Quadrant articles from April 2003

Quadrant archives from April 2003

America's war and Europe's future.(Editorial)
April 1, 2003... IT WOULD BE surprising if the United States and the rest of the rather unfortunately named "coalition of the willing" were not already involved in military action against Iraq by the time of publication of this issue of Quadrant. At the time of...

Stanner and the silence. (Letters).(representation of Aborigines in Australian histories and commentaries)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2003... SIR: S.G. Foster's feeble polemic, "Contra Windschuttle" (March 2003), makes much of Windschuttle's "basic misunderstanding" Of what the anthropologist W.E. Stanner and, after him, the historian Henry Reynolds meant by the "great Australian...

The Tasmanian aborigines. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2003... SIR: Peter Coleman's judicious review of the Windschuttle thesis (December 2002) clears the ring for a fair fight, and we can look forward to watching the historians slug it out point by point. There is nothing like a close of old-fashioned...

Genetic genocide. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2003... SIR: Although I am no anthropologist, I am prompted to comment on the Windschuttle matter. Since we are all of mongrel genetic make-up, linked via our common Hominid ancestors, and all derived at some stage from primitive nomadic stone-age...

Justice Kirby's tie. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2003... SIR: In his otherwise informative essay about Sir Peter Heydon, Peter Ryan (December 2002) took a by now familiar pot shot at one of his favourite betes noires, Justice Michael Kirby. He criticised him for wearing a tie displaying condoms, as...

Free speech at bottom-line University. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2003... SIR: Peter Kocan's report (December 2002) saddened but did not surprise. The letter over the signature of Roger Holmes (the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle) and the reported content of his reply to Mr Kocan's letter in response...

The USA and the second Gulf War. (Defence).(Bush foreign and military policy and theories of international relations)
April 1, 2003... THE REALIST SCHOOL has dominated the study of international relations since its first known practitioner, Thucydides, wrote The Peloponnesian War over two thousand years ago. (Pericles' speech over the Athenian dead remained a favourite Open...

A True History.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... A TRUE HISTORY You know the troopers were sent to catch him that Ned shot them, one Kennedy unarmed and in surrender Know when his gasping breath pained their sensibilities too far, Kelly shot him again as you would a...

Cases and causes: the high price of propaganda. (Law).(homosexual advance defence)
April 1, 2003... IT IS NATURAL ENOUGH for supporters of causes to seek out cases which demonstrate their themes. But when the quest results in the case being distorted, forced into a format to which it does not belong, not only can great unfairness be inflicted...

The failure of Africa. (Foreign Affairs).
April 1, 2003... THE NOTION that "the gap between industrialised and developing countries has widened" is unfortunately a common one. Even a former World Bank economist, Joseph Stiglitz, in the course of a vitriolic diatribe against that "unmitigated disaster",...

Australia's war in American eyes: Owen Dixon in Washington, 1942-43. (History).(Australian Minister to Washington)(edited excerpt from Philip Ayres' "Owen Dixon")(Excerpt)
April 1, 2003... IN APRIL 1942 John Curtin appointed Owen Dixon Minister to Washington in place of R.G. Casey, who had resigned. The most brilliant man on the High Court, Dixon had already contributed to the war effort by chairing key wartime boards including...

Bunyah in Summer.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... BUNYAH IN SUMMER Faded-shorts-and-sandals country, dry rocks and darting creatures, and faces pressed at flyscreens waiting for the ones from Sydney. Time stretches into sunlight. The hours are measured in...

From the diary of a protector of aborigines.(aboriginal policy and child welfare issues in Western Australia)
April 1, 2003... THE MOST TRAGIC outcome of Sir Ronald Wilson's tract about "Stolen Children" is that it has unfairly robbed generations of dedicated public servants who worked with Aboriginal people and communities as field welfare officers and Protectors in...

The Fish Clock.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... THE FISH CLOCK Under the clay bank the unegged fingerlings sleep like paper slippers, coloured in passing by light, spent grass-- the sand spit of eels. Yet to see-- to put their flat eyes to purpose they...

Headmaster.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... HEADMASTER mister green known as a disciplinarian inflicted corporal punishment but only on the boys the cane used briefly with his door open an effective deterrent when a bad girl was sent...

Wrens in Wire.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... WRENS IN WIRE i Above the mire of the chook run--a wren in a ring of wire. ii So much higher than the rooster--the hen wren holed in the wire. iii Like a sapphire, the fairy...

Joern Utzon's idea of the theatre-temple. .(architectural qualities of the Sydney Opera House)
April 1, 2003... AS THE SYDNEY Opera House was being constructed the public had access to a viewing platform accessed from the Tarpeian Way, the path above the cliff face on the edge of the Domain overlooking the entire site. At the press of a switch the voice...

The Reading of the Bones.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... THE READING OF THE BONES The tiny bones of children in a cupboard, The ghost of Garbo knitting in the chair Beside your bed, the rocking of the eggshells, Descending dust that glitters on the air, The severing of...

The long and the short of it. (Language).(trends in language and speech)
April 1, 2003... AS LETTERS (snail mail) have given way to faxes and the telephone has at once been partly replaced by e-mail yet rendered omnipresent in the form of the mobile phone, the words we use to communicate (excepting text messages, about which I know...

Home to mother, at last. (Devine).(United States is a better motherland for Australia than Britain)
April 1, 2003... TOM RIDGE, the US Secretary of Homeland Defense, says his country is more vulnerable to terrorism than most because of "the magnitude of what goes on here". Not even the most fanatic hater of America could deny it magnitude. It is a magnitude...

