Quadrant articles from July 2001

Quadrant archives from July 2001

POLITICS OF THE ART GALLERY--AND THE UNIVERSITY.(National Gallery of Australia)
July 1, 2001... THE POLITICS art galleries throughout Australia (and elsewhere) is always complex, but in recent times has developed a particular viciousness. There has always been infighting within the arts, as within the universities, but the politics of the...

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2001... MANNING CLARK SIR: I note that Peter Ryan (May 2001) continues to pursue his campaign against Manning Clark, a posthumous campaign of the kind that Hal Colebatch deplores elsewhere in the May issue of Quadrant. I note also that he...

STRANGE TALES FROM SUPREME COURTS.(politics and the courts)
July 1, 2001... THE YEAR 2001 is a big year for elections. Already Australians have gone to the ballot box in two states and in the federal electorate of Ryan. In accordance with the constitution, a federal general election must take place this year. Already...

MANNING CLARK AND WHITE AUSTRALIA.(Australia, politics and race relations)
July 1, 2001... THE CENTENARY of the Australian Labor Party is a table time to reconsider the treatment by Manning Clark, Australia's most influential twentieth-century left-wing historian, of the White Australia policies which formed an important plank in the...

THE LATIN FOR GARDEN.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Richard Elliott, tatterdemalion curlyhead, stayed for just the greenest of our years. His trousers could not reach his ankles, and trouble blew about his head in a daily weather. To this he returned his smile, which...

PASSING THE UNEXAMINED LIFE.(Socrates)(Critical Essay)
July 1, 2001... If I say this would be disobedience to God, and that is why I cannot "mind my own business", you will not believe me--you'll think I'm pulling your leg. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all...

ICEBERG VICTIM.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Since the Titanic you've had a bad reputation. The brutal collision, women and children in freezing water, men saving themselves first--a thoroughly disreputable tale. Writers and commentators expended enormous effort ...

GOA AND EAST TIMOR: CONTRASTING HISTORIES.(Portugal's historical relationship with East Timor and Goa)
July 1, 2001... GOA was Portugal's first territorial acquisition in Asia, occupied by Albuquerque in 1510 as a trading port. He found it an impressively civilised place, with a handsome, well-furnished palace. The Goanese were Indians, Hindu by religion,...

THE HEROES.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser... have become a pair of free-wheeling radicals, unafraid to speak out on whatever topic they choose. How delightful it is to see them... How lucky we are to witness two former prime...

REDUCTIONISM V COMPLEXITY: A CANARY IN THE BIOETHICS CROSSFIRE.(discusses Russell Blackford's review of "The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit")(Critical Essay)
July 1, 2001... RUSSELL BLACKFORD'S review of my recent book, The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit (Quadrant, May 2001) raises some interesting questions that identify the many areas where he and I part company in our views about ethics....

SKELETONS.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... By the time they're 50 my generation's hidden their black box recorders and thrown away the keys, for what would be the point in opening them... lists of if onlys, a few serious mistakes as obvious as...

IN A SPONSOR'S TENT.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Once I set my mind to it it wasn't that difficult to be affable instead of distant, sombre, severe. As James Salter wrote, of his last moments at West Point, "I found myself shaking hands with men I had sworn not...

NO LAUGHING MATTER.(discusses Professor James R. Flynn's criticism of "How to Defend Humane Ideals")(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
July 1, 2001... PROFESSOR JAMES R. FLYNN, in defending himself (Quadrant, June 2001) against my first and most basic criticism of his book How to Defend Humane Ideals, presents my argument as follows: "... without something like this ["moral properties"], our...

SNAPPING TURTLE.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Let it lie still as a stump, the tongue a lure, the beaked maw architecture of nightmare. Let it rise in a slow becoming, like trees at first light, like a bruise. Let it fear no fang or talon as cold...

