Quadrant articles from April 2006

Quadrant archives from April 2006

Labor: bourgeois left versus union thugs.(Editorial)(Editorial)
April 1, 2006... THE TROUBLES of the Labor Party in recent times are generally described as being the result of hypertrophy of the faction system, with both groups fighting for the spoils of parliamentary seats and preferment. And it is commonly said even...

Evicting the governor.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... SIR: Gordon Samuels, former Governor of New South Wales (Letters, March 2006) chooses to criticise what I have written in my book Head of State, but without, as he admits, actually reading the book. He chooses, instead, to base his criticism on...

War brides.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... SIR: My gratitude to Fred Blanks for his favourable review of Likely Lads and Lasses (March 2006). His suggestion for a fourth book (I had to look up tetralogy) about war brides is welcome, but a little late. And there's a story attached. ...

Britain's curious anti-racists.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... SIR: I was fascinated by John O'Sullivan's article on "The Real British Disease" (January-February 2006). But he had obviously not been in England himself for most of the period covered by his article. I, on the other hand, had not only been in...

Protectionism, not racism.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... SIR: Keith Windschuttle's thesis (March 2006) that the White Australia policy was not basically racist is supported by the case of the Chinese cabinetmakers in early twentieth-century Melbourne. The proportion of the Chinese population in...

The external affairs power.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... SIR: It is unfortunate that Dennis Rose's polemic (October 2005) against Justice Callinan's Sir John Latham Lecture (July-August 2005) lacks the rigour of its target. First, Mr Rose contends that Sir John Latham would disapprove of Justice...

A home of one's own.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... SIR: Bob Day (January-February 2006) is quite right in pointing to the awful and awesome charges being laid upon young marrieds trying to find a home in the cities of Australia (especially Sydney). The shift from rate-financed...

The return of postmodernism in aboriginal history.(History)
April 1, 2006... More specifically, Windschuttle has not provided any evidence for his imputation that academic historians have compared the British colonisation of this country to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews or caused others to make such a comparison....

Meet the ancestors.(Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans )(Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... SCHOOL LESSONS on stone age men notwithstanding, Australian Aborigines and Ancient Britons do not immediately spring to mind as cultural brothers and sisters. However, reading the earlier chapters of Francis Pryor's two volumes on British...

Serpens nullius.(counter-attacks against The Invention of Terra Nullius and its author, Michael Connor)
April 1, 2006... So FAR, the counter-attacks against The Invention of Terra Nullius and its author, Michael Connor, have raised more questions than they have answered. In the Weekend Australian of February 25, Deborah Hope reviewed counter-attacks from...

The Sick-Bags.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... The Sick-Bags We landed through a Southerly Buster, mad wind of thirty degrees south. This landing was truly foot and mouth: the sick-bags whispered out of every seat as the plane bucked through two thousand metres, ...

Sir Hal Colebatch and the missing secret army.(Rob Darroch's review of "Steadfast Knight: A Life of Sir Hal Colebatch")
April 1, 2006... MY BIOGRAPHY of my father, Steadfast Knight." A Life of Sir Hal Colebatch (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004), received favourable reviews in a spread of journals, including the Australian, Quadrant, the West Australian and even the Australian...

Janet and Diabetes.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Janet and Diabetes More septic bone's been carved from your one remaining foot, and antibiotics stutter through a cannula into your scarred heart. I am breathless at your greed to endure and rise, even, on thermals of...

Beetles.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Beetles After I died the cockroaches came calling. With wreaths of black chrysanthemums they'd gifted, Gravid, graveolent, their odour drifted From bush to mourning bush, it was appalling. A restless black suburban...

Reading.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Reading The wind chimes sounds Its high-pitched bell While the fire creaks the silver Chimney flue. A draught of air Creeps underneath the door. Tomatoes in a white bowl Gleam in my reading light. I'm...

Korea.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Korea 1. They have no mandatory Italians. And where are all their Turks and Greeks? There are no Arabs or Somalis to quietly polychrome the week. A true homogeneity can be, at times, quite hard to bear....

A damaged people.(Society)(Australian indigenous population is an example of concept of group psychological damage)
April 1, 2006... SINCE THE PUBLICATION of my essay "The Psychopathological Roots of Terrorism" (Quadrant, January-February 2005) I have decided to expand and modify the concept on the strength of the feedback I have received. When I presented an abridged...

Sunday on a Country River.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... SUNDAY ON A COUNTRY RIVER After caramel airs of the sugar islands and their carrying-handle bridges, we skimmed over salt rainwater that was reached across by smoke. Ospreys flew, or sat up castled on sticks ...

Hen.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... HEN I am the dreaming hen. At dusk I do not glance At the red sky staining the river. I know much more than this waits me As I leap into the darkness of the curry tree. With my head tucked under my wing I...

Captain Ahab and the bureaucrats.(Devine)(McKinnon v The Department of the Treasury and the High Court's ruling on the Freedom of Information law)(Column)
April 1, 2006... FOR THE FIRST TIME in the twenty-three years since the legislation was passed, the High Court has an opportunity to make a ruling on Australia's Freedom of Information (FOI) law. This will probably happen in August. Ric Snell, senior lecturer...

Memoirs of an Unswonian.(First Person)(undergraduate days at the University of New South Wales)
April 1, 2006... WHEN I STARTED at the University of New South Wales during the floods of 1963 we had to walk the plank to get to class. The Village Green was, as the poet says, "vividly verdant", and there were large puddles all over the lower campus. The...

