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Articles by Patrick Mullins
Who she was, and what she did • Patrick Mullins
When Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac (1984) was announced as the winner of that year’s Booker Prize, the reaction was ugly. Private Eye made jibes about “Hotel du Lac of Interest” and “A Stroke du Luck” and in the room itself, on the night, people were flagrantly offensive. J.G. Ballard, shortlisted for Empire of the Sun, told Brookner that she had stolen his prize.
Lady Chatterley’s footprints • Patrick Mullins
Mentioning Australia’s history of literary censorship to people of a younger vintage often causes befuddlement followed by amazement. In its heyday, our censorship system was a nation-building enterprise designed to make Australia a promised land for straight, white, monarchy-smitten, Christian-worshipping, empire-loving capitalists. It was so conservative that many books now regarded as classics were banned, and it became so notorious that Australia was known as the Ireland of the South Pacific.
Just the thing • Patrick Mullins
She was a novelist and journalist, a member of the Algonquin Roundtable, a pal of Hemingway’s, and for half a century the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent. In the latter guise, she moulded the magazine’s voice and outlook, helped establish its mix of “essay journalism,” and paved the way for the reconstructed narratives John Hersey made famous.
BetterScapes Launches New Website to Better Serve Their Growing Customer Base Throughout The Lehigh Valley
New BetterScapes Website! BetterScapes Unveils New Website, Making It Easier Than Ever for Lehigh Valley Residents to Access Professional Lawn, Shrub, and Tree Care Services SAUCON VALLEY, PA, PA, UNITED STATES, April 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BetterScapes Launches New Website to Better Serve Their Growing Customer Base Throughout The Lehigh Valley BetterScapes Unveils New Website, Making It Easier Than Ever for Lehigh Valley Residents to Access Professional Lawn,...
Patrick Mullins reviews ‘Unapologetically Ita’ by Ita Buttrose
‘Ita Buttrose is someone Australians know; she’s someone that Australians trust’, said Scott Morrison, when he announced Ita Buttrose’s appointment as Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). For once, Morrison was saying something likely true. Buttrose’s long career in the media, especially in leadership positions, had afforded her a visibility, familiarity, and goodwill enjoyed by few in Australia. Continue reading for only $10 per month.
Patrick Mullins reviews ‘Hawke PM: The making of a legend’ by David Day
There is a fine tradition in Australia of two-volume prime ministerial biographies. John La Nauze on Alfred Deakin (1965), Laurie Fitzhardinge on Billy Hughes (1964, 1979), John Edwards on John Curtin (2017, 2018), Allan Martin on Robert Menzies (1993, 1999), Jenny Hocking on Gough Whitlam (2009, 2012): all are insightful and enduring accounts of significant figures who exerted deep influence on the country. By most yardsticks, Bob Hawke is deserving of a two-volume biography.
Patrick Mullins reviews ‘Young Hawke: The making of a larrikin’ by David Day
It is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’. With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example.
September 2024, no. 468
In ABR’s September issue, writers pick over the bones, stare into the cracks, weigh, measure, and search for the words. There’s Joel Deane on Peter Dutton, Ian Hall on Narendra Modi, and Kevil Bell on homelessness. Gabriella Coslovich sums up the case against Planet Art, the world’s wealthiest museums, and Dominic Kelly ponders two conservative lamentations for the Voice.
The poets’ war • Patrick Mullins
In 1985, nearly seventy years after the end of the first world war, authorities at Westminster Cathedral unveiled a plaque in Poets’ Corner commemorating sixteen poets who had fought in that conflict. Among the most famous of the group were Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves (the only one still living), Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. It was Owen who supplied the inscription that encircles the names: “My subject is war, and the pity of war.
Patrick Mullins reviews ‘Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93)’ by Lech Blaine
Bill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win.
Patrick Mullins reviews ‘Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93)’ by Lech Blaine
Bill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win.
Grand days • Patrick Mullins
Shakespeare famously concluded that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But what about fictional characters? Would Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street detective have won as many fans if Conan Doyle had trusted his main character’s original name, Sherrinford Hope? Would the world-in-the-balance quest that underpins The Lord of the Rings have been taken as seriously had J.R.R. Tolkien stuck with Bingo Bolger-Baggins?
Patrick Mullins reviews ‘The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, anti-communism, continuities 1943-1954’ edited by Zachary Gorman and ‘Menzies versus Evatt: The great rivalry of Australian politics’ by Anne Henderson
Bernard Cohen’s satirical novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (2013) begins shortly before the 1996 election with the titular character stepping ‘through a breach in time’ to help his successors win government. But while John Howard’s double-breasted jackets and headland speeches initially soothe this ‘large and benevolent plasmic entity’, the revenant Menzies soon becomes frustrated by the emptiness and the clichés of 1990s politics.