CARP.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Let it live where nothing else can, downstream from poison pours, beneath rainbows of oil. Let it graze pastures of silt, thrive on flesh-rot, shit, all else only it can stomach. Let it navigate like a bat...

THE KENNEDY CHARACTER ASSASSINATION.(Brian Kennedy's management of the National Gallery of Australia)
July 1, 2001... ONE DAY Brian Kennedy will look back wistfully, perhaps even a little proudly, on his time in the Antipodes and recall that he was at the epicentre of one of the art world's great controversies--the air-conditioning scandal of the National...

CLYDE PACKER.(memorial tribute)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... BACK IN THE 1960s, when Clyde began his campaign for election to the Legislative Council, one of his principal mentors, his campaign director, was the late Sir Asher Joel MLC. Asher told Clyde that there were three stages in the parliamentary...

ON THE DEATH OF A FAMOUS CRICKETER.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... What gap in our collective soul Would make us want to deify One decent, private sort of bloke Who could have boasted to the sky But never once was less than modest, A man who kept all things to scale, Who...

PECKING AT THE GLASS.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... The shop nextdoor's not open yet; a mudlark's pecking at the glass. A bogong on the other side is quietly fluttering its last. The moth is looking for the light; the bird is eager for its meal. The poet sips...

LONDON TO LEURA: A CRITIC'S JOURNEY.(Giles Auty's move to Australia)
July 1, 2001... PART II WHAT POSSESSED ME to give up a pleasant and prestigious job in England to come to live and work in Australia? It has always concerned me that this question has been put to me many more times by Australians than by former...

IMAGINATION'S STRONGHOLD.(the role of libraries)
July 1, 2001... THESE DAYS, libraries as libraries, with all of their ancient, quietly powerful traditions, are seemingly on the retreat. When their funds aren't being savagely cut back, librarians are being pressured to try and adopt cool personas as...

HE BARKS AT HIS OWN ECHO.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... He barks at his own echo All day and all night long; He barks at his own echo, He thinks he's not alone. He barks at his own echo And the echo answers back, Whether he knows who's barking It still is good...

HEROES.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Maybe there are no heroes-- Just people that we cheer In our need for glory Born of our fear And the heroes we are cheering Are much the same as we As fear of being nothing Is changed to poetry.

YEGEN: A SPANISH PILGRIMAGE.(following in Gerald Brenan's footsteps)(Critical Essay)
July 1, 2001... I HAVE NEVER SEEN a more beautiful country than this Spain," the English writer Gerald Brenan wrote in December 1919. He had just spent two months walking the mule tracks across the Alpujarra mountains, suffering from dysentery and being bitten...

TOUJOURS JEUNE.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... On a riverbank in the modest town of Dole, Eastern France, the birthplace of Louis Pasteur, as signs remind one at every turn, some men play boules at twilight. Long lines of shadow are stretched across the silent river,...

BEFORE COMPUTERS.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... My grandmother was fined for failing to vote in the election which was held a month after she died. She'd been ailing for years, and had long since relinquished hold on her faculties, in any case. Next she was sued...

SALZBURG.(Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, architectural history, Austria)
July 1, 2001... BEFORE THE AGE of Democracy, before the French and American revolutions, it was the positive duty of emperors, kings and princes both secular and clerical to build beautiful palaces and ornament their cities with great works of art. Salzburg in...

A LETTER FROM KAKANIA.(Iain Bamforth, personal narrative)
July 1, 2001... DOES MEMORY have a colour? If it does, it must lie somewhere in the palette between sepia and mahogany. A beautiful word that latter, even if I hear it these days as the spaced-out syllables of Brecht's decadent city, Mahagonny. Ma-ha-gon-ny....

IN PRAISE OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Lord Alfred Douglas's nonsense rhymes are actually quite good at times, with his kamp panthers, sharks and bears and some odd thing with Belgian hares. But what I like a great deal better is the typical Alfred...

