The Good University is an important book which should be read by anyone concerned about modern academia, both inside and outside the institutions. It should also be mandatory reading for all of Australia’s Vice-Chancellors.

From the outset, white settlement of Australia met Indigenous resistance. Until the establishment of policing after 1810, and the development of case-specific punitive ‘settler’ parties and expeditions, and the use of special-purpose militarised ‘police’ units, resistance was quelled by the military.

From late April 1938 through to early August, Attorney General Menzies went on a lengthy tour of Europe. His itinerary included Nazi Germany, where the German Foreign Office was placed at his service. In private, as even his friendly biographers have to admit, Menzies regarded Hitler as a political dreamer, a man with many good ideas. In Germany, Menzies met with many Reich identities, including the President of the Reichsbank, the economic fixer significantly responsible for stitching the deals and links that helped put the Nazis in power.

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, the PM (1996–2007) who took Australia to war in Iraq (2003) in the bloody search-and-destroy mission against non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) recently confessed to being a little embarrassed.

On April Fools’ Day 1963, the first issue of the Sydney-based satirical journal Oz went on sale. The first print-run of 6000 copies sold within three hours, and a second printing followed. The sixteen pages of black-and-white letterpress sold for 1/3d. Produced on a shoestring budget, it was the work of three young editors (Richard Neville, Martin Sharp, Richard Walsh), all with backgrounds in university student publications. At its height, Oz achieved a circulation of 40,000.

This year marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death (20 May 1864) of English poet, ‘Mad’ John Clare, who died of a stroke, and was buried in Helpston, the village of his birth. Known in his time as a ‘peasant poet’ (a description he sometimes adopted himself), most of Clare’s life centred on the East Midlands region of Northamptonshire, its villages, people, its fields, forests, waterways and byways.

As the Anzac commemoration industry, awash with millions of dollars of government and corporate investment, gears up to celebrate the centenary of the Gallipoli landing in 2015 (embracing in the process all Australian military adventures overseas going back to involvement in the New Zealand Maori Wars of 1863–64), and the Sudan intervention of 1885), it is salutary to reflect on a seldom discussed Australian military tradition closer to home – in fact, at home. Simply, military might in Australia has, since early colonial days, been deployed on the home front.

In 1969, American historian Jesse Lemisch was in his early thirties. His politics and approach to history were shaped by the Cold War, as well as his involvements in the civil rights and anti-war movements and other struggles against the power structures of the day.

In October 2013, the right-wing journal Quadrant published the book Australia’s Secret War, an account by Hal Colebatch of homefront industrial disruptions by Australian trade unions during the Second World War. Described as a secret history rescued from ‘folk memory’ – and one previously suppressed by leftists – it detailed ‘treacherous’ industrial actions by unionists that denied/delayed vital war materials to the frontlines between 1939 and 1945, resulting in the deaths of service personnel.

Australia is a martial and warlike nation, established on beachheads on the east coast of the continent in 1789 by the military might of Britain. Long-running martial conflict with the indigenous people ensued, a conflict that went on into the 1920s and is yet to be incorporated into mainstream tellings of the history of the Australian nation. Australia’s enthusiastic debut as a military nation during the abattoirs of the First World War was not the unprecedented event that the myth makers eulogise.

It is fifty years since leftist publisher Victor Gollancz published The Making of the English Working Class by English historian Edward Palmer Thompson (1924–1993). During 2013, this event has been, and is being, commemorated globally in political and scholarly conferences and journals. Still in print, and with more than a million copies sold worldwide, Thompson’s hugely influential doorstop book is regarded as a pivotal exploration of social history, as much an historical classic as it is a literary classic.