Quadrant articles from January 2001

Quadrant archives from January 2001

FEDERATION--100 YEARS AND MORE.(Australia)
January 1, 2001... THE CENTENARY of the Australian federation has been the cause of much justifiable celebration. It is after all still a rare event for any country to be able to complete a successful century of liberal democracy and internal peace, especially in...

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2001... CHRISTIANS AND MASSACRES SIR: Keith Windschuttle's article on frontier massacres (November 2000) ends on a revealing note. After having criticised Henry Reynolds for making a conservative and educated estimate of the number of Aborigines...

FREE SPEECH AND HATE SPEECH.
January 1, 2001... THE PRESENCE of racial hate propaganda in our community and on the internet discomfits free speech advocates and severely tests the principle of free speech and expression. This underscores a dramatic change of social values that took place in...

FREE, WHITE AND TWENTY-ONE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The word whips in from overseas, a crack in the enamel, the day her daughter tells her that she's marrying a Tamil. She could bave married anyone, a grazier or surgeon, and bad a lovely string of kids to...

MY MOTHER'S LETTERS.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I have my mother's letters in a Woolworth's plastic bag, three or four, to be precise, five decades worth of admonitions, her longhand all around the type with, now and then, some Pitman script learned when...

THE MAN IN THE GREY CARDIGAN.(political technique)
January 1, 2001... MY FIRST BOSS in the public service taught me many things--where to find a policy; how to write a letter; how to manage a file. He arrived punctually in the office every morning, took off his coat, and put on a grey cardigan, which he kept on a...

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE VULNERABLE IN OUR MIDST.
January 1, 2001... PUBLIC POLICY is no longer a private matter. Once the domain of statesmen, politicians, civil servants, business leaders and academics, the area of public policy has become increasingly democratised. Public policy is discussed on street...

BENEFICIARIES.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... That all that happened happened thus Has been exactly right for us. An inch too far, a minute late, And we'd have had another fate. Our being here's enough to show That we were favoured long ago, Were helped...

VAN DIEMEN'S LAND.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... God's unevaporated tear Named for the Devil from the start, The ineluctably sad isle, Melancholic, alcoholic From genocide and convict days Contaminates my blood as song, A bitter, soul-dark, harsh complaint....

WILL AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND UNITE?
January 1, 2001... WOULD FURTHER INTEGRATION BE GOOD FOR NEW ZEALAND? THE ANALYSIS of what policies will benefit any political group, including a nation, is always a combination of subjective and objective calculations. In this case, the balance will need to...

SONG LYRIC.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... So I became a woman when I realised I was plain. Somehow a child learns to guess the role determined by her face and by her neighbour's native grace, so she concedes to them their place-- the women whom the poets...

ELEGY.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Contempt is the luxury of a future, resentment the past locked in a safe. When I'm lost I pray to myself for the lack of anyone else to pray to, Lord don't let me be less than I am: although I often am and am sorry...

WHAT THE GOLD RUSH WROUGHT.
January 1, 2001... ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY years ago this summer Edward Hammond Hargraves, stout, moustachioed, thirty-something man with an idea, rode out from Sydney into the Blue Mountains on a borrowed horse. California-style, he panned stream-bed soil near...

THROWERS-OUT AND KEEPERS-IN.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Throwers-out and keepers-in... The women with their cupboards bare Before the nursing home The others with a daughter's name On every piece of silver Three women who will strip the rooms To fuel a...

A TURBULENT KING AND HIS PRIEST.
January 1, 2001... THE RELATIONSHIP between Henry II of England--warrior, count, duke and king--and Thomas Becket--clerk, chancellor, archbishop, martyr and saint--is a tale with heroic, indeed Homeric, qualities which has acquired the status of myth, a mother...

DYLAN & CAITLIN.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The poignant photograph is one Of them reclining in the sun-- Their intimacy showing through, Unposed, unglamorous, but true. Yet with a tension in it all, As if they had agreed to call This little truce in...

READING HISTORY.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... We know what they will suffer and will do. We have the final outcomes neatly penned. And we can watch it all proceeding to The very thing that happened at the end. For us the deep significances cling To names and...

TO THE KYSAK STATION.
January 1, 2001... PEOPLE IN PRAGUE told us the canteen ladies of Kysak were one the great sights of Eastern Europe. Kysak is a small Slovakian railway junction town near the Ukrainian border. Night and day, trains pull in from the major cities of Central Europe....

