Quadrant articles from April 2004

Quadrant archives from April 2004

Inner urban hysteria and population growth.(Editorial)(Editorial)
April 1, 2004... THE MYSTERY of the disappearance, and certain death, of Juanita Nielsen of Sydney's Kings Cross in 1975 remains unsolved despite the publication of a new account of the circumstances. Was Juanita the first victim of urban developers (have there...

The film school.(Letters)
April 1, 2004... SIR: Despite its bleak view of the current state of the Australian film industry, the editorial in your January-February edition at least recognises that the industry has had many successes that have enhanced Australia's status in the world. It...

The Western tradition.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... SIR: Hal Colebatch's long letter (March 2004) against my essay on the adulation of modern America is in the oracular and dithyrambic style. For all that, it is ineffectual. I have been savaged by a myxo rabbit. My mistake was to quote Tawney...

Barrallier and Baudin.(Letters)
April 1, 2004... SIR: Robert Murray's article on "Sydney's Brush with Bonaparte" (January-February 2004) leaves out one important name in the list of relevant Australians. The fortifications and defences for Sydney at that time were constructed by the...

Writing the gospels.(Letters)
April 1, 2004... SIR: None of the "powerful reasons" David H. Lewis cites against the apostolic authorship of Mark's gospel (Letters, March 2004) bears scrutiny. Mr Lewis claims that there is nothing in the New Testament to suggest that Peter ever visited...

Contrariwise.(Letters)
April 1, 2004... SIR: I write on behalf of my friend Humpty Dumpty, whose most famous quotation has been plagiarised. In the January-February issue David H. Lewis took it and gave it to the Queen of Hearts. She has no right to claim these words as her own....

Meriwether and strange weather: intelligence, risk management and critical thinking.(Defence)
April 1, 2004... When the tide goes out, we'll find out who's been swimming butt naked. --Warren Buffett ON AugusT 29, 1994, Business Week ran a feature article entitled "Dream Team". It was about a man called John W. Meriwether and the team of brilliant...

Appointment in Samarra: Western strategic thought and the culture of risk.
April 1, 2004... THE DANISH PHILOSOPHER Soren Kierkegaard once wrote that, while life must be lived forwards, it can only be understood backwards. Nowhere was this great truth more starkly illustrated than on September 11, 2001. On that day, the world's most...

Das Dasein.(Enfantines)(Poem)
April 1, 2004... DAS DASEIN The blond burn sprawled on his bench by the Rhine Has changed his custom. The piss-yellow wine He used to favor today is blood-red And no doubt as cheap. A crane overhead The Martinskirche swings its...

La Ronde.(Enfantines)(Poem)
April 1, 2004... LA RONDE They come out half-baked sometimes and can't survive, Missing this, missing that; some simply aren't there, Sweet enough and happy and oh so alive: For as long as it lasts, they'll always need care. ...

Kansas City blues (after bechet).(Enfantines)(Poem)
April 1, 2004... KANSAS CITY BLUES (AFTER BECHET) Swing low sweet Sidney. Play soft. Come blow your horn For my two-foot-long Henry who uses you Each night as a ladder down to sleep. Reborn Each dawn, he climbs up from your...

Trust.(Philosophy & Ideas)
April 1, 2004... A WHITE MAN waiting quietly at a bus stop after dark is engaged in conversation by an apparently friendly, younger black man. A woman is approached in the street by a scruffily dressed youth who opens his mouth--and asks for directions to the...

It's not just black and white.(History)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... CULTURE USED TO BE in places like Paris, Florence and Vienna. The English-speaking world was supposed to have little of it and Australia hardly any. Because we had so little, local "culture vultures" were suspected of being not far removed from...

The new anti-semitism? Reflections on the anti-American pandemic.(Society)
April 1, 2004... I THINK IT WAS after the first Gulf War--technically, the second, if you count the Iraq-Iran conflict--when it became clear the times were definitely a-changing. Something was different; you could feel it. When George Bush Sr visited Australia...

Should we make parents of the dead?(Bioethics)
April 1, 2004... OUR SOCIETY believes that children are best raised by those who gave them life--their biological parents--and that every effort ought to be expended in sustaining and strengthening parental relationships. While continuing to uphold the...

The future of teacher education.(Education)
April 1, 2004... DURING THE LAST century or so, the scholarly standing of teacher educators in Australia has usually been modest. Lecturers responsible for training primary school teachers were, naturally enough, usually appointed directly from primary schools...

From "Huntingdonshire Nocturnes".(Poem)
April 1, 2004... FROM "HUNTINGDONSHIRE NOCTURNES" One evening we went to look for willows on the Godmanchester Commons. Tree Wardens, we were being led by the Tree Officer for Huntingdonshire. Gravel territory, where time ran out and...

Stand apart, or shape the world?(Devine)
April 1, 2004... SINCE HE IS LEARNED, lucid, witty and understands America exceptionally well, I never have any quarrel with Owen Harries' analyses and commentaries on international affairs. Nor do I intend to start having them. What I intend--filling the...

China today through Shanghai eyes.(Asia)
April 1, 2004... THE RATHER NARROW and somewhat low--hardly twelve feet wide and barely two storeys high--rowhouse that on July 21, 1921 stood on the even then constricted rue Borgeat in the French Concession of Shanghai is today nominally the site of the...

