Clive Hamilton
Provocateur: A life of ideas in action
Hardie Grant, 2022
Clive Hamilton has spent a life asking why. In his unique memoir, Provocateur, he shows us why questioning the status quo matters, how powerful arguments can change the country, and how the life of ideas in action actually works.
From why climate change matters to how we understand ourselves as Australians and the dangers to us of the new authoritarianism – all this and more has been shaped, for better or worse, by public researchers and writers like Hamilton. His work, and that of the Australia Institute he founded, made him many friends as well as powerful enemies. He’s been denounced in federal parliament, black-handed by the Chinese Communist Party and sued by an angry corporation. He’s had to call in the police after death threats and take a crash course in counter-surveillance techniques. But he has also influenced the quality of the air Australians breathe, the cost of our education and how we see Australia’s place in the world.
In Provocateur, we see the passions, the doubts, the strategising, the fears, the victories, the mistakes and the questioning. Here is a blueprint for changing public debate in our increasingly uncertain times – proof that ideas are powerful and that a different way into the future is possible.
About the Author
Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and academic. His influential books include Silent Invasion, Growth Fetish, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change and Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. For fourteen years he was the executive director of The Australia Institute, a think tank he founded. A professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, he has held visiting academic positions at the University of Oxford, Yale University and Sciences Po. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The New York Times, Times Higher Education Supplement, Nature and Scientific American.
