In this fifth episode of the Afternoon Light Summer Series you will hear from Anne Henderson on ‘Preparation for War, the Trade Union Movement and Appeasement’ and Frank Bongiorno on ‘Curtin and Menzies’.

Anne Henderson AM takes aim at writers who have criticised Menzies for being an ‘appeaser’ in the face of the rising threat of fascism in the late 1930s, contextualising his views so as to defeat historical anachronisms.

Henderson is the Deputy Director of the Sydney Institute. She is a prolific and respected author, having published books on Enid Lyons, Joseph Lyons, Mary Mackillop, Patrick Glynn and more. In 2014 she published Menzies at War, a detailed account of Menzies’s years in the political wilderness between his two stints as prime minister, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for History.

Professor Frank Bongiorno AM looks at the relationship between Menzies and fellow wartime Prime Minister John Curtin, demonstrating Menzies’s ability to forge friendships across the political divide and highlighting how both men were the products of an Australian culture that encouraged a surprisingly high level of learning even among the working class.

Bongiornois the Head of the School of History at the Australian National University. He is an Australian political, labour, and cultural historian, with a particular interest in the history of the Australian Labor Party, on which he has published widely. His books include The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2015), The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1875-1914 (1996), and The Lives of Australians: A History (2012). He was co-editor of Elections Matter: Ten Federal Elections that Shaped Australia (2018).