SCORN NOT THE BALLAD.(poem)(Poem)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Scorn not the ballad: it's the tale Of all our lives (and told without a fuss). Sing it with a glass of flowing ale! What's ours belongs to none, and all, of us. No other verse can sing us like it does, No other verse...

DESIRABILITY OF NAME CHANGES.(geographical naming and the Republic, Australia)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... SIR: While disagreeing profoundly with the dismissive anti-republicanism of David Flint's article "Any Republic, Whatever It Takes" (May 2001) may I at least enlighten him in his speculation about possible changes under a republic to the names...

RAISING A GLASS TO DEMOCRACY.(Chinese Embassy in Canberra hosts Tibet invasion celebration, Australia)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... To the progressive left-wing mind, the Chinese invasion of Tibet fifty years ago was not, one suspects, all that deplorable as invasions go (certainly nothing like as bad as the British invasion of Australia 163 years earlier). It clearly...

LEAVING THE FIRST WORLD.(economic conditions, New Zealand)(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2001... NEW ZEALAND POPULATION POLICY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH DEBATES ABOUT what causes or prevents economic growth have gone through a few generations of change since I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s. Then, it was not unusual for academics to...

TAKING OFF.(poem)(Poem)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... I take off for the hills where gulls circle and soar in the thermals as if caught in the sky's blue plughole when in fact their flight's elan where the nor'wester flips off the ridges and the...

THE SHOOTING OF FRED LOWRY AT TOM VARDY'S LIMERICK RACES HOTEL, NEAR GOULBURN, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUGUST 29TH 1863.(poem)(Poem)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... A cold, still dawn in the bush. Acting on information, Senior-Sergeant Stephenson and three other men surrounded the pub. It was little more than a roadside shack with a few roughly partitioned rooms. Fred Lowry...

ON RISK AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP.(bankruptcy of HIH Insurance Ltd.)
July 1, 2001... If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance... there might not be much investment as a result of cold calculation. --John Maynard Keynes (1936) IN THE WAKE of the collapse of HIH, the public and the media are baying for blood,...

ELEGY FOR SLIGHT ACQUAINTANCE.(poem)(Brief Article)(Poem)
July 1, 2001... People will vanish into the fold of light but still will live along the memory-plane. Why are they live there then? Brain-dross? Pointers, the stars whose tiny glitter ushers us from ego to some rare whatever? Today...

READING THE ODYSSEY.
July 1, 2001... When I began to write my history I was inclined to count these legends as foolishness, but on getting as far as Arcadia I grew to hold a more thoughtful view of them, which is this. In the days of old those Greeks who were considered wise spoke...

A note to contributors.
July 1, 2001... Over the next few months Quadrant will be setting up its own website. Initially, this will carry a table of contents, the editorial, and some features of the magazine. Ultimately we hope to provide a major part of the magazine online, as well...

HAL PORTER: THE WATCHER WITH A CAST-IRON ALIBI.(Review)
July 1, 2001... IN HAL PORTER'S 1965 story "Young Woman in a Wimple", the narrator is sitting in a train compartment reading a smuggled-in copy of Vladimir Nabokov's banned novel Lolita "which, in its remade brown paper jacket, looked exactly like a banned...

THE SHINE BOX.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Each evening I go to collect night's sour jewels emerald and cherry red acid drops of light in the night in the dark in the winter velvet darkness moving inside darkness. Burnt marmalade on the railway lines ...

A TRICK THAT HAS BEEN LOST.(A. D. Hope's poetry, a dialectic)
July 1, 2001... MODERN SOCIETY AND POETRY THROUGH THE EYES OF CALLIOPE AND PYTHAGORAS IN THE POETRY OF A.D. HOPE IN HIS "Conversation with Calliope" A.D. Hope concedes that The proper way to start a poem Built on the old high generous plan Is to...

