Patrick Mullins

For the past nine years, the ABC has been besieged. Its funding has been slashed. It has been assailed by complaints from ministers and prime ministers. Its board has been stacked with political appointees. It has been relentlessly attacked by commercial media outlets. And it has endured crisis after crisis. Who Needs the ABC? charts how, in its 90th year,...

Winner of the 2020 National Biography Award and the 2020 NSW Premier's Non-Fiction Award. The oddly compelling story of a man regarded as Australia's worst prime minister. Tiberius with a Telephone is the biography of William McMahon, a significant, if widely derided and disliked, figure in Australian politics in the second half of the twentieth century. This book tells the...

Fifty years after the event, here is the first full account of an audacious publishing decision that — with the help of booksellers and readers around the country — forced the end of literary censorship in Australia. For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of...

The extraordinary tale—'A two-volume mystery!' Mark Twain called it—of the solicitor who incited a campaign to free a man he knew was guilty of attempted murder, who lost his reputation and ability to practise, and who embarked on a decades-long political career to regain it all. Sydney, 1895. Richard Meagher is a brilliant criminal defence solicitor with ambitions in politics....