Quarterly Essay

In A Time for War, John Birmingham ponders the Australian way of war. After East Timor and Bali, a combination of primal fear and primal ambition has transformed attitudes to our region, to security...

Kate Jennings was in New York, eyes wide open, completing her take on an amazing time- 'the run-up to the election ... a time when every day felt like a year and we became slightly crazed from worry...

How did Gough Whitlam and Richard Woolcott in 1975 saddle this country with a policy that was bound to lead to the intervention of 1999? Why were shrewder voices ignored and why did we persist with...

What do Australians want most from their next government? In this vivid, grounded, surprising essay, Rebecca Huntley listens to the people and hears a call for change. Too often we focus on the...

What does he know about Australia that his opponents don't? This is a characteristically barbed and perceptive look at the challenges facing the government and the country. MacCallum argues that the...

In Bad Company Gideon Haigh scrutinises the way we have turned CEOs into tin gods. Is moral outrage the appropriate response to the collapses of Enron or HIH or are we all implicated in a crazy...

In Beautiful Lies Tim Flannery launches an attack on the various lies that we tell ourselves about our resources, our past and our future.The lie of terra nullius that made us ignore the...

Last year was a "blood year" in the Middle East - massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS,...

The author of Curing Affluenzalooks at how neoliberalism ate itself and what comes next. For thirty years, we were told that privatisation and economic reform would be good for everyone. But now the...

Exit Right: The Unravelling of John Howard; Quarterly Essay 28Author: Judith BrettPublisher: Quarterly EssayPublication Date: Jul 14, 2007Number of Pages: 128 pagesBinding: Paperback or...

Faction Man: Bill Shorten's Path to Power; Quarterly Essay 59Author: David MarrPublisher: Quarterly EssayPublication Date: Sep 21, 2015Number of Pages: 156 pagesBinding: Paperback or SoftbackISBN-10:...

Once the country believed itself to be the true face of Australia: sunburnt men and capable women raising crops and children, enduring isolation and a fickle environment, carrying the nation on their...

In Girt By Sea Mungo MacCallum provides a devastating account of the Howard government's treatment of the refugees as well as delineating the factors in Australian history which have worked towards...

What will the climate crisis mean for Australia? What is the price of our inertia? Australia is in peril. Do we truly grasp the impact of a warming planet - in particular, what it will mean for our...

John Howard has the loudest voice in Australia. He has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced NGOs, censored the arts, prosecuted leakers, criminalised...

Judith Brett on the Politics of Denial: Australia's Coal Addiction: Quarterly Essay 78Author: Judith BrettPublisher: Quarterly EssayPublication Date: Jun 22, 2020Number of Pages: 140 pagesLanguage:...

The Family Court was a progressive reform of the 1970s. Now it is perhaps the most hated institution in Australia. In the first Quarterly Essay of 2005, John Hirst investigates what went wrong. This...

When Mal Brough and John Howard announced the Northern Territory intervention in mid-2007, they proclaimed a child abuse emergency. In this riveting piece of reportage and analysis, Paul Toohey...

In the third Quarterly Essay of 2004, Margaret Simons takes a long hard look at Mark Latham, the self-proclaimed 'club buster' and the man who would be prime minister. Few doubt Latham's intelligence...

Lone Wolf: Albanese and the New Politics: Quarterly Essay 88Author: Katharine MurphyPublisher: Quarterly EssayPublication Date: Nov 28, 2022Number of Pages: 158 pagesBinding: Paperback or...

In Love & Money, Anne Manne looks at the religion of work - its high priests and sacrificial lambs. As family life and motherhood feel the pressure of the market, she asks whether the chief...

In the fourth Quarterly Essay of 2003, David Malouf looks at Australia's bond with Britain and wonders whether it wasn't the Mother Country which did most of the giving. This is an essay which...

What does the new political landscape look like in Australia?Australian politics is shifting. The two-party system was broken at the last federal election, and a minority government is a real...

Mission Impossible: The Sheikhs, The US and The Future of Iraq: Quarterly Essay 14Author: Paul McGeoughPublisher: Quarterly EssayPublication Date: Jun 06, 2018Number of Pages: 126 pagesBinding:...

To read every article the Australian has published on Safe Schools is to induce nausea. This isn?t even a comment on the content, just the sheer volume ... And yet, across this entire period, the...

After many thousands of years, the nomads are disappearing, swept away by modernity. Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomadic cultures - in Australia, north-west India, Tibet and...

Sometime this century, after 4 billion years, some of Earth's regulatory systems will pass from control through evolution by natural selection, to control by human intelligence. Will humanity rise to...

A portrait of Peter Dutton, as well as a modern interrogation of the Australian suburbs and the people who live there. 2022 saw the splintering of the Liberal Party's electoral coalition. Influential...

Is the United States disintegrating? Don Watson offers a report from the United States that catches the madness and theatre of an election like no other. This is a historically informed, mordant...

In Paradise Betrrayed John Martinkus details what is being done to West Papua by its Indonesian overlords. He illustrates how those who seek independence are killed and tortured for their cause...