In this special summer series of the Afternoon Light podcast you can enjoy the presentations delivered at our November 2025 conference entitled ‘Menzies and the British Commonwealth of Nations’. This fifth episode features Dan Brettig’s paper ‘Menzies, Cricket, and the Cold War’, Teesta Prakash’s paper ‘Menzies, Commonwealth and Kashmir’, Stewart Gill’s paper ‘Canada and Australia in the Commonwealth:
Robert Menzies’s Relationship with Mackenzie King to Lester Pearson’, & Tim Rowse’s paper ‘Menzies’s disenchantment with the British Commonwealth’.

Daniel Brettig is The Age‘s chief cricket writer and author of several books on cricket. They include Whitewash to Whitewash: Australian Cricket’s Years of Struggle and Summer of Riches, Bradman & Packer: The Deal that Changed Cricket, and Bucking the Trend (co-authored with Chris Rogers).

Teesta Prakash is the research fellow (security and geopolitics) at the Australia India Institute. She is an expert on the strategic affairs of the Indo-Pacific, specialising in geoeconomics of India, Southeast Asia, and the Quad. Previously, she was an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute leading the Australia-India Cyber and Critical Technology Program between 2022 and 2023. Before that she was the inaugural Southeast Asia Research Associate at the Lowy Institute between 2021 and 2022. Dr Prakash completed her PhD in 2021 from Griffith University; the focus of her thesis was Australia-India strategic and economic relations during the Cold War.

Stewart Gill OAM is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He was formerly Master of Queen’s College. He has a Master of Arts from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Guelph. He is a Fellow of The Royal Historical Society, London and his published historical studies span Canada, Scotland, and Australia.

Tim Rowse is an historian of Australia. Before retiring in 2016 from Western Sydney University, he had held appointments (of various lengths) at: Macquarie University, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, The Menzies School of Health Research, the Australian National University and Harvard University. Most of his publications have been about the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. He is also the author of two books about the career of Dr. H.C. Coombs. In recent years, with Murray Goot, he has written on the politics of constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, and he and Professor Goot have a book length account of the 2023 referendum in press.