Not in Tranquility: a Memoir
Kew, Victoria:
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006.

"John McLaren's story begins with memories of growing up in a comfortable suburb discomforted byintrusions of Depression and War. He watches the first American marines come ashore at Mt Martha. He is uprooted from the city and settled into a country high school, only to be uprooted again and endure the rigours of boarding school. He finds himself at university in the aftermath of the War, and is then embroiled in the politics of the Labor Party; he teaches at high school, college and university; he edits Overland and Australian Book Review. This public life is paralleled by a family life of great joy, with shadows of drink, drugs and mortality."
- blurb.

Download edited extracts here:
Drugs in Toowoomba.pdf
Sedition in Toowoomba.pdf
Spirit of the Sixties.pdf
 

Free Radicals: of the Left in Postwar Melbourne
Kew, Victoria:
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2003.

"This is the story of three men, of their friendship and deep commitment to radical causes.  Of the same age, they met at Melbourne University at the end of the Second World War and shared a radical vision of Australia.  Along with some of the most intelligent, imaginative and freethinking people of their generation, Steven Murray-Smith, Ian Turner and Ken Gott submitted their minds and actions to the control of the Communist Party. The Party strongly influenced them, but they later rebelled against it.  They held to their radicalism, however, and strove for liberty and social justice within Australia and peace abroad."
- blurb.

  
States of Imagination: Nationalism and Multiculturalism
in Australian and Southern Asian Literature.
New Delhi, India:
Prestige Books and Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2001.

"John McLaren's readings of fictions from India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia - ranging from Kiplings Kim to K.S. Maniam's In a Far Country to Jasmin Goonerantne's Change of Skies - illustrates that the formation and/or contestation of the political and cultural concept of the nation remains an important concern of postcolonial societies. [...] This excellent study illustrates how imaginative writing continues to rework the concept of the nation; and McLaren's incisive readings argue in favour of the nation-state as still being the most desirable form of political community.  It will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of Asia and Australia."
- Janet Wilson, World Literature Written in English, Vol. 38, No. 1, 1999, pp. 125 & 126.

Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia.
Oakleigh, Victoria:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.

"For most of the postwar period, Australian literary debate was marked by the division between radical nationalists on the left and cultural conservatives on the right. These Cold War ideological positions were represented respectively by the journals Overland and Quadrant and played out in novels and newspapers. Writing in Hope and Fear is a broad cultural history that traces the origins of these conflicts, discusses key literary works and major journals, and focuses on the numerous writers, editors and activists involved in various sagas, scandals and struggles. John McLaren shows that, as well as being a reflection of society, writing became a form of politics, expressing either hope or fear about the revolution that was perceived to be imminent."
- blurb

For recent chapters or articles by John McLaren, see the Victoria University e-prints repository.