The biographer’s last word • Patrick Mullins
Adam Sisman is an attentive reader. As he demonstrated in biographies of the historian A.J.P. Taylor (1994), poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2006), and academic Hugh Trevor-Roper (2010), he is alive to detail, implications and subtleties. As a scholar of biography, moreover — as manifesting in his prize-winning Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (2000) — he knows the dynamics and tensions that make the form so energising to read and work in.
Patrick Mullins reviews 'Storytellers: Questions, answers and the craft' of journalism Leigh Sales
When the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom premièred in Australia in 2012, Foxtel had its own onscreen news talent cut a series of promos. A bevy of ageless news anchors – all dense hairdos and blazing white teeth – talked admiringly of how the series portrayed their profession. Journalism, in their telling, was fast-paced, often self-righteous, occasionally fallible, but ultimately always a noble occupation that served the public’s interest.
Desanctifying Orwell • Patrick Mullins
“To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of the Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority,” writes Deborah Levy, in Real Estate, the third volume of her autobiography, “is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman.” In Wifedom, Anna Funder — award-winning writer of the non-fiction Stasiland (2002) and novel All that I Am (2012) — strips everything from the edifice on which George Orwell’s reputation has stood and...
Patrick Mullins reviews 'Media Monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires' by Sally Young
Media The ploys of media moguls and politicians Media Monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires by Sally Young UNSW Press, $49.99 pb, 576 pp Media The ploys of media moguls and politicians In 1968, Rupert Murdoch was one step from acquiring his first international media holding, in the British tabloid The News of the World.
Patrick Mullins reviews 'The Morrison Government: Governing through crisis, 2019–2022' edited by Brendan McCaffrie, Michelle Grattan, and Chris Wallace
In June 1971, Sir John Bunting, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, observed that new prime minister Billy McMahon was ‘the most political of all politicians’: demanding, difficult, always reacting to new, feverish urgencies. The result, according to Bunting, was constant crisis.
Patrick Mullins reviews 'Tanya Plibersek: On her own terms' by Margaret Simons
Biography The first biography of a Labor survivor Tanya Plibersek: On her own terms by Margaret Simons Black Inc., $34.99 pb, 320 pp Biography The first biography of a Labor survivor Larissa Waters and Tanya Plibersek accept a petitition at the Women’s March4Justice Rally Parliament House, 15 March 2021 (Leo Bild/Alamy) In early March 2023, Tanya Plibersek fronted an audience at the Australian National University to question historian Chris Wallace about her newly released account of...
Traces of Norman Mailer • Patrick Mullins
Norman Mailer was four days from announcing his campaign to be New York’s mayor when, in November 1960, he hosted a friend’s birthday party in his apartment on 94th Street. Mailer’s intentions were not purely celebratory. As a prelude to his campaign he had friends round up less illustrious guests — people recently released from prison, the homeless, teenage delinquents, and more — to mingle with the elites he’d invited.
How To Scuttle A Public Broadcaster
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns. Today’s article, “How To Scuttle A Public Broadcaster,” was originally published by the SRB on October 31, 2022. The national public broadcaster is “smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, wet, [and] pink,” said one politician. It is “shamefully frivolous, vengeful, and partisan,” said the prime minister.
Student-Centered Pedagogy’s Activist Roots
In 1968, Toni Cade Bambara made a radical decision. At the time, Bambara—writer, activist, and more—was teaching a remedial writing class at the City University of New York. There, she met students who had been subjected to years of educational racism: underfunded schools, substandard conditions, outdated textbooks, and instructors more interested in disciplining students than nurturing their creativity or intellect. (She called this the “criminality of education”). These students deserved more.
“God save us all!” • Patrick Mullins
In May 1972, six months before that year’s election, the editor of the Melbourne Age enjoyed a surreal lunch with prime minister Billy McMahon. Describing him as “really dazzling company,” Graham Perkin was nonetheless staggered by the prime minister’s summary of the political scene and his government’s future.
Patrick Mullins reviews 'The Successor: The high-stakes life of Lachlan Murdoch' by Paddy Manning
In the 1990s, seeing a ‘hot-red weapon’ of a motorbike being ridden into the News Corp car park in Sydney, journalist Paddy Manning could not help but ask, ‘What’s that?’ Still wearing his helmet, the rider answered that the bike was an MV Agusta – at which point Manning realised he had yelled at Lachlan Murdoch. This encounter, described in the acknowledgments of The Successor, hints at the dual focus of the book.
