Briefing MONTHLY #91 | December 2025

BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS! THE CULTURAL REVOLOUTION IN CHINA by Linda Jaivin (Black Inc)

Jaivin has won widespread praise for distilling into a little over 100 pages a turbulent, tumultuous decade. The short history format was specified by the UK publisher and with some judicious plucking, Jaivin conveys the big narrative, the key players at the top – Mao, Jiang Qing and so on – and brings to life the impact on ordinary people. Along with the big sweep, we get the details. These include the title of the Peter Sellers film that British diplomats watched as they drank claret and waited to see if their Mission would be stormed by the Red Guard. As Jaivin told an interviewer, “It’s not the most important detail of the Cultural Revolution, obviously – but it’s such a great one”.

MELANESIA: TRAVELS IN BLACK OCEANIA by Hamish McDonald (Black Ink)

McDonald has been telling Asia-Pacific’s stories for four decades, so it’s no surprise this deep dive into the group of islands that stretches from Fiji to New Guinea combines reporting grit with sharp contemporary analysis. The Albanese government says Australia is a “permanent contest” with China to be the partner of choice for Pacific nations, but few Australians know much about our near neighbours’ sense of themselves. McDonald travelled from one end of Melanesia to the other for this book and does an impeccable job of passing on what he learned.

CHINA'S GRAND STRATEGY AND AUSTRALIA'S FUTURE IN THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER by Geoff Raby (Melbourne University Publishing)

Raby’s second book in as many years was released only four months into the second Trump presidency, but captures the zeitgeist nicely. The former Australian ambassador to China gives his take on how Australia should navigate an increasingly alarming international outlook. Russia’s war in Ukraine has ground on for close to four years, there’s a quixotic leader in the White House, and China remains our biggest trading partner, our most serious security threat, and a constant source of conjecture. How should Australia approach a more aggressive China under Xi Jinping? Raby believes many overstate China’s ambitions for global domination and sets out his views on what Beijing really wants and how Australia should respond.

THE CONTESTED STATE: THE INDONESIAN BANK RESTRUCTURING AGENCY DURING THE ASIAN FINANCIAL CRISIS by Matthew Busch (Melbourne University Publishing)

Indonesia’s Reformasi period is endlessly fascinating. So much changed so quickly during the late 1990s with the end of Suharto’s era and the Asian Financial Crisis. This book tells the story through the lens of the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA), the subject of the author’s PhD at Melbourne University. Source material includes previously unpublished audits of the agency done after the IBRA was wound up in 2004. The relatively slim volume, at just 192 pages, sheds new light on the IBRA’s radical actions including nationalising two of Indonesia’s largest private banks – and the world’s biggest shrimp farm.

SURVIVAL IN SINGAPORE: ELIZABETH CHOY, OPERATION JAYWICK AND THE BATTLE FOR TRUTH IN CHANGI by Tom Trumble (Penguin)

This book lives up to the cover blurb that promises “a gripping account of an untold story of Japanese-occupied Singapore”. I was hooked from the first page. Operation Jaywick was a bold attack by Australian WW2 commandos who planted limpet bombs on ships in Changi Harbour and returned home undetected. Canberra opted not to take advantage of the propaganda value in order to try and repeat the subterfuge. This reticence resulted in imprisonment and torture in Singapore for the men – and woman – thought to have been involved in the covert attack. Trumble does an amazing job recreating the experiences of the key characters in this wartime drama that took place so close to home.

BLAMEY: THE STORY OF AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST GENERAL by Brent Taylor (ABC Books)

As General Sir Peter Cosgrove writes in his foreword, there has been a lot of “jaundiced opinion” about General Sir Thomas Blamey, who led the Australian Army though World War Two. One of the best-known stories about Blamey is that he accused some diggers of running “like rabbits” in fighting on the Kokoda Track. While the veracity of this account is questionable, there were other accusations of drinking and womanising, fraud and corruption. Taylor acknowledges Blamey was a flawed hero but argues it is his military contribution that should define his legacy. He argues Blamey’s greatest achievement was saving tens of thousands of diggers’ lives by avoiding defeats and adroitly “managing up” under first British, and then American, command.

