Afternoon Light

Australia’s relationship with India has been slow to prosper. For all our cultural ties and mutual love of cricket, until recently the shared legacy of Empire tended to stunt rather than facilitate t…

It is little remembered that in the race to produce the world’s first nuclear weapon, Britain took an early lead before changing tact to focus on assisting America’s efforts. In the immediate afterma…

William Cooper was a pioneering Indigenous activist, notable for his famous petition to King George VI for an Aboriginal representative in the Australian parliament, his call for a day of mourning af…

Australia’s relationship with China has always been fraught with both difficulty and opportunity. It was Menzies who established Australia’s first diplomatic mission to China during World War Two, an…

One of the defining features of the Menzies era was a long economic boom where, apart from the occasional short hiccup, growth remained high while inflation and unemployment remained low. The eternal…

During the month of October, the Robert Menzies Institute has been very proud to host former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom Lord Jonathan Sumption on a tour of Australia in which …

Robert Menzies holds the record as Australia's longest serving prime minister, but he is certainly not Australia's longest serving ‘democratically’ elected political leader. That record is held by Th…

One of the more obscure achievements of the Menzies Government was establishing Mawson Station, Australia’s first permanent base on the once uninhabited southern continent. This difficult endeavour w…

The Colombo Plan is one of Australia’s most successful and best remembered foreign policy initiatives. It is commonly associated with an influx of visiting students from our region who helped to brea…

The dismantling of the White Australia Policy was a long process, but its tentative beginning may be dated to the initial wave of post-war migration which served to expand the definition of ‘Australi…

Seventy years ago the Menzies Government made the unlikely purchase of an original 1297 copy of Magna Carta. Transported to Australia with the greatest degree of care and attention, it has (barring t…

John Gorton attained the Prime Ministership in the unlikeliest of ways. Propelled into the media spotlight for lancing the boil of the VIP Aircraft Affair, he was able to use television and personal …

In the ‘Forgotten People’ broadcast Menzies presaged JFK by suggesting that ‘The great question is, "How can I qualify my son to help society?" Not, as we have so frequently thought, "How can I quali…

The issue of State Aid for independent schools was once one of the most divisive in Australian politics. When the advent of ‘free, compulsory, and secular’ education in the 19th century spelled the e…

The idea of an ‘Australian citizen’ is a concept that is in a perpetual state of development. At the time of federation, Australians considered themselves to be British subjects and the only time ‘ci…

While Australia’s hosting of British nuclear tests in the 1950s is a well-known and controversial policy of the Menzies Government, the fact that Australia sought its own ‘bomb’ remains relatively ob…

Often described as one of Australia’s weakest Prime Ministers, Billy McMahon nevertheless makes for a fascinating biographical subject. A notorious leaker who made far more enemies than friends, McMa…

At the heart of Robert Menzies’s appeal to the ‘Forgotten People’ was the family, the essential basis of a healthy society. Menzies described the instinct to be with one’s family as ‘the great instin…