FOOT SOLDIER IN THE CULTURE WARS
Tony Thomas
Paperback, 285 pages, $29.95
Release Date: June 2020
ISBN 9781922449627
Tony Thomas’s new essays pulverise “woke” causes including climate doomism; the Aboriginal industry; and the ABC’s bias.
While society goes mad with political correctness, Tony gives sanity and
laughter a chance. He probes the outer reaches of woke-ism for
absurdities beyond satire.
Who else but Tony would record that Melbourne University’s green brigade imported a guest expert on “tree humping”?
Tony also focuses on great Aboriginal questions of the day, like “Who
gets to be an Elder?” Can you be a younger Elder and why are 80% of
Elders worried about other Elders’ bona fides? As for who gets to be an
Aborigine, one of 85,000 recent “new identifiers” discovered her
Aboriginality by talking to her chooks.
Tony is not just a political tragic. In wide-ranging essays he writes
about Australia’s greatest spy – a persuasive middle-aged housewife in
Adelaide with baby-blue eyes. He writes how at 20 he was taught German
by a literary scholar who then was sentenced to hang for murder. And he
describes how 5000 Perth citizens armed with pistols, rifles and
shotguns went on a man-hunt in a pine plantation in 1963 -- with police
approval.
Tony gives you a feast of far-fetched facts, and as always, it’s with a sly smile.
I have known Tony for over 40 years. These essays reflect his meticulous
research, attention to detail and, above all, his passionate
condemnation of all the lies, hypocrisy, smugness and groupthink that
demean our public policy debate.
-- John Stone, Federal Treasury Secretary 1979-84, National Party Senator 1987-90:
Some authors proffer mindfulness, a calming and sombre page or two from
which to fall quietly into slumber. If you’re looking for such inert
writing, drop this volume like a hot cake. For here the indefatigable
Tony Thomas again introduces his readers to a wild, colourful,
convulsive world of eccentrics, of argumentation, of strange and
sometimes strikingly uncongenial places and cultures, as he persists in
his restless everyman quest for answers to his endless questions.
-- Rowan Callick OBE, China expert and an Australian Journalist of the Year
There is only one Tony Thomas, a fact for which peddlers of cant,
snout-troughing catastropharians and the ABC — but I repeat myself —
must daily rejoice.
-- Roger Franklin, editor of Quadrant Online.
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