Convict flogging in Australia MICHAEL WILDING remembers a foundational Australian writer Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life is one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. The classic indictment of the horrors of the English convict system established in Australia, it is the story of Richard Devine, transported for a crime he did not commit…
MICHAEL WILDING surveys the sorry state of Australia’s universities The systematic degradation of the universities has now been continuing for 40 years. It began at the end of the 1970s, with the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA. Australia dutifully followed suit. The policies were a mixture of reprisals…
MICHAEL WILDING remembers stirrings among the dead letters The first piece of writing for which I got paid was an article in the local weekly paper. I was just 18, marking time between leaving school and going to university. The paper, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, claimed to be the oldest newspaper in the world, dating from…
Doctor Dee and Edward Kelly raising the dead MICHAEL WILDING tells the extraordinary story of the councillor, the charlatan, and the crowned heads of Europe In 1582, Dr John Dee advertised for an assistant. A mathematician of considerable reputation in England and in Europe, he was regularly consulted by powerful statesmen such as Lord Burghley,…