In The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s, McKenzie Wark examines the strange moment when Australia’s political arguments began migrating into media spectacle and emerging digital culture. Since, she has become one of the world's most prolific writers on digital space.

Writing in the late 1990s, Wark traces how debates about how national identity, history, and intellectual life were increasingly shaped by television, talkback radio, and the early internet. And that debate around gender, race and culture are subjects of continuous reinvention because of it.

The book moves through figures, institutions, and flashpoints of the decade—from public intellectuals and cultural critics to media personalities and political campaigns—mapping how the struggle over Australian identity became a kind of “virtual republic,” fought through representation, rhetoric, and mediated perception rather than traditional civic space.

Her study captures a transitional moment when information technology began reshaping how politics, culture, and public debate operate.