Quadrant articles from December 2007

Quadrant archives from December 2007

Saving the children.(Editorial)(child welfare)(Editorial)
December 1, 2007... YET ANOTHER BATCH of deaths of children in the care of obviously dysfunctional families and of the various state departments entrusted with the safeguarding of such children once again makes clear that we have a serious social problem affecting...

Sir Owen Dixon in the Cold War.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... SIR: L.W. Maher, in the course of his letter headed "The Cold War and the High Court" (October 2007), refers to Sir Owen Dixon's judicial career as "characterised by a... record of continuous partisan politicking in the conservative cause,...

The morality of The History Boys.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... SIR: Although I'm a lifelong fan of Alan Bennett, lukewarm (but vague) reviews led me to give The History Boys a miss when it screened at my local arthouse cinema recently. Nell McDonald's essay (July-August 2007) rekindled my interest: was it...

Freedom and the terrorist threat.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... SIR: Rarely do I strongly disagree with the Editor, so when I read his contribution to the September issue I re-read it several times and then spent quite a lot of time thinking it through. Having gone to all the trouble, I decided that I...

Israel, Judah and the Jews.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... SIR: Cardinal George Pell in his September 2007 article, "Constantine, the First Catholic Emperor" should have written in his third paragraph, "as the Israelites escaped under Moses" instead of "as the Jews escaped under Moses". The point is...

Service, Gordon and Wilcox.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... SIR: Rod Moran (Letters, September 2007) decides to leave to "our splendid cultural studies intellects to sort out" the question of whether the verse of "the great twentieth-century balladeer" Robert W. Service is of comparatively little...

Neddy Seagoon's navy.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... SIR: Michael O'Connor is critical of Hugh White (Letters, October 2007) for not understanding naval warfare in the ancient world. But a lack of knowledge of the classical historians would offer no excuse for this lapse. After all, rather than...

Islam's trojan horse? Turkish nationalism and the Nakshibendi Sufi order.(Religion)
December 1, 2007... ON AUGUST 5, 2007, an advertisement appeared in an Istanbul newspaper, Zaman, calling for applications for a newly established Fethullah Gulen Chair of Islamic Studies and Interfaith Dialogue, within a Centre of Inter-Religious Dialogue at the...

The Difference.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... THE DIFFERENCE The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. --G.W.F. Hegel Free men are Kings of men and women are their Queens, It's like poetry and daffodils, like sausages and...

Religion, violence and Roger Scruton.(Gentle Regrets)
December 1, 2007... ROGER SCRUTON'S autobiography is called Gentle Regrets. His Prospect article last August responding to Christopher Hitchens and Co might well have been called "Gentle Remonstrances". It's true that in one place he so far loses patience with his...

Education revolutions, left, right and centre.(Education)
December 1, 2007... EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTIONS are highly fashionable. So anxious are the major parties to present themselves as radical innovators that we seem to face the prospect of a "permanent revolution". The May Commonwealth budget, which marked the de facto...

The Line.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... THE LINE like a tune in your head that cannot be heard that fades away when you listen like spider silk glimpsed as it drifts unanchored and aimlessly glistening like a bright curl of metallic thread ...

Hungry for you.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... HUNGRY FOR YOU I wish you were an ice-cream on a stick So I could thaw your coldness, lick by lick, With maybe a chocolate coating I could bite And break away to reach your sweet delight, Undressing you, removing nip...

Genocide by suicide.(social problems )(Viewpoint essay)
December 1, 2007... I MUST BEGIN by declaring my interest with regard to Aboriginal politics. In 1974 as a leftie schoolteacher working at Katherine School of the Air, I helped Vincent Lingiari, Mickey Ringiari, Long Johnny, Philip Nitschke, and a few others,...

Multiculturalism: an idea whose time has gone.
December 1, 2007... IT HAS BEEN REPORTED in Britain that the Conservative Muslim Forum", a body of "moderate Muslims set up on the initiative of David Cameron to advise the British Conservative Party, has condemned in threatening terms British support for Israel...

Dealing with obese women.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... DEALING WITH OBESE WOMEN Fat women don't have feelings-They are, by definition, jolly, Bluff, a bit obtuse. No need to watch your words-Like foreigners and children, They don't speak the language. ...

Chandelier-Tree.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... CHANDELIER-TREE I find myself staring at the spaces between fronds, where pure blue plumes appear, the air painting itself on my eye. And I see how the trunk doesn't end where a person can climb, but continues ...

What It Isn't.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... WHAT IT ISN'T Old evidences of decay Still linger in the mind And little that you do or say Seems apposite or kind. You preach more often than you pray, You lose more than you find. It isn't what you take...

Humdinger.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... HUMDINGER (getting louder) See I saw the feller humming, he was coming, he was coming, through the wood, like a bandit in a hood and it wasn't looking good, no way, so I started in to pray but my wits had gone...

Out Of Tasmania.(Devine)(Christopher Koch )
December 1, 2007... An afternoon in March, the air cooling, the sun coming and going at the whim of slow-sailing clouds. The colouring of the day is changing from moment to moment, as it often does in the island: colour giving away to monochrome; monochrome...

The crusade against beauty.(Literature)(Christopher Koch's speech)(Reprint)
December 1, 2007... I HAVE BEEN LEARNING to write for something like forty-five years. I say "learning to write' because writers never cease to learn their craft, and with each small extra discovery, even at my advanced age, the excitement of one's first fatal...

