Quadrant articles from January 2000

Quadrant archives from January 2000

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2000... INJUDICIOUS ADVICE SIR: Philip Ayres' interesting article "Crisis-Breaker" (November 1999) on Sir Owen Dixon's extra-judicial advice to state governors raises two issues, neither of which can be developed fully here. 1. Was it...

MORE SCHOLAR FOR THE DOLLAR.
January 1, 2000... ON WEDNESDAY 13th October 1999 Australia higher education system was done inestimable harm. On that day a cabinet submission on future funding for higher education prepared by federal Education Minister Dr David Kemp was leaked to his...

THE IMAGES ALONE.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Scarlet as the cloth draped over a sword, white as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia, old curried towns, the frog in its green human skin; a ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons, but as at a whoop of young men...

STATE HOSPITAL: APPREHENSIONS OF VAN GOGH.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... The old man shuffles across the room toward me, and I see he's not so old, forty, or thirty-five. "It's muddy outside," he says. "I like your boots. Do you like mine? You're getting old. Your hair is gray." He laughs. "I lost a...

EDWARD SAID'S ORIENTALISM REVISITED.
January 1, 2000... EARLY IN 1998, the Art Gallery of New South Wales staged an exhibition entitled "Orientalism: From Delacroix to Klee". It contained 124 paintings and fifty photographs, most of which were produced by European artists in the nineteenth century...

TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER.
January 1, 2000... NOW THAT THE FUSS about management seems to be dying down, everyone is suddenly talking about leadership. Good leaders are paragons -- a mixture of Bill Gates and Albert Einstein with a touch of the Dalai Lama thrown in. Hardly anyone measures...

A SONG OF SEVEN KINGS.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... The first king was a king in Babylon, His beard was braided and his armour shone, "I rule the Heavens," he said. "I rule the Earth. A golden lion prophesied my birth." The second king was pale and fat as lard, Robed...

HOME.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... a premature seed was buried in the soil of home that had not sprouted for years and had no hope of flowering struggling in bitterness and full of imagination in a soil that contains alkaline and acid under...

EAST TIMOR: TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES.
January 1, 2000... FOLLOWING the 30th August referendum last year, when the militias, armed and supported by the Indonesian armed forces, made good on their threats to devastate East Timor for choosing independence, the twenty-five-year debate in Australia over...

DEATH OF A POET.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Could I think you a stranger ever though you' re cold and in the ground, under a hard bed of obligations? Over and over I'm being told what I'd rather not be told. Of the weather gone from your face, uncanny Gaelic...

FRILL-NECKED LIZARD.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... My sister and I, aged just three and one, found a cool place under the house away from Brisbane's summer sun. The garden was above us, somewhere, fenced on one side with vines and the spike-tipped palm-fronds which are...

REFUTING PROTAGORAS.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... RELATIVISM is the idea that where there is a disagreement about matters of fact, there is really no fact or truth of the matter. Anybody's opinion is as good as anybody else's. There is quite a lot of relativism about these days, as there was...

LOVE & SEX & BOYS IN SHOWERS.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... (The publicity line for a free book enclosed with "Bliss", a magazine for young teenage girls, is "Love & Sex & Boys in Showers".) Wishing, wondering, thinking, talking, Is it Medicine? Is it Smarties? Difficult, like...

ANTI-ANTI-REALISM.
January 1, 2000... AS THE DUST JACKET of Mind, Language and Society says, John Searle is widely regarded as one of the world's leading philosophers. Some years ago, he was the living philosopher most cited by non-philosophers, and exceeded Thomas Kuhn in number...

REMAINING SCEPTICAL.
January 1, 2000... LESSONS FROM PSYCHIATRY'S MISTREATMENT OF HOMOSEXUAL PATIENTS PSYCHIATRY was a late-comer to the oppression of homosexual, bisexual and trans-gender people. Long before psychiatry or psychology were recognised as distinct disciplines, the...