SWASHING AND BUCKLING.(Scarlet Pimpernel television programs and Pearl Harbour motion picture, reviews)
July 1, 2001... THE DIFFERENCE between a swashbuckler and a good period actor is whether he has lightness of touch, a certain playfulness," that great master of swordplay, Owen Weingott, would argue. "It's what made Douglas Fairbanks senior and junior so...

DEAD SAILORS AT FLINDERS STREET.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Milk-necked seagulls their souls immeasurably purified share bread between the railway lines.

THE CROSS.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... In the lavender early evening traffic lights, green as iridescent fish gleam at the intersection of night and neon light while citizens in dark clothing hurry into dusk lean forward in their rush as if...

Renovation.(Brief Article)(Fiction)
July 1, 2001... I know just where this picture should go." The new ones will say that. Holding it up and standing back. Taking ownership of sorts for a while. I know too. The frame of the room would have always set where pictures went. The frame of...

Work-Out.(Short Story)
July 1, 2001... You run up the stairs to the gym avoiding the women and men from the previous class rushing down the stairs. Keep to the left. Give your membership card to the girl at the desk and then in through the turnstile. Rummage for the $2 coin in your...

Tidings.(Short Story)
July 1, 2001... The temps' table stood in the central angle of the room, which was shaped like a large L. The permanent staff mainly sat in cubicles around the sides. The librarian had only to crane his neck to see the temps. Marian, who supervised their work,...

BLUE DIAMONDS.(Brief Article)(Poem)
July 1, 2001... We were all young poets. A full house of poets in the big smoke. We knew nothing and we feared nothing because we knew nothing. We sat on the backs of chairs to be--not correct. Stooped, in a suit, he didn't faze us. He...

The Ghost of Madness.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Bertrand Russell 1921-70: The Ghost of Madness, by Ray Monk; Jonathan Cape, 2000, $73.50. SOME YEARS AGO I reviewed the first volume of Ray Monk s life of Bertrand Russell, which took his life up to near the end of 1921. I said that it was...

Essays in Biography.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Essays in Biography, by H.W. Arndt (supplement to the History of Economics Review, Summer 2000; enquiries to william.coleman@utas.edu.au. HEINZ ARNDT has had a long career as one of the most distinguished economists in Australia, most of it...

Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling, by Granville Allen Mawer; Allen & Unwin, 2000, $24.95. BOURN RUSSELL, captain of the Sydney whaler Lady Rowena, sailed his vessel along the coast of Japan in 1831 and, as an entry in his log...

Berlin: A Modern History.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Berlin: A Modern History by David Clay Large; Viking, 2001, $60. IN WIM WENDERS' film The Wings of Desire (1987) an old man potters across a warren in the middle of Berlin. He can be heard to mutter, "It must be here somewhere. I can't find...

A MARVELLOUS ENTREE.(Review)
July 1, 2001... French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction: A Guide to Cinema, Television, Radio, Animation, Comic Books and Literature, by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier; McFarland and Company, 2000, US$95. THIS HUGE and...

A STRANGER RIDES INTO TOWN.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Not at all nameless, I, Squint Eastward, had a gut feeling this was no hymn-singing town and no run-of-the-still saloon. Blinded by my match setting ablaze a stubby seegar, I was suddenly noosed in by five hombres who...

ITEMS EXTRACTED FROM THE CATALOGUE OF THE SALE OF THE BULLOCK MUSEUM, 1819, AT WHICH WERE SOLD A NUMBER OF OBJECTS FORMERLY BELONGING TO NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Lot 25 A silver Decollete, used in the ordinary sense. 44 A fine cambric handkerchief, handsomely stained with snot in the shape of a map of France. 50 An ivory-backed Scrotum Brush, originally belonging to Louis...

AN INVITATION TO REJOIN THE HUMAN RACE.(minority groups and martyrdom)(Column)
July 1, 2001... PEOPLE WHO WRITE a regular column for a journal enjoy hearing from readers. It matters not (or not much) whether comment is critical or complimentary; the mere evidence that someone has actually read you and responded is enough. When a chance...