Shadows from a Black Sun.(Literature)
April 1, 2004... THE ORIGINAL hard-cover edition of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity was published by New York University Press in 2002. Goodrick-Clarke is best known for The Occult Roots of Nazism:...

Great Literary Fistfights of the Twentieth Century: Wallace Stevens vs. Ernest Hemingway, Key West, Florida, 1936.(Poem)
April 1, 2004... GREAT LITERARY FISTFIGHTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: WALLACE STEVENS VS. ERNEST HEMINGWAY, KEY WEST, FLORIDA, 1936 Hemingway's sister came back from a party, told Ernest that Wallace Stevens had called him something bad. ...

Where poetry and history meet.
April 1, 2004... et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra.--Ovid IN SCOPE AND VIGOUR Horace's Odes I, II and III, published in 23 BC as Carminum Liber primus, secundus et tertius are unparallelled by any collection of...

Drumelzier.(Poem)
April 1, 2004... DRUMELZIER I have to try to make some sense of this strange place. It is as if translation had been made, in language I can't emulate or describe; but remember it like this: I pulled the van over, on the...

King Menander's question.(Poem)
April 1, 2004... KING MENANDER'S QUESTION (Milindipandha, India, 150 BC) Zenodotus, hail. Greetings. I send you by this letter A nothing I've had written up to set down a debate I've just had with a local man, a sophist who preaches The...

Mel Gibson's gospel.(Film)(The Passion of the Christ)(Movie Review)
April 1, 2004... BACK IN THE 1950S it was said that you needed a degree in theology to review the latest Graham Greene novel, such was the complexity of the moral and religious conundrums in books like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. I feel...

Martin Esslin Posts a Letter to the Antipodes.(Poem)
April 1, 2004... MARTIN ESSLIN POSTS A LETTER TO THE ANTIPODES Martin Esslin retired from the BBC, wrote, with a fountain pen, in a blue aerogramme. On the path to the unlockable door I stood between the Hungaroa River, the...

Up to, and including.(Poem)
April 1, 2004... UP To, AND INCLUDING What would you do for rain? You would do anything. You try to imagine--wet! It is too long ago. You would leave a bag of oats (the price of oats!) outside, if that would make it...

The persecution of the martyr.(The Passion of the Christ)(Movie Review)
April 1, 2004... THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST is a disturbing film, not simply because of the graphic violence. In essence the movie is about a man who is betrayed, humiliated and tortured to death for his beliefs, a fate endured with the approval or acquiescence...

Survival.(Poem)
April 1, 2004... SURVIVAL Of course it was the bones that brought the bush rat and the bush rat the snake. At first glance everything outside was green-- the brush that we kept cropped close by the house the grey gums and the...

The new baby.(Short Story)
April 1, 2004... Being a parent is harder than being a Prime Minister, said British Prime Minister Tony Blair. His sixteen-year-old son had just been arrested after being found lying drunk on the footpath in London's West End. In the...

"You must be out of your mind!": Don Quixote in America.(Interviews with Dwight Macdonald)(A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, edited by Michael Wreszin; University Press of Mississippi, 2003, about $80. A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald, edited by Michael Wreszin; Ivan R. Dee, 2002, about $70. ONE MEASURE of the...

Days of manly celibates.(The Priest Factory." A Manly Vision of Triumph 1958-1962 and Beyond)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Priest Factory." A Manly Vision of Triumph 1958-1962 and Beyond, by Chris Geraghty; Spectrum Publications, 2003, $27.95. ON SUNDAY April 19, 1953, the Australian Catholic Church's National Eucharistic Congress in Sydney concluded...

Primal screams.(The Howard Years)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Howard Years, edited by Robert Manne; Black Inc. Agenda, 2004, $29.95. MUCH HAS HAPPENED in the short period since this collection of political tracts was put together, for by the time it hit the streets, the Labor Party, for whom the...

Greenberger with the lot.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Bright Shapes and the True Names: A Memoir, by Patrick McCaughey; Text, 2003, $32. PATRICK McCAUGHEY'S memoir has been a local triumph--reviewed with clear affection by peers and colleagues and prominently displayed in bookshops. For...

The world of the selkies.(The People of the Sea: Celtic Tales of the Seal-Folk)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The People of the Sea: Celtic Tales of the Seal-Folk, by David Thomson; Canongate Classics, 2001, $30.40. THIS BOOK was first published in 1954; this is its third edition since then. It is deservedly a classic--a most gorgeously written,...

Footnotes to history.(The Uncollected Michael Foot: Essays Old and New 1953-2003)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Uncollected Michael Foot: Essays Old and New 1953-2003, by Michael Foot, edited by Brian Brivati; Politico's, 2003, $84. MICHAEL FOOT was a somewhat flawed leader of the British Labour Party. He looked eccentric. He was too...

What's wrong?
April 1, 2004... SO MANY YEARS AGO that I shrink from precise recollection, I saw a black-and-white film called The Seven Deadly Sins. The dialogue was French, with terse subtitles in English; there was no plot in the ordinary sense, but the "theme" was to...