THE STRANGER ON THE TRAIN FROM PRAGUE.
January 1, 2000... FIFTY YEARS AGO, O, in the early morning of 23rd July 1949, I stood on the deck of the S.S. Continental and had my first glimpse of Sydney Harbour. I stood there in wonderment next to Big Tom, my father; as the magnificent harbour unfolded...

FOR ALICE, FOR ALL OF US.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... I. Already born, your birthday is three weeks away, And already you are dead. The world does not know this. Outside, tonight, an autumn sky is cold with stars. In the city where you lie, the traffic is unceasing. ...

CHRISTIANITY IN A NUTSHELL.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... GOD'S PLAN FOR PEOPLE 1. people exist because God wants people to exist 2. God wants people to exist because God wants to do good things for people 3. God wants all people to live with God 4. it is good for people to live with...

New "stolen generation" claims.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... Researcher's shock discovery A leading advocate of minority rights is sending shock waves through white Australia with his discovery of not one but two hitherto unrecognised "stolen generations". Dr Henry Reynolds-Slater says the...

A Jerk with a Rod.
January 1, 2000... In his first venture into piscatorial reflection, the greatest of Australia's expatriate art critics explains how he unfailingly manages to reel in lucrative contracts with the IBC and all those "quality" metropolitan newspapers that normally...

Dies Irae.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... The exclusive Sydney harbourside municipality of Chardonnay Hill has decided to keep 6 November each year as "a day of civic mourning". Chardonnay Hill voted a resounding 184 per cent in favour of a republic at November's referendum. ...

MAKER OF HEAVEN AND MICROBIOLOGY.
January 1, 2000... IN THEIR MASSIVE history of evolutionary thought, Darwinism Evolving, David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber suggest that when stresses are felt in prevailing scientific theories, other, previously marginalised views are likely to make their way...

WHAT'S YOUR MEDICINE? ORTHODOX OR NATURAL?
January 1, 2000... IN TIMES OF GREAT CHANGE it is sometimes difficult to know what is orthodoxy and what heresy. Those of us born in the first half of the century find our opinions becoming increasingly viewed as unorthodox by the younger generation who have...

THE BEST IN TOWN.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... A smiling specialist. Smart in Italian suit and old school tie. Nails freshly manicured, hands cold on my breast, pushing flesh into hills and valleys. He's started counting. (I made it six in the shower last week.)...

BEYOND RADIATION NEUROSIS.
January 1, 2000... IN 1999 AUSTRALIANS celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the commencement of our nation's greatest engineering infrastructure project -- the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. As we salute the vision and the enterprise of the men and...

THE CONDITION OF AN INJURY.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... i went back to the mirror and the reverse me appeared when i sat down in the sounds they all became quiet (translated by Ouyang Yu)

FLOORS.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... With no pretentiousness they bear us. It is no concern of theirs what we propose to do, or do. They stand us, mimic earth's pull, hold us to it. Flat rejections do not trouble them; indifference cuts no ice. ...

AT BAI JUYI'S GRAVE, LUO YANG.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Each statue here's in good repair: immortal, maybe, Mao stands tall before the copper-wire works. The city's ploughed and flattened. Cyclists ferry hens in crates to swift decapitation; fishes crowd in...

HEALTH OF THE NATION.(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... AUSTRALIANS have never been healthier. The average length of life has never been longer. Medical practices have never been so certain, and are improving visibly. Yet there is chronic dissatisfaction among economists and health care...

WHY ARE THERE NO GOOD POLITICAL NOVELS?
January 1, 2000... AS THEY SAY of the sixties, if you can remember places like Australia's old Parliament House, you weren't there. What holds true for the old Parliament House is just as applicable to the Congress, the Bundestag or the Duma. Wilful amnesia, bred...

NEW YEAR'S PARTY.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... The hostess and her husband were as warm as one could want but their New Year's Day party brought me down. It was time to talk of the year ahead in optimistic terms with confidence in men in power ...

POETRY AND DISPLEASURE.
January 1, 2000... HERE ARE THREE sketches to shed some light, not on Australian poems, but on the narrow, acrid back street in which Australian poetry as an enterprise finds itself at this time. First an immodest sketch. I live in Canberra where, at literary...

