Books published by Melbourne University Press

Sir Robert Gordon Menzies was the founder of the Liberal Party of Australia. As well as being Australia's longest-serving prime minister, Menzies was the most thoughtful. Menzies' world picture was one where Britishness was the overriding normative principle, and in which cultural puritanism and philosophical idealism were pervasive. Unless we remember this cultural background of Menzies' thought then we will seriously misunderstand what he meant by the very project of liberalism. The Forgotten Menzies argues that Menzies' greatest aspiration was to protect the ideals of cultural puritanismin Australia from two kinds of materialism: communism; and the mindset encouraged by affluence and technological progress. Central to Menzies' project of cultural and civilisational preservation was the university, an institution he spent much of his career extolling and expanding. The Forgotten Menzies makes an important contribution to the history of political thought and ideology in Australia, as to understanding the largely forgotten but rich intellectual origins of the Liberal Party.

In the 1960s Dale Kent embarked on a lifelong struggle to fulfil the desire of many women of her generation - to be the most she could be. Her story, both poignant and darkly comical, traces a counterpoint between increasing professional success, a desperate search for a sexual soulmate and a way back to her daughter.

The narratives in My Forests are a pleasure to read; like strolling down a meandering track through the trees, you never quite know what you'll discover around that next bend. The book presents the role of trees in contemporary life in a world where most people don't live in the wild, and their acquaintance with nature comes from many sources.

By 2018, rates of the most common forms of crime in Australia had fallen between 40 and 80 percent and were lower than they'd been in twenty or in some cases thirty years. In The Vanishing Criminal Don Weatherburn and Sara Rahman set out to explain this dramatic fall in crime.

Charts the changing policies and practices of the Australian Defence Force, illuminating the experiences of LGBTI members in what was often a hostile institution. At the centre of this book are the courageous LGBTI members who served their country in the face of systemic prejudice.