Quadrant articles from January 2007

Quadrant archives from January 2007

The High Court and federalism.(Editorial)
January 1, 2007... THE TWO REAL CONSERVATIVES of the High Court showed their true colours in the judgment on the validity of the government's WorkChoices legislation. So did the supposed conservatives, most of them appointed by the Howard government. The two were...

The struggle for Australian values in an age of deceit.
January 1, 2007... IN THE LONG HISTORY of warfare, from the ancient world to our own, there is one weapon whose ability to affect outcomes has always been notorious. Today, technological innovation has made it more powerful than ever. The weapon is propaganda. It...

Introducing Keith Windschuttle.
January 1, 2007... IT IS MY VERY GREAT pleasure to introduce Keith Windschuttle to deliver the Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture for 2006. In many ways Keith does not require an introduction. As a writer, commentator and intellectual over the past decade he has...

Sexualising everyday life: from Mann to Nabokov to Sheik al-Hilaly.
January 1, 2007... MY FIRST QUESTION is this: Was the mad mufti right? When Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly said that half-clothed Australian women went around like "exposed meat" inviting rape there was an immediate uproar from all enlightened opinion. Unbelievable!...

Tunnel Vision.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... TUNNEL VISION What you need is a handy glove-box size anti-Tunnel Guide for Dummies, to avoid ever being there, to evade that moment when the sky closes in, bleeding into darkness like water, you just ...

Barbarians in Shanghai: the conquering power of Euclid and Opium.
January 1, 2007... FOR SEVERAL HOURS, virtually every day, over a period of six months in late 1606 and early 1607, father Matteo Ricci, the pioneer Jesuit missionary to China, sought to convey the precise meaning of Euclid's Elements to Xu Guangqi, a convert to...

The burdens of war.(History)
January 1, 2007... LES CARLYON'S new book, The Great War, commands our praise and gratitude. It engenders also a certain wonder that a lone author-voyager could navigate successfully such a vast ocean of archives, histories (official and unofficial), biographies...

An activist in the movement: an interview with Frank Scully.(Frank Scully)(Interview)
January 1, 2007... FRANK SCULLY is believed to be the only Labor parliamentarian before the 1955 Labor Split to have been a member of "the Movement", the controversial anticommunist organisation of the 1940s and 1950s led by B.A. Santamaria, which became the...

Given.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... GIVEN After the news, after hours at a computer, after---or before-- the spring storm, after weeks of inaction, the removal of shoes and lacing up of boots, his one planned act is to dig-- raise...

Truth, error and government obstruction.
January 1, 2007... IF THE PRIME MINISTER is so much in favour of the teaching of Australian history, why does his government go to such lengths to obstruct scholars from revealing and writing about that history? There are some aspects of Australia's history...

July 2005.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... JULY 2005 1 Now is the time that saffron flowers flare from courgette plants, the males on thin stalks, the females tailed to small swellings. And here beneath hairy umbrellas, ready to be picked, solid as a...

The Mnajdra Temples, Malta.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... THE MNAJDRA TEMPLES, MALTA As if they'd been thrown down by a god in a temper rocks lie at random all over the hill. The ground is riddled with stones. It ought to be barren but it's given birth to flocks of yellow...

Milk Bottle.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... MILK BOTTLE Rinse one and you'll be rewarded with a winking lacery, spherical gas masses: globe balanced on ballooned globe, floating fragilities, each begging to inhabit the imagination. Precise chambers...

Education made easy.(Education)
January 1, 2007... DEFICIENCIES IN EDUCATION are becoming a public issue. The efforts of Kevin Donnelly and the Australian in exposing the fatuities of critical literacy and postmodernism are welcome signs. But the present problems are deep-set, as the rot set in...

The legacy of Ronald Ryan's last day.(Law)(capital punishment)(Law overview)
January 1, 2007... IT IS NOW FORTY YEARS since the last man in Australia was "judicially murdered". Ronald Ryan was hanged by the neck until dead at Melbourne's Pentridge Prison on February 3, 1967. Although the Bolte government, which ignored all demands for...

Land rights and property rights.(Law)(Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976)
January 1, 2007... THE ABORIGINAL LAND RIGHTS (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA) has very little in common with the Native Title Act other than the fact that they are both pieces of Commonwealth legislation, but in the contemporary national debate on Indigenous...

It's a Joke on Me.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... IT'S A JOKE ON ME Or I've had a stroke. This city heaving with workers on their way to work wilfully! shifting language just out of focus keeping up the act, as if they understand it. Even the children chatter in...

D.H. Lawrence and the fear of bungalows.
January 1, 2007... "We don't like to have anybody overhead here, "said Kangaroo. "We don "t even care to go upstairs, because we are then one storey higher than our true, ground-floor selves." "Prop us up on a dozen stumps, and we're cosy, "said Jack. "Just...

On the Nature of Desire.(Four Poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2007... ON THE NATURE OF DESIRE translated from the Russian by Daniel Weissbort The Greeks had culture, the Romans had culture, trash has none. The Greeks philosophised, competed in long-distance races, worked out...

To Hakan Sandvik.(Four Poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2007... TO HAKAN SANDVIK translated from the Russian by Daniel Weissbort There was still a street, such an endless one, no one knew where it began, in whose dreams, and in whose it will end. No one knew when it would rise...

To Valentina Polukhina.(Four Poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2007... TO VALENTINA POLUKHINA translated from the Russian by Daniel Weissbort An operatically tedious winter, frost a half-tone colder, air b-flat-rigid, a maple and its balding crown, appropriate recitative. I falter...

