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Summer Series 2022-3 Part 2: Troy Bramston & Charles Richardson

In this special summer series of the Afternoon Light podcast you can enjoy the presentations delivered at our November 2022 conference entitled ‘Coming to Power, Learning to Govern and Gathering Momentum 1943-1954’. This second episode features Troy Bramston’s paper on ‘Robert Menzies: The Art of Power’ and Charles Richardson’s paper on ‘Menzies, Evatt and Constitutional Government’ (begins at 19:15).

Troy Bramston is a senior writer and columnist with The Australian newspaper. His critically acclaimed book, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics (2019), is the only full-length biography of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister published in the past 20 years. Troy wrote the introduction to the official guide to Robert Menzies’ papers published by the National Archives of Australia in 2021. He is the best-selling and award-winning author or editor of 11 books in total, including the recently published Bob Hawke: Demons and Destiny (2022) and Paul Keating: The Big-Picture Leader (2016). Troy won the Australian Book Industry Award for The Dismissal (2015) co-authored with Paul Kelly.

Charles Richardson earned his PhD from Rutgers University, specialising in ethical theory and political philosophy. He worked as a ministerial adviser in the Victorian government, and later as editorial manager at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. He is currently an independent scholar based in Melbourne; his research interests include the history of liberal democratic structures and the comparative study of European party systems. Charles has been a regular contributor to Crikey since 2002, specialising in election analysis and political topics; since 2012 he has written on world politics at his blog, The World is Not Enough. His work has appeared in numerous other publications and he has been featured as a commentator in newspapers, radio and television; he has also presented at a number of conferences in philosophy and political science. He recently retired as a director of Above Quota Elections Pty Ltd, a company that contracts to run elections for non-government organisations, and he does periodic consulting work on electoral matters. He is not affiliated with any political party.