What about design? A serious lacuna for the Australia Council. (The Arts).
April 1, 2003... THE RECENT REPORT of the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry--which was conducted during 2002--reveals a serious deficiency in the conceptual structure of the visual sector of the Australia Council. In short, this is that there is no...

Encounter.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... ENCOUNTER Kensington Gardens, 1937 "What a beautiful child!" cried the lady' in the fur coat, as she peered into my brother's pram, where he lay plump and rosy. My mother, Australian and shy, doubtless said...

Contact and tragedy. (Literature).(Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession)(The Inland Sea)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... WHEN EUROPEANS began making their way from the northern hemisphere to the strange and unique lands of the antipodes, a process of cultural transformation, whose long-term effects were totally unforeseeable, was set in motion. Such forces...

Driving to the Wake.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... DRIVING TO THE WAKE We stop to walk beside the surf, your hat shading the map of your face, the ruined dunes alive with grass. Each day the highway changes mood: the light grainier a tractor slowing, the cliffs more...

AVSD.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... AVSD In the still, cold morning cloaked in cloud and damp with salt warm wetness I take my joy in arms. In perfect sleep and trust my boy, my angel boy goes soft, from arm to arm in the cold of...

The novels of a conservative judge.(Australian High Court judge Ian Callinan)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... AUSTRALIAN artists and most Australian academics incline as a matter of course to the left in their political stance. They seem convinced that this stance guarantees their art and their scholarship the high ground of moral superiority. They see...

Shadow.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... SHADOW She hovers even when the sun goes down lolls back bored when you wash dishes or shell peas but leans in close when you make love or kiss your child at night and in dense dark her full...

Agatha Christie, master puzzler.(commentary on Christie's writing career)
April 1, 2003... ON NOVEMBER 25, 2002, Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap clocked up fifty years on the London stage. It's been performed there more than twenty thousand times, to audiences adding up to about ten million people, making it the longest-running...

Woman Playing the Glass Harmonica.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... WOMAN PLAYING THE GLASS HARMONICA With her busking cloche velvet dress and army boots... her Salem air of ashes... she clears a space in Harvard Square to play the musical glasses. Threaded by a spindle ...

Last Letter from Poul Anderson.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... LAST LETTER FROM POUL ANDERSON Polite, or perhaps kind, about the stuff I sent him, hardly mentioning one detail: he was dying. Several thoughtful pages--professional writer's professional and yet punctilious about...

The Woolly Half-Poem.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... THE WOOLLY HALF-POEM with due respects to the memory of James Dickey Would-be poets wild to couplet with anything with sob stories with post colonial glitz post colonial sham will keep themselves off prosody by...

Adapting to the truth of the story. (Film).(Second World War Australian military strategy in New Guinea)(Column)
April 1, 2003... THE COLUMN was just about to be dispatched when news came that Australia would be joining America and the so-called coalition of the willing in a pre-emptive war on Iraq. So I decided to begin with a rejoinder to Michael O'Connor (Letters,...

A terrace in Fitzroy.(Short Story)
April 1, 2003... The nurse ushered Liz towards a wide staircase. "I told Mrs Rafferty you were coming. `Mrs Prentiss is coming to see you,' I said. And guess what she said?" She looked expectantly at Liz as they climbed the stairs. "I can't imagine," Liz...

Waiting for papaya.(Short Story)
April 1, 2003... That evening he noticed for the first time how summer had a soft, penetrating light. It persisted for some time after the sun had gone, as if the shadows hesitated to move in and claim their place. There were no dark patches between the...

She Said.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... SHE SAID I'm the writer, she said, in your head, And I thought. And I said, well, what sort, What sort of books do you write, then? She said, I write books of the words that I took From your head. And I said,...

The gushers and the disenchanted.(The Art of Persuasion: Australian Art Criticism 1950-2001)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... The Art of Persuasion: Australian Art Criticism 1950-2001, edited by Ben Genocchio; Craftsman House, 2002, $59.95. DO REGULAR READERS of broadsheet newspapers get the art critics they deserve? I am prompted to ask this odd-seeming question...

Travellers in Antique Lands.(Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800, compiled by Raymond John Howgego; Hordern House Rare Books, 2002, $295. AT A TIME when any subject, however trite, seems to qualify for publication in the guise of an encyclopedia, or worse a set of...

The epic of the Men of Timor.(The Independents)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... The Independents, by Jim Smailes; 2nd/2nd Commando Association, Perth, no price. IT IS RARE to find a treasure, even a small one, I being given away. It did, however, happen to me I at Fremantle not long ago when I visited the Army at...

Burgess's oath to poetry.(Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems, by Anthony Burgess, edited by Kevin Jackson; Carcanet, 2002, about $30. HAVING KILLED the poet Enderby in one novel, Anthony Burgess proceeded to write Enderby's Dark Lady or No End to Enderby (1984)...

No time for soft heads.(Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: A New Reform Agenda for Australia)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: A New Reform Agenda for Australia, edited by Peter Dawkins and Paul Kelly; Allen & Unwin, 2003, $24.95. IN APRIL 2002 a conference of 400 leading Australians considered the most serious economic problems facing...

A Basket of Nectarines.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... A BASKET OF NECTARINES When my father went a-courting he brought my mother fruit, fresh nectarines in a basket, and wore his Sunday suit. Picked them in the garden and walked across the hill quickly to...

Green fancy and savage fact. (Ryan).
April 1, 2003... DID YOU READ B.J. Coman's article in last month's Quadrant? It was entitled "Environmental Primitivism and the Noble Savage", and is a surgically precise cut at the yucky sentimentality which drives many of today's urban-dwelling...