An ANZ-EU FTA: a new kind of trade agreement.(Economics)(Australia and New Zealand, European Union, Free Trade Agreement)
January 1, 2007... IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY it was a handful of European (mostly British) moral philosophers who most forcefully argued the virtues of free trade between nations. Few ideas have had a bigger influence on the wealth of nations. Two...

From the 8th Floor.(Sonnet)
January 1, 2007... FROM THE 8TH FLOOR Rome is glittering tonight. And the fireworks for no reason in a suburb I haven't been to. There was a fire the other day, over there, in the distance, the smoke rolled like rain clouds. ...

William Blake and the Rawleigh's man.(Religion)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... OLDER READERS will recall, probably with great fondness, the unannounced visits of the Rawleigh's man (or, perhaps, the Watkins man) in an earlier Australia. In my childhood days on the farm, the coming of the Rawleigh's man was an event of...

China's copycat capitalism.(Asia)(economy)
January 1, 2007... MANY PARENTS whose children have learned a musical instrument will be familiar with the "Suzuki method". It is a system designed to inculcate Western music performance for Asian students. The method is predicated on imitation and rote learning...

Bushman.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... BUSHMAN I sent a message through the smoke * two years ago the old bushman said, over the back yard fence. To old Joe, right up the Top End of Cape York peninsula. And as he spoke tears formed in his eyes. I...

Parridla Taikondi.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... PARRIDLA TAIKONDI The wind from my pedalling drops out of my beard as I come to a stop to listen to the bird-life wild in the trees. Magpies, kookaburras and crows high in the still leaves of Gum trees ...

Some more short takes.(Literature)(Short story)
January 1, 2007... 6/2/79 HESITATING BETWEEN OUR VARIOUS FATES SINCE HIS RETURN from Stamford, Kevin Hart has been staying in the end room at Arthur Circle. This morning I called there to read him a new poem I had written, and in turn he described for me...

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize winner.(Literature)
January 1, 2007... AFTER BEING RUMOURED to be a front runner, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. At fifty-four he is relatively young for such a distinction. While a productive if not a prolific author, he won recognition...

American Conservatives and the Second World War.
January 1, 2007... WHEN I FIRST LEARNT that Mr Patrick Buchanan was setting up a new magazine called the American Conservative, I was delighted. There is always room for another conservative journal of culture and ideas. Now I have read the American...

Alice, Kelly and the brides.(Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd)
January 1, 2007... TO CELEBRATE Charles Blackman's London opening in 1961, at a Chinese restaurant called The Universal, Barry Humphries composed a merry rime "Arthur [Boyd] paints brides in their newly wed clothes, But Charlie takes us under the bed clothes."...

Print the legend?(Movie review)
January 1, 2007... "IF THE FACTS don't fit the legend, print the legend," John Ford is supposed to have said. In fact he didn't: but one of his characters certainly did, at the conclusion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when it was decided that it would be...

For the Beautiful Women at the Questura.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... FOR THE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN AT THE QUESTURA It's beyond my understanding that you respect poetry but I respect you for that. "Scrivere poesia." And I see in your eyes something I have never seen. You ask for a poem. This is my poem for you....

The name of the nose.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... When we first came to inspect this house in Hill End, my mother's initial thought had been how bad the fengshui was. A gravelled path led to a flight of timber stairs, to the front door from which blue paint peeled off in flakes, some as big as...

Painstaking progress.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you. And while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless. --Merle Shain I'm imagining a cloudy autumn morning. There's a room. Half office, half bedroom....

Time-out at the Mugdens'.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... I suppose for want of a better name you would call it a guesthouse, although there was only room for a couple of families. There were no bookings. You were invited, and normally we stayed for two weeks, which seemed to be about the same for...

Driving the Old Ladies.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... DRIVING THE OLD LADIES She looked at me with the straps of her bag in her hands, beer glass empty on the table under the window. But then her mate wanted one for the road so we all had to wait,...

Wiping off the English grin: in the age of terrorism.("Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain")(Book review)
January 1, 2007... I have never called myself an intellectual, and nobody has ever dared to call me one in my presence. --Bertrand Russell It is the self-imposed assignment of neo-conservatives to explain to the American people why they are right, and to...

The light of civilisation.(How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization)(The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas E. Woods; Regnery, 2005, $54.95. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success, by Rodney Stark; Random, 2005, $49.95. THESE TWO...

Always learning.(The Student Chronicles)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... The Student Chronicles, by Alice Garner; Miegunyah, 2006, $24.95. THE POPULAR PERCEPTION of the universities is likely to range from an unrealistic vision of ivy-clad colleges and oak-lined studies to an extension of school with more spare...

The return of David Campbell.(Hardening of the Light: Selected Poems)(Strike)(Letters Lifted into Poetry: Selected Correspondence between David Campbell and Douglas Stewart 1946-1979)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Hardening of the Light." Selected Poems, by David Campbell, edited by Philip Mead; Indigo (Ginninderra Press), 2006, $20. Strike, by David Campbell; Pandanus Books, 2006, $29.95. Letters Lifted into Poetry: Selected Correspondence...

Thorstein Veblen and conspicuous consumption.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... IT MUST BE SIXTY years ago, perhaps almost to the day, that I bought my copy of Thorstein Veblen s book The Theory of the Leisure Class. I was on my way to have a counter lunch with Brian Fitzpatrick at Melbourne's famous Mitre Tavern, which...