Ideals, visions, buses and bridges • Patrick Mullins
Members of the modern political class often claim ownership of a privileged knowledge drawn from their direct experience of the blood, sweat and tears that flow in democratic politics. Outsiders, as Graham Richardson once wrote, merely have their “noses pressed against the windowpane” and can’t comprehend the stakes involved and the dilemmas confronted.
Patrick Mullins reviews 'A Sense of Balance' by John Howard
Since his (involuntary) retirement from politics in 2007, John Howard has gone to some lengths to encourage comparisons with Robert Menzies. He authored a lengthy paean to Australia’s longest serving prime minister (2014), appeared in a television series to appraise his leadership and era (2016), and curated an exhibition on him at the Museum of Australian Democracy.
Surely he wasn’t going in?
Has the end ever so defined the whole? In the fifty-five years since he disappeared into the surf at Cheviot Beach, Harold Holt’s life has been so defined by the circumstances of his death that his first biographer, Tom Frame, felt it necessary to give both equal weight in his title, The Life and Death of Harold Holt.
Patrick Mullins reviews 'Ego: Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party’s civil war' by Aaron Patrick
When out of government, the Coalition parties resemble nothing so much as an ill-disciplined horde, by turns bombastic and bilious, riven with discord, forever tearing down putative leaders and searching for scapegoats to explain their losses and lot. The blame almost always falls on the departed. In the 1980s, it was Malcolm Fraser’s unwillingness to undertake proper economic reform that they most decried; after 2007, it was John Howard’s refusal to relinquish the leadership to Peter Costello.
No-one is talking about ABC funding in this election campaign. Here's why they should be
The election campaign is well underway and the ABC is barely registering as an issue. Why is that, when according to the Morrison government’s own figures, the ABC’s real funding will continue to decline over the next three years? Not that the government acknowledges this. “The evidence is clear,” communications minister Paul Fletcher declared in February. “The Morrison government has provided strong and consistent support to the ABC.” This is a breathtakingly misleading statement.
Patrick Mullins reviews 'Bob Hawke: Demons and destiny' by Troy Bramston
Biography Texture and nuance in the new biography of Bob Hawke Bob Hawke: Demons and destiny by Troy Bramston Viking, $49.99 hb, 704 pp Biography Texture and nuance in the new biography of Bob Hawke Bob Hawke on his campaign plane, 1983 (Ray Strange/News Corp Australia, from the book under review) Curators at old Parliament House –now known as the Museum for Australian Democracy – have for many years maintained the prime minister’s suite much as it was when Bob Hawke vacated it in 1988.
Noel Pearson, radical centrist • Tim Rowse
Mission: Essays, Speeches & Ideas By Noel Pearson | Black Inc. | $49.99 | 608 pages Noel Pearson believes in human plasticity: people can and should remake themselves. Indeed, because his style is so autobiographical, Pearson is himself a prominent example of our capacity for reflection, revision and renewal. Mission includes fifty-seven items — twenty-eight of them first published in the Australian or the Weekend Australian.
Tall-poppy lopping • Patrick Mullins
History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy By Doug Munro | ANU Press | $55 (print), free online | 194 pages “This essay is an overdue axe laid to the stalk of a tall poppy.” So began Peter Ryan’s notorious attack on the work and character of the famed historian Manning Clark. The blows that Ryan delivered in the September 1993 issue of Quadrant magazine were legion.
Is the latest ABC inquiry really just 'business as usual'?
A fresh fight has broken out between the national broadcaster and the Coalition government. This time, it is over a Senate inquiry, instigated by a Liberal senator, into the way the ABC handles complaints. ABC chair Ita Buttrose has sensationally labelled the inquiry an act of “political interference designed to intimidate the ABC and mute its role”. She is calling on the senate to block the inquiry, when parliament returns next week.
Being David Gulpilil • Brian McFarlane
Since his first screen appearance in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) as the unnamed boy who helps rescue two privileged children stranded in the outback, David Gulpilil has been a significant figure in the New Australian Cinema. In fact, that film might almost be said to have ushered in the revival. Since then, Gulpilil has invariably brought to his roles a potent charisma and a sense of effortlessly inhabiting his characters.
Who did he think he was? • Patrick Mullins
The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Dissent By Gideon Haigh | Simon & Schuster Australia | $39.99 | 384 pages If there remains a dominant popular memory of H.V. Evatt, it is of the moment when, as leader of a fracturing Labor Party that would soon split, he tried to regain the political initiative. In the House of Representatives in October 1955, he accused prime minister Robert Menzies of using the defection of Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov to damage Labor.