A BALIBO CHRISTMAS TALE.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... ONCE UPON A TIME in a little place that nobody really cared about a terrible thing happened. Some nasty men found some good men trying to prove their goodness by showing just how nasty the others were. The nasty men killed the good men....

OLYMPICS GROUP ALLEGES DISCRIMINATION.(Brief Article)(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... SPORTS OFFICIALS representing the nation's smokers are planning court action under anti-discrimination legislation against what they describe as the "blatantly unfair" refusal of a number of major companies to sponsor the forthcoming Smokers'...

A GODFATHER on the MURRAY.(Brief Article)(Play)
January 1, 2001... With celebrity chef Enzo dei Pomodori SCENE: A makeshift al fresco kitchen beside a billabong, billy boiling over gum-twig campfire, hessian-covered Coolgardie safe swinging from a branch, primus stove creating bushfire hazard, drowsy...

THE INWARD STAR.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Whatever happened to the gold which the Three Kings brought? Was it in nuggets or in Persian coins? No records survive Matthew never named the King whose gift it was The Kings were discreet by nature Perhaps that is...

BABUSIA.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. The sharp tone of the heartbeat monitor pierces my mind, already rattled with fear and insecurity. She lies on the operating table, more like a dentist's chair, sleepy from the small shot of...

MOTHER'S MOTHER for Biff.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I'm looking at a woman smile singing to her grandson there, three months young and swaddled in her arms. You'd think it was the past come back, those first few dreaming months of mouths, that pressure on the nipples...

HALF A CENTURY AS A MUSIC CRITIC.
January 1, 2001... WHEN I BEGAN writing music criticism in the daily press in 1963 after doing so in other publications since the late 1940s, critics were identified by their initials at the end of the review. Around mid-1965, their cloak of semianonymity was...

TOASTS.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Jessica wiped her eyes with her napkin and then poked a fork in her baked haddock. Diana, pretending not to notice, refilled our glasses with wine, a surprising Chablis. I lifted my glass in a toast. "Here's to...

BACKED UP.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Traffic was backed up. "It looks like we're stuck here," I said, touching Marie on the thigh. I risked a small smile, which she didn't notice. Traffic was backed up before and behind us, but squad cars arrived...

EAT YOUR GREENS.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Levitate an hour a day And eat your greens says Doctor Hay. Take your flugelhorn to work And eat your greens says Doctor Burke. Light a candle on the bus And eat your greens says Doctor Truss. Buy a...

THEY'VE SHUT UP THE MADHOUSE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... They've shut up the madhouse and thrown all the lunatics out on the street And the crazies don't like it, the doctors don't like it, the keepers don't like it, The people don't like it; the kids, they don't like it, in...

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID DAICHES.(Interview)
January 1, 2001... WHEN I RECORDED the conversation from which these extracts have been edited and arranged, David Daiches was in his eighty-eighth year, retired from his most distinguished career as a university teacher of English, and probably the most senior...

BENEDICTION.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... For benediction I raise my hand and the people bow their heads--except a small boy, who raises his hand to bestow a blessing on me!

POST PARTUM ELATION.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... After the long pain-- such brightness on her face as she held our firstborn his head still messy with blood and vernix and forceps-marks!

TOUCH.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Suddenly aware as my two little sons leap up at me like pups and my wife touches her lips to mine-suddenly acutely struck that during the fortnight away I haven't touched anybody and nobody has touched...

CROSSING.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Daylight at their heels, three kangaroos bound across pasture as open as a rifle range, leaping in single file to the place where they usually push under the fence into the bush--the place where, when...

MATERIALISTIC MADNESS.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... THERE IS NOTHING intrinsically ennobling about poverty, just as wealth is not necessarily corrupting. But a culture that sees everything in materialistic terms has forgotten the lesson of King Midas and created a world where sensibilities are...

SESTINA ON A MODEL RAILWAY EXHIBITION.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... First, there is the tiny flashing of pistons between the English meadows, timber-frame Tudor houses or dry Australian paddocks with wheat. Smoke from tiny funnels, flashing lights at crossings, and the somewhat satisfied...

NINE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... "We'll Pay Paddy Doyle for His Boots" Just when your sweetest sleep begins you will get tumbled toward your own extinction as of a sudden the slippery ocean slants and your bones, brim with warning, have you clambering...

TEN.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... "Rolling Down to Old Maui" Say I could give this life back and take another it might suit me very well to be a barefoot island boy along for the ride of his life on some immense baurua, out among those...

