Congratulations to Michelle Arrow for the publication of her new book The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (NewSouth, 2019). The book examines not just how activists made the personal political, but it also considers how this idea reshaped Australian politics, in the 1970s and beyond.
The Seventies was the decade that shaped modern Australia. It was the decade of ‘It’s Time’, stagflation and the Dismissal, a tumultuous period of economic and political upheaval. But the Seventies was also the era when the personal became political, when we had a Royal Commission into Human Relationships and when social movements tore down the boundary between public and private life. Women wanted childcare, equal pay, protection from violence and agency to shape their own lives. In the process, the reforms they sought — and achieved, at least in part — reshaped Australia’s culture and rewrote our expectations of government. In a lively and engaging style, Michelle Arrow has written a new history of this transformative decade; one that is more urgent, and more resonant, than ever.
Arrow will be in conversation with Frank Bongiorno in the
ANU/CANBERRA TIMES Meet the Author Series on 7 March 2019, 6.00-7.00pm.