There are books that inform, books that provoke, and then there are books that feel like a defiant bugle blast across a nation that has forgotten how to stand tall. Australia Forever: The Collected Essays of Graeme Campbell (24 November 2025) is emphatically the third kind. At 82, the former federal Labor MP for Kalgoorlie (1980–1998), and unapologetic patriot has fired his final, magnificent broadside. And what a broadside it is.
This is not a polite memoir. It is a 420-page Molotov cocktail of common sense, wrapped in the Union Jack and Southern Cross, lobbed straight into the open-plan offices of the modern Australian commentariat. Campbell pulls no punches, takes no prisoners, and refuses to apologise for loving his country with a ferocity that would make today's political class faint from the sheer testosterone of it.
The essays span four decades but read as if they were written yesterday, so prophetic, so unerringly accurate has Campbell proven to be. On mass immigration: "We are importing the problems of the world over-population and calling it compassion." On multiculturalism: "A nation that forgets its own story will soon be ruled by people who hate that story." On the republic, and the endless treaty circus: he saw it all coming in the 1990s and called it with the clarity of a desert prophet. Every page drips with the fury of a man who watched the country he fought for slowly dismantled by people who never had to fight for anything.
What makes Australia Forever electrifying is not just the prescience; it is the sheer moral force. Campbell writes like a working-class poet who read Gibbon and Churchill in the Kalgoorlie pubs. Sentences land like sledgehammers: "Multiracialism is the euthanasia of nations." "Republicanism is the vanity project of people who hate the only Australia that ever actually worked." "Net-zero is a suicide note written in solar panels." You can almost hear the gravel in his throat and iron in his spine.
Yet beneath the thunder there is profound tenderness. His essays on the Australian digger, the Anzac spirit, the bush battler, the shearer, the nurse who worked three jobs to keep the country pub alive; these are love letters to a people he refused to let disappear. When he writes of the "quiet, stoic, mate-looking-after-mate decency that built this nation," you feel the dust of the Nullarbor in your mouth and a lump in your throat.
The book is organised thematically rather than chronologically, so the reader is treated to a relentless intellectual assault: immigration, identity, foreign ownership, mining, defence, the monarchy, the betrayal of the working class by Labor, the rise of the green-Left elite. Each section ends with a short, updated 2025 postscript; Campbell's last words before the cancer finally won; and they are devastating in their calm certainty. He knows he won't live to see the revival he predicts, but he believes it is coming all the same. "Australia," he writes, "is too good a country to be allowed to die of cowardice."
Is the book politically incorrect? Gloriously so. Will the usual suspects call it "far-Right, racist, xenophobic? They already are. Good. Let them. History is written by the victors, but prophecy is written by the exiles, and Campbell has earned his place among the latter-day Jeremiah's of the West.
Buy this book. Read it in public. Leave it on the train. Press it into the hands of every young Australian who thinks patriotism is a dirty word. Because when the history of the great push-back against the Long March through Australia's institutions is finally written, the opening chapter will simply say: "Graeme Campbell saw it first, said it loudest, and never, ever backed down."
Australia Forever is more than a collection of essays. It is a battle standard. And long after the current crop of timid, focus-grouped politicians are forgotten, Graeme Campbell's voice will still be echoing across the red centre, calling his countrymen home.
Vale, old warrior. The country you loved forever will remember you.
And one day, God willing, it will deserve you again.
5 stars isn't enough. This one gets the Southern Cross.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Australia-Forever-Collected-Essays-Campbell/dp/B0G2JX1K9L/ref=sr_1_1