"PISTOLS AND CUTLASSES, MEN!".(C.S. Forester's "Hornblower")
January 1, 2001... THE RETURN OF HORNBLOWER ITV'S NEW HORNBLOWER series, broadcast last year on the ABC, was virtually the first screen version of C.S. Forester's books for nearly fifty years. For fans of the novels, however, Hornblower has never been away....

BLACK DOG.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... 1 When it bared its teeth at me again, the black dog, I bared, bared my neck. But it would no more attack than it would go, go on back! 2 Waking, I am not surprised to sense the black dog ...

THE SERPENT'S EYE: THE CINEMA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY COMBAT.
January 1, 2001... Military glory--that attractive rainbow that rises in: showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms to destroy. --ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 12TH JANUARY 1848 IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the motion picture and modern warfare techniques...

THE GAP.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... He peered through the gap in the canvas and there they were, doing it, just as he thought. He no longer likes a summer day when a cool breeze assuages the hot sun, for that was the day that was in it. And he...

BOBBIN BOY.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... He started like any other lowly bobbin boy --polite, eyes brimming, the freckles on his nose yet to turn twelve, his forehead creasing I as he struggled to take it all in. He believed our account of the man who tripped and...

WAINE'S FARM.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... This morning I flicked a caterpillar off a cabbage leaf and watched it drop, then sway in the air, hanging by a silken thread. First grub I've ever seen dance the Newgate hornpipe. And I've lived through worse ...

TAKE THIS MAN.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Take this man who holds a shoe against the needle flying in and out, in and out. Notice how casually he turns the sole, how little effort he seems to expend. The McKay stitcher does it all. But look again. See how...

Before Joe.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... So you knew Joe, did you? Waiter, same again. Extraordinary fellow. Did you ever meet him? Only once. I knew Helen quite well. And her husband. First or second? First really. Bernard taught at my school for a while before he...

Returning to Stone.
January 1, 2001... All that late winter and spring I rode the bus in the early afternoons down the ugly London road, noticing the queues at the eel-and-pie-shop, the students by the college, the blacks at the street corners. Then I would get off the bus, turn...

ROAD.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I loved a stretch of Hell's Gate's road, Deserted, lonely as a life, That snaked up hill towards a brow As proudly as a swelling cock, That swiftly falling thrilled my crotch Before its next sharp steep assault ...

The Tooth Fairy.(Short Story)
January 1, 2001... Sofia raced into Torvald's workshop, jolting him from the trance he fell into while making fiddles. "Why aren't you in bed?" he snapped. Dressed in her lemon-coloured Bugs Bunny pyjamas, seven-year-old Sofia danced over towards him in time...

RELEASE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I'm going to slap my anger onto a wet slab, put it through a mangle, hang out its long line of eccentric washing. I'm going to fly its flags from my windows, smack it into surprised faces, push it up noses, smash...

WHEN IT'S ALL OVER.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I'm going to throw open my windows and yell: "halleluiah", dial up friends in the middle of the night to give them the glad tidings, e-mail New South Wales and Pacific Palisades, glorify the kitchen by making sixteen summer...

The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.(Review)
January 1, 2001... The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, by Roger Kimball; Encounter, 2000, $50. ONCE IN A WHILE a book is published which seems to provide a genuine landmark in the way we understand ourselves and our...

Against the Idols of the Age.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Against the Idols of the Age, by David Stove, edited with an introduction by Roger Kimball; Transaction Publishers, 1999, US$40. SATIRE CAN be a formidable intellectual weapon, but it is rare to find it in the world of formal philosophical...

The Whispering Wall.(Review)
January 1, 2001... The Whispering Wall, by Patricia Carlon; Wakefield Crime Classics, 1992, $5.50. ACCORDING TO an explanation at the end of this book, Peter Moss and Michael J. Tolley began collecting "forgotten or neglected gems of crime nd mystery fiction...

Nightpictures.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Nightpictures, by Rod Jones; Random House Australia, 1997, $24.95. THE SETTING for Nightpictures is Venice; and there's no better backdrop for evoking such intense feelings of decay and decline than this city, with its reputation for...

A GOOD JOB.(the bible as leisure reading)
January 1, 2001... EARLY EACH DECEMBER, the book pages offer us fat sheaves of short paragraphs, setting out the self-written accounts of who read what books during the year just passing. This quaint indulgence of the literati does no conceivable harm, but does...