In the final sitting weeks of 2016 the West Australian Parliament passed the Restraining Orders and Related Legislation Amendment (Family Violence) Bill 2016, which introduces a range of legal reforms, including changes to the Criminal Code (WA) to deal with violence against women that harms their unborn child. This specific reform is a positive step…
LIBERTY OR DEATH: The French Revolution by Peter McPhee Yale University Press, Yale Hardcover: 488 pagesISBN: 9780300189933 Price: AUD$57.95 Reviewed by Bill James General Charles de Gaulle once asked: “How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?” France has always been a nation of striking regional differences, and this was no less true during the revolutionary era 1789–99. One of the strengths of Peter McPhee’s story in Liberty or Death: The French Revolution is that he continually describes the ways in which the revolution, and the reactions to it, took varying forms, not only in Paris and provincial France, but across and within these provinces, and even in France’s overseas colonies. Thus the increasingly radical events in Paris met with enthusiastic…
The death of the 90-year-old former leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, was widely reported as the death of a dictator – but one who was loved by his people and who vastly improved the lot of ordinary Cubans. The media also repeated that the United States Government, specifically the CIA, had tried to assassinate him, according to some reports, hundreds of times. It was as if America’s hostility, and its long-standing economic sanctions against Cuba, was the cause of Castro’s authoritarianism. Occasionally mentioned was the fact that under Castro, Cuba became a communist state and ally of the Soviet Union. But since the Soviet Union no longer exists, and few know what communism is, this doesn’t sound like a bad thing … (And as every teenage rebel knows, you can…
A few years ago, Australian poet and writer Andrew Lansdown penned a reflection on the great hymn, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. Andrew is an evangelical Christian, and the hymn was written by Charles Wesley, younger brother of the founder of the Methodists, John Wesley. In its present form, it is now part of…