The Double.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... THE DOUBLE The witness Jones attests by affidavit That you were present at the seminar All of the day in question. He asked you for your number and you gave it. He's quoted from your repartee At lunch and, when...

The house of Edith Wharton.
December 1, 2007... THE MODERN PUBLISHING world is more often than not captive to its market-place, thus the prospective reader of a new biography of Edith Wharton is treated to giddy recommendations on its back cover. "A rich new life of a great novelist", "first...

Two knights of Australia.(Australia)(A Public Life: The Memoirs of Zelman Cowen)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... SIR ZELMAN COWEN and Sir Ninian Stephen: each a lawyer by training, with a highly distinguished career in (respectively) academe and the judiciary, thereafter consecutive governors-general of Australia, and other things after that, both...

The Treekeeper's Tale.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... THE TREEKEEPER'S TALE I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood. My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams. But all I know when I...

Redwood Canopy Explorer.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... REDWOOD CANOPY EXPLORER I hang in the spaces between canopies and when I pause for breath it hits me-the total silence. Even my mental chatter vanishes. Just me and these ancient beings and the rain they filter from...

Misunderstanding the Crown.(The Constitution)(The Chameleon Crown: The Queen and her Australian Governors)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... THE CHAMELEON CROWN: The Queen and her Australian Governors, by Dr Anne Twomey, is a well-written, informative and long-overdue contribution to an understanding of Australia's constitutional arrangements, particularly in relation to the...

The Blessings of Saint Vincent.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... THE BLESSINGS OF SAINT VINCENT Saint Vincent, patron saint of student clothing, bequeathed to me from the depths and twists of his sorting tables, a perfect Victorian camisole, every stitch scaled in sixteenths...

Short Boots.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... SHORT BOOTS Twenty five dollar boots from Cooks on Oxford Street, cow hide, Cowgirl-style, embossed, with a Cuban heel, you meant business and when, at eighteen, I walked home in the hot compression of summer...

Time and space for the few.(Science)
December 1, 2007... WHEN THE DEFINITIVE history of the twentieth century is written, perhaps a thousand years from now, the two world wars will deserve a footnote apiece and there will be, I daresay, a section on putting men on the moon and another on cracking the...

The 1976 Cabinet Papers: a reply to John Stone.
December 1, 2007... JOHN STONE'S RESPONSE (Quadrant, July-August) to my remarks on the release of the 1976 Cabinet Papers does not provide any evidence to contradict my account of some of the significant events of the year, and contains a number of...

The Istanbullus meet the world.(Travel)(Istanbul, Turkey)
December 1, 2007... RECENTLY DAVID MALOUF commented of the Brisbane he recreated in Johnno: It is a sobering thing, at just thirty, to have outlived the landmarks of one's youth. And to have seen them go, not in some violent cataclysm... but ...

The Final Cliche.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... THE FINAL CLICHE When th'endangered species are no more and the seas are no longer around, and the multicultural masses are expiring under the ground; When every darned thing has been side-lined; and the last...

Dumbed-down visuals.(Film)(Lions for Lambs)(Movie review)
December 1, 2007... "IBSEN WITH HELICOPTERS" is how one US critic described Lions with Lambs. It was of course |intended as a putdown. According to SMH reviewer Paul Byrnes, "the snarling blogs of war have been busily denouncing Lions for Lambs well before it...

Surreal Elements in a Relationship.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... SURREAL ELEMENTS IN A RELATIONSHIP He wore jeans and a singlet boots and a watch which he hung over the chair like a Dali watch it grew bigger and bigger while I grew smaller and...

Uprooted Redwood.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... UPROOTED REDWOOD My crown once swayed above the stratosphere like a raft, each pine-needle tuned to the stars. You can hear my leaves humming an infinite green fugue. It's as if dawn depends on it, for ladders of...

Primo.(Short story)
December 1, 2007... My father never talked to me about sex when I was growing up. He was a conservative and private man who seemed to love his children but without intimacy, without engagement, without the exchange of spirit that, I am told, happens in the...

A companionable browse: more than the usual suspects.(The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... BEFORE YOU LEAP to the conclusion that this new Oxford Companion to Australian Politics will be, like some other Oxford Companions, contaminated by a soft leftism, you should know that I am one of the contributors. I may be only one of more...

Bureaucrats versus Science.(The Trouble with Physics)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin; Penguin, 2007, $59.95. LORD KELVIN, in the late nineteenth century, proclaimed that Physics was nearly finished. He believed that all the fundamental Laws of Nature were known and the rest was only a...

Glass Slipper.(Poem)
December 1, 2007... Glass Slipper My beautiful, blue-eyed boy grown so tall and strong and strange, able to make a living not a life, beloved but ill-equipped to love your lovely, laughing girl who barely hesitates as he draws her ...

In at the beginning.(Book review)
December 1, 2007... How the Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur Herman; Random, 2001, $25.95. WHICH CRITIC of academia wrote (not in Quadrant) the following: "a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection...

The useful grievance.(Essay)
December 1, 2007... IN THE JANUARY-FEBRUARY issue of Quadrant this year I wrote about Thorstein Veblen, whose book The Theory of the Leisure Class stirred up a sensation in the early 1900s. Its thesis: as soon as humans achieve basic sufficiency in nutrition,...