Hollywood ending? • Jo Chandler
What’s that feeling? When you dare not believe that something, the thing, might finally be real? When bitter experience teaches that there’s still plenty of scope for it all to go to hell? Surely the Germans have a name for it? Sehnsucht, which I gather translates as a sickness of yearning, might get close. “Collingwood?” suggests a sad case of my acquaintance. In my vernacular it’s Copenhagen Syndrome.
Letting the repellent in • Patrick Mullins
Philip Roth: The Biography By Blake Bailey | W.W. Norton | $65 | 912 pages Blake Bailey’s biography of the American writer Philip Roth entered the world with all the makings of a scandal — appropriately enough, given its subject became synonymous with outrage over the course of his career.
“I'm the best of them”
John Grey Gorton: Australian to the Bootheels Paul Williams | Connor Court | $19.95 | 100 pages John Gorton might well have been the most self-amused of all of Australia’s prime ministers. Once asked to describe the sort of man he was, he replied that he was six feet tall and weighed about twelve stone. Later, speaking in 1998 with Griffith University lecturer Paul Williams, he described himself as Australia’s best prime minister.
How the world spins | Mark Baker
During a visit to Rome in the early 1970s, David Gulpilil went to see the martial arts hit Enter the Dragon and was delighted to discover that Walkabout, the movie that launched his own stellar acting career, was screening at the same cinema. “When I walked out into the foyer, there was Bruce Lee,” Gulpilil recalled decades later, still shaking his head in astonishment. “He was watching my movie and I was watching his.
Warren Denning and the making of Caucus Crisis
Warren Denning and the making of Caucus Crisis On 5 June 1936, journalist Warren Denning applied to the Australian Patent Office for copyright protection for a manuscript he had written entitled ‘Canberra Scene’.
9 things to do in your first 10 minutes on a Linux server
When I test software on Linux (a regular part of my job), I need to use multiple servers with various architectures running Linux. I provision the machines, install the required software packages, run my tests, gather the results, and return the machine to the pool so that others can use it for their tests. Since I do this so often (even multiple times a day), my first 10 minutes on a Linux server have become a daily ritual.
THE TRIALS OF PORTNOY
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom. In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife.
Trials of Portnoy: when Penguin fought for literature and liberty
Rose Park “You can let yourself be told a story, at your own whim and pleasure” Corporate Ladder: your weekly guide to executive appointments Latest data reveals depth of SA jobs hole Fitness app pays users to workout Books & Poetry For decades, literary censorship in Australia saw authorities ban, burn and seize books thought to threaten the morals of the public – until one publisher decided to take a stand. A new book by Patrick Mullins tells the inside story.
The Defeat of Literary Censorship
It took a book about masturbation to bring down Australia’s repressive regime of literary censorship. Philip Roth’s hugely controversial, highly sexualised novel Portnoy’s Complaint is a book about the habit that in the 1960s scarcely dared speak its name. Unseemly subject matter in the eyes of some, but that’s the point really.
Trials of Portnoy: when Penguin fought for literature and liberty Original
One grey morning in October 1970, in a crowded, tizzy-pink courtroom on the corner of Melbourne’s Russell and La Trobe Streets, crown prosecutor Leonard Flanagan began denouncing a novel in terms that were strident and ringing. “When taken as a whole, it is lewd,” he declared.
Australia's censorship system brought down by Penguin
.For over 70 years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia enforced one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. Then in 1970, Penguin took the risk of challenging the censorship of Philip Roth's novel, Portnoy's Complaint and after considerable raids and trials, finally brought down Australia's arcane censorship system.
The Trials of Portnoy
FREE SHIPPING ACROSS AUSTRALIA X Open menu Scribe AUS Scribe UK Scribe US Catalogue View Cart Search Home Books & Authors Books The Trials of Portnoy how Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system Patrick Mullins ‘Anyone interested in Australian history, politics and books generally will find much food for thought in this entertaining, well-researched and carefully written history.’ Julia Taylor, Books+Publishing Fifty years after the event, here is the first full account of an...
Billy McMahon: A hopeless, forgettable PM
In this new biography of Billy McMahon's life, author Patrick Mullins recounts his inadequacies as well as his considerable impact on Australian politics. PATRICK MULLINS has apparently hit the jackpot: an important political figure – a former Prime Minister no less – who for some reason has been ignored by biographers.
When William McMahon became Prime Minister
The stories about the cessation of civic aid to the South Vietnamese? The ructions between the Defence minister and his department? It was ‘a little conflict of no consequence,’ William McMahon told a colleague. He was wrong. The consequences of that little conflict would be huge. Within a week, that Defence minister would resign and launch a stinging attack on John Gorton, Australia’s prime minister since 1968.
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