age, a status it would reclaim only in the far distant 2020s, take a bow — or should they blush? In early 1888, James Malley, formerly of Kansas and parts further east, was in a proper fix. Acquitted years before of murder, outed as an insurance fraudster and holed up in a San Francisco hotel, this son of an Irish immigrant saw opportunity beckon in the guise of two alluring words: Melbourne Exhibition.
Sins of the fathers
ARTS AND CULTURE
Poem: Stars
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It’s the end of an era for Imprints - and hopefully the start of a new chapter
I’m sitting in the back room of Imprints Booksellers on Hindley Street, the last independent bookshop in Adelaide’s CBD. A week ago, co-owner Jason Lake called to confide he and Katherine Woehlert are selling, after working here almost their whole adult lives. Once their bookseller employee, today I’m here, perched by a small fan to relieve the March heat, to hear the story of the shop, which turns 40 next month. “What were your favourite moments?” I ask.
Book Club reading guide: Iep Jāltok
The Stories from the South Book Club is a series for book lovers to explore what it means to inhabit the unique world of the ‘South’. We will meet live at Dymocks Bookstore Rundle Mall on Tuesday, March 26, 6-7.30pm, for a discussion of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poetry collection Iep Jāltok with Jill Jones, Mandy Treagus, and Theodora Galanis. Register here for this free public event. Use this guide to enrich your reading.
Poem: Little Button Quail
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Strap yourself in - it's gonna be a wild ride
Donna M Cameron’s latest book, The Rewilding, is a passport pre-stamped with several visas: one to the contours of an unconventional love story; another to the land of Dystopia at the end of an Outback trail; a third to father-son estrangement; and a fourth to the fragmented underworld of radical eco-politics. Over it all hangs a sense of menace, fuelled by a continent-wide chase and only occasionally relieved by the catharsis of face-to-face confrontation.
The last laugh: The unforgettable and irreplaceable Barry Humphries
It’s still hard to believe that Barry Humphries has left the building (a euphemism for the planet) for good. Mind you, he had a pretty good innings. An incredible innings, actually. Barry Humphries died on April 22 in 2023 in Sydney at the age of 89 and was saluted by the nation at a State Memorial at the Sydney Opera House on December 15.
Poem: Where do the children play?
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A man of letters' occasionally fortunate life
Three John Langs have bulked large in modern Australia. All were verbal pugilists but only two would be immediately recognisable to history buffs. John Dunmore Lang was a Presbyterian minister and early advocate of a republic. Another, better known as Jack Lang, was dismissed by the Crown. Which leaves who?
Poem: Li Bai’s Cranes
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Meet the father of The Lucky Country
Donald Horne is the man who coined that much misunderstood cliché “the lucky country” and it’s high time we reassessed this fascinating Australian. That cliché was enshrined as the title of his 1964 book, The Lucky Country. Which is a bit misleading considering that Horne wrote that “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”.
Poem: Outside a Library
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Poem: Oasis
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A timely look at identity politics
Pronouns have never been of more … pronounced … importance. In an era when the young prize the search for identity above all, a first-person study of what it’s like to grow up Chinese in 21st-century Australia could not be timelier – and when the study’s title consists of just three pronouns, you’re looking at a form of perfection.
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