Back to the Fifties.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... BACK TO THE FIFTIES The Hostel, Moore Park, 1958 Hush palls this female hideaway of brown and grey (with khaki blankets). From the bed in my cubicle I can open my window, stash clothes in the wardrobe, switch off the...

The pen and the bottom line.(Culture)(writing as absolute freedom)
April 1, 2006... LORNA SAGE (whose spellbinding autobiography Bad Blood was published in 2000, and who died a year later of emphysema) talked of novelists being engaged in a sort of imaginative civil war in which a writer could come down on both sides. Novelist...

Blue poles, modernism and the novelty trap.(Art)(he purchase of Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in August 1973 by the Australian National Gallery)
April 1, 2006... A FEW MONTHS BACK, a rash of articles appeared in the press which commemorated the dismissal of the Whitlam government thirty years ago and commented on the continuing sense of grievance felt by his supporters. At the time, I wondered how much...

The Blue Coin.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... THE BLUE COIN I am the blind star no longer obeying my own rules but the deeper ones of heaven. I have given up understanding comets thunder past. The sun comes up like a rooster and all I feel is warmth. ...

The Horse.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... THE HORSE The horse in the night munches away outside this window. Its nose-bag contains unanswered letters and excuses sweetened with oats. I turn over and smile glad to hear them being consumed. I hear...

The unmoving constellations: the poetry of Louis MacNeice.(Literature)(Critical essay)
April 1, 2006... READING THE ANGLO-IRISH poet Louis MacNeice (1907-63) today, it really does seem as if little has changed but the "ever-changing conveniences". When he writes of "why I turn this jaded music on / To forswear thought and become an automat" he is...

Agatha Christie, Tintin and the French.(French and British reactions to Agatha Christie)
April 1, 2006... SOMETHING ODD is going on. In her home country, the writer who, death, J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown notwithstanding, is still the world's most popular author, is disregarded by the literary establishment, if not by ordinary readers. Agatha...

The Dwindling.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... THE DWINDLING The dead's beloved treasures dwindle. First to go are the clothes they wore, suits and ties and old-fashioned pants are cleaned and packed for the Salvos' store. After the war good cloth was scarce ...

Lament for London's Bus No. 30.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Lament for London's Bus No. 30. Turning a page of the local Times I see a picture of the dead bus under a blue tarpaulin shroud and borne along on a semi for a bier. The broken outline of its bulk is bleak against...

The launch.(Story)(Short story)
April 1, 2006... At a desk covered in rows of white name badges, like decks of playing cards, a young woman smiled up and said, "Hello. Your name, please?" "Jerry Mart." Above the young woman's head, over the entrance to the hotel's main seminar room,...

Galahs.(Story)(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Galahs As the light streaks with red and grey I sit on the soft chair on the deck and let wine heighten and dull my senses then the galahs come screaming in to settle in next door's gums they flash fragments of...

Old Dubbo Gaol, 2004.(Story)(Poem)
April 1, 2006... In Dubbo Gaol the stone is cold, the window slits are narrow. Dark photos there of the eight they hanged will crack your bones to the marrow. Their pallet beds were knotted wood with a...

Escaping Plato's Cave: A Parable for Politicians.(Lectures in the History of Political Thought)(Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott)(From a "Necessary Evil" to an Art of Contingency: Michael Oakeshott's Conception of Political Activity)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Lectures in the History of Political Thought, by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Terry Nardin and Luke O'Sullivan; Imprint Academic, 2006, about $100. Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott, by Glenn Worthington;...

A place for Jesus?(The Future of Jesus)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... The Future of Jesus, by Peter Jensen; ABC Books, 2005, $22.95. FOR THE FIRST TIME in over forty years, a cleric has been invited to deliver the Boyer Lectures. Dr Peter Jensen, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, not surprisingly made the...

A study of success.(The Howard Factor: A Decade That Changed the Nation)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... The Howard Factor: A Decade that Changed the Nation, edited by Nick Cater; Melbourne University Press, 2006, $29.95. THIS IS A PRETTY good collection of essays written by journalists working for the Australian about the decade of John...

Beyond the home counties.(New British Poetry)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... New British Poetry, edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic; Graywolf Press, 2005, $33.95. IT IS REMARKABLE how little attention poets and poetry readers throughout the English-speaking world pay to the poetry of English-speaking...

Under the Yeats spell.(Student Guide to the Poems of W.B. Yeats)(Go, Lovely Nose)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Student Guide to the Poems of W.B. Yeats, by John Greening; Greenwich Exchange, 2005, about $30. Go, Lovely Nose, by Ray Kelley; Five Islands Press, 2005, $18.95. YEATS INTRODUCED ME to both the idea and the sensation of quarrelling...

The man on the horse.(Frances De Groot: Irish Fascist, Australian Legend)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Frances De Groot: Irish Fascist, Australian Legend, by Andrew Moore; Federation Press, 2005, $39.95. THE WORD FASCIST is still freely tossed around, with varying degrees of jest and hyperbole. No doubt many Quadrant readers and writers...

Bounded and beastly.(The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World, by A. David Napier; University of Chicago Press, 2003, about $90. AS SUSAN SONTAG pointed out several years ago in her book Illness and Metaphor (1978), Western medicine and...

Calibans of culture.(Ryan)(David Throsby's report suggests Australia should have a national cultural policy)(Column)
April 1, 2006... Some Caliban of Culture, some absurd Messiah of the Paranoiac State --A.D. Hope AUSTRALIA'S CURRENT would-be Caliban is David Throsby, an economist; one of his famous predecessors from the cave was also an economist--"Nugget" Coombs....