REMEMBERING THEOPHILUS.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... While hatters were hatting, they'd pass the time chatting Of what they were enduring from felting and curing With poisonous sulphates that addled their poor pates And made them all mercury mad. There was never a hatter...

ERIC AMBLER'S DARK FRONTIERS.
January 1, 2000... The man who invented the modern thriller did not live to see the rediscovery of his greatest work. Eric Ambler wrote a series of books in the 1930s that established a new literary genre the immense popularity of which is now taken for granted....

TIRESOME SCIENTISTS.
January 1, 2000... FOR SCIENTIST R.B. Frenkel ("Metrication and the Rest of Science", July-August 1999) my article ("Metrication and Scientific Hubris", March 1999) was an intemperate and ill-informed attack on metrication and all of science. He is disturbed that...

THE RETURN OF HARRY LIME.
January 1, 2000... LIKE MOST of my generation born in the 1940s I first encountered Harry Lime on the radio in the BBC series The Lives of Harry Lime. Each episode began with a gunshot followed by "This is Orson Welles... that was the shot that killed Harry...

Adieu, Madame Bartoli.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... The terrace gate swung open noisily, a clear signal that Mireille had arrived. Casting a beaming smile like a searchlight around the terrace and finding it occupied only by Celia, she demanded abruptly, "Ou est le clan?" Celia got up with...

Brothers.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... Ebony was Nick's little brother. "You have to be," he told her. "There's no-one else. Tegan's no good -- she cries too much and besides, she's scared of spiders. And Kate," he made a grimace of disgust, "Kate's gone real stupid -- all she does...

The Engagement.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... I reserve the right to tell only whomsoever I choose about the circumstances of my engagement and the events leading up to it. It is a suitable partnership and, considering all of the favourable factors involved such as similar age, occupation...

EXTRACT FROM CABOT'S DIARY -- LANDFALL.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... This morning, land, at last. A fine line like a brushstroke marks the horizon, broadening and deepening as we lurch towards it across a cold sea flecked by specks of white and heaving with porpoises. Icebergs sail past, ...

LEAVING GLENTHOMPSON.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... There's Dad's Dad way up in the cherry-picker fixing the power poles in this town where the trees out-number them and the crickets out-buzz them And there's the bank where young Dad's a teller counting coins by...

THE LAST.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... The last great Western martyrdom was probably in Otranto which the Ottomans besieged and gave the 800 holders-out the choice to change belief. No deal: they stepped forward to be decapitated one by one on...

HERE WE GO, HERE WE GO.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... And is that Teddy sitting on the shelf, and are the church clock's hands still stuck on three and will there still be jobs for you and me and is this England? Is the small shopkeeper still alive whose kippers were...

Robert Menzies, A Life, vol. 2, 1944-1978.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Robert Menzies, A Life: Volume 2, 1944-1978, by A.W. Martin; Melbourne University Press, 1999, $49.95. LIKE OR HATE HIM, it is hard to think of a more brilliant Australian politician than Robert Gordon Menzies. He was born in 1894, in the...

Out of Ireland.
January 1, 2000... Out of Ireland, by Christopher Koch; Doubleday, 1999, $39.95. A NEW Christopher Koch novel is always a great treat, for he is one of the few modern Western authors who engages fully not only readers' intellects, and not only their emotions,...

Should You Read Shakespeare? Literature, Popular Culture and Morality.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Should You Read Shakespeare? Literature, Popular Culture and Morality, by Anne Waldron Neumann; UNSW Press, 1999, $24.95. OF THE VARIOUS spectra upon which essays may be plotted is one which runs approximately from meditative, personal and...

AS LOST AS BURKE AND WILLS.
January 1, 2000... ONE WARM, still day recently, I sat on the veranda looking idly out through the heat haze that shimmered over the northern Victorian plain. From our elevation, the view extends unbroken almost to the Murray River; one sees below the outward...