Chasing the Future: Journalists writing political history

Journalists writing books of contemporary political history in Australia have generally drawn upon the model that was established by Warren Denning (1937), consolidated and popularised by Alan Reid (1969; 1971; 1976) and augmented by Paul Kelly (1976; 1984; 1992; 1995; 2009a; 2014). By some reckoning, this approach has reached its “zenith” (Bramston, 2014), with an inevitable question begging what should come next. This article studies the development of the genre and – using the work of Kelly as an exemplar of the traditional approach – explores how contemporary practitioners George Megalogenis and Annabel Crabb are finding new directions for its application.