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Christine Wallace

Australian political journalist and biographer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 3, 2023
Entity authorityQ5111212
Source-derived summary

Christine Wallace (born 1960) is an Australian political journalist, biographer and academic. She is currently an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow at the National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.

Her publications include biographies of John Hewson (1993), Germaine Greer (1997), and Don Bradman (2004).

Education

Wallace is a graduate of the Australian National University (BA, politics and history), University of Sydney (BEc) and the Australian Graduate School of Management (MBA).

In 2015, she completed her PhD (Australian National University) on political biography as political intervention.

Career

Political journalist

Wallace was a member of the Canberra Press Gallery and worked for a wide range of print and electronic media outlets including The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, Business Review Weekly, ABC Television, 666 ABC Canberra and the Adelaide radio station 5AA.

After a decade of political and economic journalism, she became a full-time writer in Sydney following the 1996 Australian federal election.

Biographer

Wallace has published three biographies.

Former leader of the Australian Liberal Party, John Hewson.

Hewson: A Portrait (1993) Sun Australia, ISBN 978-0-7251-0723-9

Feminist and public intellectual, Germaine Greer. The biography was unauthorised, and Greer called Wallace a "flesh-eating bacterium" and the book "a piece of excrement".

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Christine Wallace” as australian political journalist and biographer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Christine, Wallace and Australian.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1960, 1993, 1997, 2004—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1960-01-01. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Christine, Wallace and Australian providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Christine Wallace”, the useful work is to connect “australian political journalist and biographer” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 3, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q5111212. VIAF identifies the subject as 58301440. The Library of Congress control number is n94001567. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1993, 1997 and 2004.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Christine Wallace”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Christine Wallace primary sources, Christine Wallace archive and Christine research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Christine Wallace”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Christine Wallace” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.