BORNEO: THE LAST CAMPAIGN by Michael Veitch (Hachette Australia)

On July 1, 1945, the first Australian troops arrived on the jungle island of Borneo in Operation OBOE, one of the largest amphibious invasions of World War Two. Veitch details the Allied politics behind the campaign – what General Douglas MacArthur wanted, he got – and has mined Battalion histories to recreate what it was like to fight an enemy teetering on total defeat but who refused to give up. There were 80,000 Australian troops involved in OBOE and 2000 casualties, yet its strategic value was questionable. This, along with war fatigue, helps explain why it never became part of our national folklore like other campaigns.

THE CURIOUS DIPLOMAT: A MEMOIR FROM THE FRONTLINES OF DIPLOMACY by Lachlan Strahan (Monash University Publishing)

For outsiders, diplomacy will always have the whiff of a Graham Greene mystery. Strahan lifts the curtain in this entertaining and informative memoir. His three decades at DFAT included stints in South Korea, India and the Solomon Islands at times of crisis. He was in Seoul when US intelligence sources gave the Bush Administration the ammunition it needed to abandon 1994’s Agreed Framework that had contained North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Northeast Asia suddenly seemed to be on the brink of war. Australia’s Foreign Minister at the time, Alexander Downer, decided to send a five-person team to the Hermit Kingdom to put Australia’s position. The trip left indelible impressions on Strahan. He was in India when the student crisis prompted widespread anger toward Australians. And in 2022, Strahan was in the Honiara hot seat when the shock announcement of a security pact between the Solomon Islands and China made foreign policy a key election issue at home.

GUTS by Melissa Leong (Murdoch Books)

Leong is a first-generation Singaporean Australian who grew up in the Sutherland Shire which was hardly a beacon of multiculturalism in the 1980s. She recalls being conspicuous and not in a good way; “teachers would pretend not to hear Ching Chong Chinaman being whispered when I walked past”. Her professional life began in digital advertising and wound through journalism and broadcast media until she got properly famous as the first female judge on MasterChef Australia, a gig she describes as a “set of golden handcuffs”; a great opportunity but also limiting. What shines through is her very Singaporean-like appreciation of good food that survived white suburbia and became a professional asset.

THE GOOD DAUGHTER by Kumi Taguchi (Simon & Schuster)

Taguchi is a journalist, broadcaster and presenter whose Japanese father was distant and reserved in her early years growing up in Melbourne. After her parents divorced, he was largely absent through her teens and early 20s. This memoir recounts Taguchi’s quest to get to know him, including travelling to Japan after his death to learn about his early life. She re-examines the Japanese heritage that as a child she had often tried to push away. This is a story about identity, about what you are told as you grow up, tracking down missing pieces, and assembling your own sense of yourself.

MEMOIR OF FREEDOM by Cheng Lei (HarperCollins)

You undoubtedly know her name. For more than three years, successive Australian governments campaigned for the release of Cheng, the Chinese-born Australian journalist who was detained by Beijing on false charges of espionage. Now you can read her story of imprisonment, of being cut off from her children and despairing at the absurdity of her conviction. Among many interrogations and searches into every nook and cranny of her life, the best prosecutors could come up with was a text message to a friend that broke the embargo on a government document – except her version of events is that document had no embargo on it. This book is many things; an insight into the power of China’s national security apparatus; a lesson on how to survive long, long stretches of enforced solitude; and an insight into what happens after release, an experience Cheng compares to being a newborn.

JOSS: A HISTORY by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing)

This collection is a tribute to the 60,000 Cantonese who migrated to Australia during the mid to late 19th century and the long arc of the Chinese diaspora spanning Sydney to Bendigo, Beechworth, Omeo, Daylesford, Dimboola and Melbourne, where Yee lives. “let’s languish on little bourke street: the longest continuous / chinese settlement in the western world”, she writes in the poem with two black dates for sweetness. In Yee’s words, JOSS aims to both “unsettle the stories that perpetuate the tropes and stereotypes” of early migrants and shed some light on some “lesser-known histories”.

THAI ANYWHERE AND EVERYWHERE by Nat Thaipun (Hardie Grant Books)

According to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, Thaipun has “already helped shape the future of Australian food”, which is quite a plaudit since few would have known her before she won MasterChef Australia last year. This truly is a wonderful cookbook though – and you don’t need a professional kitchen or even a sous chef to enjoy the recipes. In the introduction, Thaipun writes of growing up between two cultures, “Australian on the outside, Thai on the inside”. At home, her parents insisted we “live like we were still in Thailand. We spoke Thai, we learned to read and write and, most importantly, we cooked and ate like Thai people”. We owe her parents a vote of thanks.

LUCKY DRAGON SUPPER CLUB by Stephanie Feher (Murdoch Books)

Feher is an Australian-born cook with a Chinese-Hungarian background who established the Lucky Dragon Supper Club during the pandemic to share recipes with family and friends. Her first book is a mix of staples like dumplings and chicken rice to mash-ups like sticky date cake with miso butterscotch sauce. The emphasis is on dinner party cooking with suggestions ranging from meals for two to extensive supper club spreads.

FIERCELAND by Omar Musa (Penguin Books)

This sweeping family saga begins in the city of Kota Kinabalu, capital of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo. It’s a laid-back kind of place often referred to simply as KK. It’s also where Penny Wong was born and while geopolitics is not front of mind for the KK family at the heart of this novel, the politics of development casts a long shadow. Roz and her brother Harun are the children of Yusuf who has made his fortune in palm oil. The high environmental cost of this crop that grows monotonously across large tracts of Malaysia and Indonesia is well known. As they grow up, the siblings respond in different ways to their father’s legacy. The Australian-Malaysian author is also a poet and rapper and his language is distinctive.

WHAT KEPT YOU? by Raaza Jamshed (Giramondo Publishing)

This novel begins with an Australian bushfire and goes on to make many shifts in time, place and form. Key to the story is Nani, the grandmother who was the central figure in the narrator’s - Jahan’s  childhood in Lahore, Pakistan. Nani was the one who “who authored the roles in our origin stories”, Jahan recounts. All these stories were set in pre-partition India. “India to us was an insatiable monster, always enroute, always jumping over a wall on its bloated feet, lurching towards us; India to you spelled the home you could never return to, the one you left behind at the time of the Indian subcontinent’s butchering”. Like her protagonist Jahan, the author migrated to Australia from Pakistan.

THE PRINCE WITHOUT SORROW by Maithree Wijesekara (HarperCollins)

Debut author Wijesekara is an Australian-Sri Lankan writer based in Melbourne. Graduating with a Master’s degree in Dentistry, she says she “splits her time between telling people to please brush their teeth, and writing stories inspired by the fantastical and the real world”. This book is the first in a planned trilogy inspired in part by the Mauryan Empire of Ancient India. It features an Emperor angered by the inexplicable crumbling of iron ore, needed for steel. While it’s hard to imagine our political leaders burning witches like Wijesekara’s Emperor Adil, you can imagine how such a problem would send modern Australia into a spin.

UNTIL THE RED LEAVES FALL by Alli Parker (HarperCollins)

There’s a lot going on in this work of historical fiction. The central character Emmy Darling’s real name is Emiko Tanaka and her family’s experiences – including internment – in Australia during World War Two are central to the plot. Many women reading this will have reason to be glad they don’t live in 1950s Melbourne. This is the second novel by Japanese-Australian author Parker whose debut work told the story of her grandmother, the first Japanese war bride to arrive in Australia.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS by Shankari Chandran (Hardie Grant)

British-Australian writer Chandran’s latest novel is set in Sri Lanka in 2009. The action predates the economic crisis that sparked widespread protests and ultimately broke the Rajapaksa family’s grip on power in real life in 2022, but the country’s tumultuous post-civil war power plays are key to the plot. The action follows CIA agent Ellie Harper, who’s been sent to investigate the murder of journalist of Ameena Fernando. A thriller with bite.

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH by Richard Flanagan (Penguin)

If you’re looking for a book to tuck into your cabin luggage, you can’t go past this new edition of Flanagan’s masterpiece that won the Booker Prize in 2014. The Prime Video mini-series of the same title that aired this year also may have found new readers for this story of World War Two prisoner of war Dorrigo Evans, his experiences building the Burma Railway and his life before and after. As The Economist notes, Flanagan is “considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation”.