Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Melbourne Press
Bare lives • Marian Quartly
The story begins in 1959 with the death of an Aboriginal baby on the verandah of the Wyndham District Hospital. The child had been brought into town from the Wyndham Native Hospital, where there was no doctor to treat it.
No one goes to jail for bouncing a cheque • Nina Porter
“Throughout the decade my mother had spent in and out of custody for a suite of dishonesty offences, she had maintained her innocence. It was a cliché to which I was oblivious. Even once I entered law school, I had still to be disabused of my belief in her. As Red tells Andy in The Shawshank Redemption: ‘Everyone in here’s innocent.’” So wrote Fernanda Dahlstrom, lawyer and refugee advocate, in a 2018 opinion piece in the Guardian.
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?
Speak, memory • Inside Story
On the publisher’s website this achingly honest book is tagged under “Memoirs,” a genre its author despises. Gideon Haigh, one of our most versatile and prolific writers, sees memoir as a form of attention seeking, a spotlight for “humblebraggarts.” His new book is deliberately “pruned of memoir’s usual self-pardonings and self-protections.” My Brother Jaz examines the death of Haigh’s younger brother Jasper in a car crash and its long aftermath.
Cross-class coupling
How curious it is that my twenty-five-year-old grandson is leaving Australia for a prestigious position in New York just as I’m writing this review of Rose Butler and Eve Vincent’s Love Across Class. Some quick research tells me that it’s exceedingly hard to get a position like the one he’s heading to, but there’s no denying he is an outstanding worker with impressive qualifications.
Cross-class coupling
“My father-in-law… never forgave his son for rising ‘above’ his class.” Paul Miller/AAP Image How curious it is that my twenty-five-year-old grandson is leaving Australia for a prestigious position in New York just as I’m writing this review of Rose Butler and Eve Vincent’s Love Across Class. Some quick research tells me that it’s exceedingly hard to get a position like the one he’s heading to, but there’s no denying he is an outstanding worker with impressive qualifications.
How the machine works: a renowned sociologist takes stock
On 25 June this year, at the 20th World Congress in Sociology, Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell received the International Sociological Association’s award for excellence in research and practice. The award is conferred only every four years and Connell was the third recipient, following two renowned sociologists, Immanuel Wallerstein (2014) and Nira Yuval-Davis (2018).
The China divide
In 2006, opposition leader Kim Beazley told the US ambassador that “Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise, the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen”. Beazley’s candour is important because he did not expect WikiLeaks to publish his remarks less than five years later.
The Good Death Through Time
Reviewed by Rama Gaind. By Caitlin Mahar, Melbourne University Press, $35.00. How likely is it that our ancestors can help us now to face complex questions of dying? The Good Death Through Time delves into the history of how people’s responses to dying have changed in western societies. We also get to understand when and why other Australians began to find the notion of a physician-assisted death appealing.
Appointment with death
Before acquiring its more familiar contemporary meaning about 150 years ago, euthanasia simply meant a good death. Dying was seen as a spiritual ordeal to be endured with Christian patience, and thus a test of courage and character. Much emphasis fell on what came after death — salvation or something much worse — rather than its attendant agonies.
Appointment with death • Nick Haslam
Even in our darker moments, few of us are likely to agree with philosopher David Benatar that it would be preferable not to have existed. Living brings pain and suffering, Benatar reminds us, which eclipse pleasure and happiness. Non-existence nullifies pain — a good thing — and means no one is around to miss out on pleasure — no bad thing. Hence, as Benatar’s 2006 book title bleakly announces, it’s Better Never to Have Been.
Tell me, young man, are you a c-c-communist? • Gideon Haigh
Michael Cannon is one of those figures whose books, mainly acquired second-hand, began multiplying on my shelves almost without my being aware of who he was. The first of his I owned, The Land Boomers, contained no biographical information at all about its author. His trilogy of Australia in the Victorian Age offered cursory references to decades as a “journalist and historian”; likewise his six edited volumes of the Historical Records of Victoria.
Daughters of Durga
Reviewed by Rama Gaind. By Manjula Datta O’Connor, Melbourne University Press, $34.99. Here is a perceptive, though disquieting, investigation of domestic violence in South Asian communities, and the resilience of women in the face of adversity.
Soldiers and Aliens
Reviewed by Rama Gaind. By June Factor, Melbourne University Press, $39.99. Here is an illuminating insight into a forgotten history of the remarkable contribution of non-British subjects to Australia in World War II. It’s about men in the Australian Army’s Employment Companies. The story of the four thousand Australian soldiers who signed up for service and were never to fire a weapon.
The Most Beautiful Job in the World
Fashion is one of the most powerful industries in the world, accounting for 6 per cent of global consumption and growing steadily. Since the 1980s and the birth of the neoliberal economy, it has emerged as the glittering face of capitalism, bringing together prestige, power and beauty and occupying a central place in media and consumer fantasies.
The Dasher | Inside Story
One Halal of a Story By Sam Dastyari | Melbourne University Press | $29.99 | 277 pages If you’ve ever felt unloved, unappreciated or just ignored, imagine what it would feel like to be a federal parliamentarian without a Melbourne University Press contract. It’s a worse snub than being left out of the popular group at school.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Melbourne
Contact Melbourne, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack