Quadrant articles from April 2002

Quadrant archives from April 2002

Anti-anti-Howardism. (Editorial).(John Howard, Australia)(Brief Article)(Editorial)
April 1, 2002... IN THE BAD OLD DAYS of the Cold War and US Senator Joe McCarthy there arose a phenomenon which came to be known as anti-anticommunism. The unsavoury nature of communism was almost matched, and in domestic terms (in the USA, Australia and most...

Racism and refugees. (Society).(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2002... THERE IS A SIMPLE and clear case that Australia should accept more refugees. It does not require us to attack the current government, or its supporters, or the Australian people, as racist. In the main, such attacks are misguided, and they are...

Haiku for Issa.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... HAIKU FOR ISSA i Waiting in a queue-- having a chuckle at one of Issa's haiku. ii Such haiku, Issa! Ah, only at the Buddha do our pathways part. iii Issa, Issa, oh! If this...

Envy.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... ENVY I watch with envy the small birds in the bamboo. So now and happy! They at least need not review what they did or did not do.

Black Bamboo.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... BLACK BAMBOO i Empathy today with the ebony bamboo-- this empty feeling. ii This feeling--something that's escaped from the centre of a bamboo cane. iii Hollow... I suppose ...

Old Dogs.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... OLD DOGS John's brother Mickey drove me out To visit the farm for lunch; to entertain Me, he talked about his life, his fortunes, His health, while crossing Lake Ponchartrain. The dogs were everywhere as we drove in...

The logic of the labels. (Politics).
April 1, 2002... IN EARLY JANUARY Tony Abbott, in a speech to the Young Liberal Movement, started another battle in a long political and cultural war. His speech was called "Feeling Better about Australia", and he started provocatively: I suspect that...

John Gorton: my part in his downfall: with apologies to spike Milligan.
April 1, 2002... I WAS DOOR-KNOCKING a tough Sydney suburb when the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, drowned at Cheviot beach in December 1967. The idea was to win a seat in the state parliament in the election due any time. The voters were middle-aged...

Living Comet.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... LIVING COMET She was born before I met her mother, but we were father-daughter for twelve years. The big bang of divorce sent her into yet another orbit. As a comet she comes round once in many years....

Half.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... HALF I run around the shack stating to my mother half of me is Indian and half of me is French its straight down the middle half of me is white half of me is brown I tell her Spock is a Half-breed...

Has the National Museum got it all wrong? A response to Keith Windschuttle. (History).
April 1, 2002... IN THE SEPTEMBER 2001 edition of Quadrant, Keith Windschuttle reviewed the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. His assessment was scathing. In summary, Windschuttle described the museum as "a profound intellectual mistake as well as a...

Social history and aboriginal legends: a reply to Gary Morgan.(National Museum of History exhibitions)
April 1, 2002... MY ARGUMENT in Quadrant, September 2001, that the National Museum of Australia was a profound intellectual mistake, had a number of premises but the main one was a critique of the following proposition expressed at a 1999 conference to justify...

Postmodern museum or refluent critic? A response to Rod Moran.(Western Australian Museum and Indigenous history)
April 1, 2002... HAVING ATTEMPTED to address at least some of the views espoused by Keith Windschuttle with respect to the National Museum of Australia, I find myself responding to matters closer to home, namely the article by Rod Moran in Quadrant,...

The absent-minded lad of Leningrad. (First Person).
April 1, 2002... THE SMOOTH machinery of Intourist, the Soviet tourist agency, missed a beat when I arrived in Leningrad by train from Warsaw early one Sunday at the beginning of the 1980s. A guide was assigned to meet every tourist, but mine must have...

The Director's Resurrection.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... THE DIRECTOR'S RESURRECTION Hist! My grandfather, the coal carter, started a new business in the house where his wife and nine children lived. When he died, after an illness, his two sons took over the business,...

Coming Home Like Merle Oberon.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... COMING HOME LIKE MERLE OBERON Your eyes are grey, grey as morning grey as the Argyle Street day You stand outside where the cold wraps itself around the wharf front night like a mother crying for her girl to come home...

Eroding the governor-generalship. (Devine).
April 1, 2002... PRIME MINISTER Howard's somewhat devious conduct in confronting the ferocity of the media and the ALP when they combined to assault the Governor-General, Peter Hollingworth, has further drained the battery of an institution that lacks a...

Kakadu Cave Paintings.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... KAKADU CAVE PAINTINGS Limned in ochre and zinc-white on sandstone, the Big Ancestor's head's a fish. Legs like jack-knifed Eiffel Towers assume the Sumo's ready squat, allow the turtle's...

Unemployment--the secret crisis. (Economics).(Australia)(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2002... JUST TWO DAYS before the Howard government was returned for a third term on 11th November last year, compelling evidence emerged that it had failed the first test of any federal administration: the unemployment test. What was reported by...

Aphorisms.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... APHORISMS Of politicians-- he is a giant. Look at the distance of him: ear to ear heart to mouth. Skin is free-- you pay for your scars. A poem should threaten prettily, like the emblem ...

Pickled essence of Englishman. (Literature).(analysis of Thomas Lovell Beddoes's works)
April 1, 2002... CREEPY, macabre, disdainful, Thomas Lovell Beddoes is one of the oddest figures in English poetry. Ezra Pound called him "the prince of Morticians", Graham Greene the "filibustering medical poet". "Dr Death" might be our contemporary moniker....

The man who mistook his groin for a brain.
April 1, 2002... An author by profession had need narrowly to watch his pen, lest a line escape it which by possibility may do mischief, when he has been long dead and buried. --William Cowper, 1789 WHY DID ONE of the funniest writers of the twentieth...

The Road to Canberra, and Beyond.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... THE ROAD TO CANBERRA, AND BEYOND Jumbucks graze on Lake George today, white puffs From distant artillery, or thought balloons Emptied of words, blown toward the sear horizon. What water there may be sulks in the sloughs ...

Branagh's labours lost. (Film).(Kenneth Branagh, Love's Labour's Lost in Australia)
April 1, 2002... THERE ARE MORE screens and fewer films shown on them theatrically in Australia now than at any time in the history of the medium. You'll notice I wrote "screens", not "movie houses". Growing up as I did in Willoughby in the 1950s I was a short...

Hollywood and the President.(film criticism)
April 1, 2002... AUSTRALIAN FANS of the Nine Network's late-night White House drama series The West Wing were on tenterhooks for months. Will President Josiah Bartlett run again or won't he? We now know he will, though his campaign for reelection foundered...

To the edge of her world.(Short Story)
April 1, 2002... On the seventh evening of her Greek holiday, Isabelle sat at a cafe table in Athens, writing her postcards and watching Julie, opposite her, doing the same thing. Julie's dark head was bent downwards. She filled in her postcards quickly yet...

His Free Hand: on Robert Dickerson's oil painting, Lost Child.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... HIS FREE HAND On Robert Dickerson's oil painting, Lost Child What to do with his free hand? One hand cups her hip, holding his arm like a rail at her back to steady her on his left knee. But his free hand,...

Former Lovers at Jetty Restaurant.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... FORMER LOVERS AT JETTY RESTAURANT Coffee in the sun with the blue-green smooth river spread, turning golden-brown in its rippling shallows. Early autumn water, clear enough to see all the way down. Yachts further...

Castle.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... CASTLE O forgive me but I forget my name. It was a long time ago when the men came on horseback with their swords drawn. I was a boy, not a man. There were plenty like me. We did what we were told to do. ...

Still Life.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... STILL LIFE The green apple, washed, Catches small versions of the sun Upon its curving flanks And rests on a white plate That casts its shadow on a table That is also white and that Will not move while the...

Long Day's Journey.(Poem)
April 1, 2002... LONG DAY'S JOURNEY We're driving to Canberra for the second time in twenty years. Who are the two strangers in the back seat of the car? Where did they come from? They weren't there last time. I look...

Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. (Books: the anzac tradition as a civil religion).(The Cross of Anzac: Australian Catholic Service Chaplains)
April 1, 2002... Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, by K.S. Inglis; Melbourne University Press, rev. ed., 2001, $39.95. The Cross of Anzac: Australian Catholic Service Chaplains, by Tom Johnstone; Church Archivists' Press (PO Box 130,...

Writing in Rights: Australia and the Protection of Human Rights. (Books: citizens or litigants?).
April 1, 2002... by Hilary Charlesworth, University of NSW Press, 2001, $24.95. HERE IS YET ANOTHER sermon on the need for an Australian bill of rights. Professor Hilary Charlesworth's thesis will be familiar to those acquainted with Brennan's Legislating...

New Selected Poems.
April 1, 2002... New Selected Poems, by Philip Hodgins; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000, $22. New Selected Poems, by Peter Goldsworthy; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001, $22. WHILE THE New Selected Poems of Philip Hodgins is without a failure, it is nonetheless...

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. (Books: a class act).
April 1, 2002... Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, by David Cannadine; Viking/Penguin, 2001, $45. WELL KNOWN for his trenchant views on the monarchy in its years of decline, with Ornamentalism David Cannadine extends some of his earlier work...

Always on a Friday. (Ryan).(Friday Night School socializing immigrant children, Australia)
April 1, 2002... SHORTLY AFTER 5 p.m. one recent Friday, I drove into the yard behind a large Melbourne near-city church. This might have come as a shock to my weather-beaten old utility, more accustomed at that hour to visiting the parking lot attached to the...