Quadrant articles from July 2004

Quadrant archives from July 2004

Marketing bloomsday ...(Editorial)(Editorial)
July 1, 2004... LAST JUNE 16 was Bloomsday. Not only that, but the centenary of the day, June 16, 1904, on which the whole action of James Joyce's famous novel which follows the adventures of his hero, Leopold Bloom, takes place. There were celebrations all...

"The ward fabrication.".(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... SIR: Frank Crowley could have made his article on "The Ward Fabrication" (May 2004) more convincing had he had the courtesy, which I believe he should have had, to have consulted me, an old "friend". Perhaps he thought that I, like Russel Ward,...

Justice Deane's Faulty reasoning.(Letters)
July 1, 2004... SIR: In the June issue, Dennis Rose QC rightly criticises Justice Deane's reasoning in Polyukhovich's case. The fallacy in the reasoning can be demonstrated simply, in a few lines. Justice Deane's view was that the legislation under which...

Goodbye to the hard-faced men.(Letters)
July 1, 2004... SIR: William Maley has written a letter (June 2004) which I suppose I should answer. It was good that he appended quotes from his chapter in The Howard Years, for it reminds readers of what he wrote: and what I wrote. Couldn't be better. ...

Winning the chatterers' approval.(Letters)
July 1, 2004... SIR: My advice to the ALP National Executive and Mark Latham--if you really want the support of the ABC and the Fairfax papers in the next election, you should endorse Bob Brown and David Hicks for safe seats. Dr R.E. Klugman, (former...

Have the universities got it right?(Letters)
July 1, 2004... SIR: I found myself agreeing with most of what Bob Catley wrote ("The Recuperating Universities", May 2004) but nothing less than bewildered by its obvious omissions. To celebrate the achievements of the universities in the post-Dawkins era is...

Was Rommel a war criminal?(Letters)
July 1, 2004... SIR: In some ways, Neil McDonald's shot at being generous about Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (May 2004) probably does him credit. He may have taken things a bit too far, though. It's true Rommel's name's not linked to any of the German...

Political promises--what do they mean?(Politics)
July 1, 2004... There is a widely held view in Australia that political promises are glibly made and almost routinely broken once politicians have used them to gain votes. Indeed, the charge of "broken promises" has become a significant part of our political...

Pastoral romance and indigenous realities.(Culture)
July 1, 2004... THE PICTURES are splendid--handsome Aboriginal stockmen at Victoria River Downs in the 1940s, riders with neckerchiefs and their boots braced in the stirrups. Nearby we find other men with big Akubras squatting on the dusty ground, strong...

Inside the holocaust tower.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... INSIDE HE HOLOCAUST TOWER We looked for signs of the outside world as soon as we entered the Holocaust Tower, the door closing with a softness that belied the nature of our surroundings-- bare floor, empty walls, not...

Digging time.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... DIGGING TIME He always knew when it was digging time by the change of weather and the crops we'd finished picking that season--whose stalks and leaves were left as compost on rows of soil that shone wet with dew....

The nullius ideal: on "terra nullius reborn" by Henry Reynolds.(History)
July 1, 2004... THE WORDS terra nullius were probably never spoken on the Endeavour by Captain Cook in 1770, nor written by the quill pen of Governor Arthur Phillip in 1788, nor heard anywhere in Botany Bay during the eighteenth century. In fact according to...

The unfinished walk of Jean de Lancourt.
July 1, 2004... ON SEPTEMBER 25, 1928, the editor of the Northern Territory Times, under the heading, "Globe Trotters, Parasites and Others", reminded readers that there was a rush of individuals eager to scoot around the country. Aidan de Brune had once been...

Snow in March.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... SNOW IN MARCH It's the way things are when a heartfelt lightness of being charges the warm air, clear light glints like strings in the valleys and the hills are minders not bullies. Then, as shadows angle and...

Night Watch.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... NIGHT WATCH I heard the owl I heard the hill I heard the groaning night grow still. I tossed and sank in fevered sheets, alone on feather pillow turned to stone. For you had come to me again, ...

Heat.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... HEAT Floorboards buckle, cicadas crawl from rock-hard ground, begin their climb up baking gum trees; the leaves are dropping early. Wings spread in a slit of shade, two magpies crouch, red throats agape. No...

This Rain.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... THIS RAIN is pricking air like needles stitching linen; is dripping from the felted flanks of horses and overflowing drainpipes that have lost the knack. The crests of pigeons are battened down and thornbills...

Mannix, Modotti and the Italian POWs.
July 1, 2004... THE ARRIVAL of Italian prisoners of war it Australia during 1941-42 brought new challenges to the Australian authorities and, especially, to the Catholic Church. For the Italian Chaplain in Melbourne from 1938 to 1945, Father Ugo Modotti, the...

The Planets.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... THE PLANETS Feel good about the planets, they are your heavenly friends, set on paths you can only imagine. Indulge in your life; they do. Go to the party, achieve a tribal success. Surround yourself with...

The first five years.(Dancing with Strangers)(Tom & Jack: A Frontier Story)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... INGA CLENDINNEN'S Dancing with Strangers is the most detailed book yet on race relations in the first five years of the Sydney settlement and one of the most thorough I have seen on the subject anywhere.Her main--rich and rewarding--source...

Mother Earth.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... MOTHER EARTH Our earthen dish is seven parts water, one part China, and a tiny bit japanned. Its spread of foods is well-presented: ice sculptures at both poles, and licking-salt elsewhere. Give me a lever large...

Historian on his own.(The Fuss That Never Ended)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... GEOFFREY BLAINEY has over thirty books to his credit, including one on the mining industry titled The Rush That Never Ended. In 1984 he became the most controversial historian in the country when the metropolitan press reported some of his...

The integrity branch of government.(Law)
July 1, 2004... THE SUMPTUARY RULES of the Chinese Imperial Civil Service established a rigidly defined set of dress requirements for all public officials: from the black lacquer-treated hats with protruding wings and the black boots trimmed with white lacquer...

The rational doctrine of Stare Decisis.
July 1, 2004... STARE DECISIS (Latin: "to stand by things Decided") is the doctrinal practice of applying precedent (originally an adjective, hence "precedent case", now used largely as a noun: "a precedent") in the adjudication of later cases (disputes). This...

Three Haiku.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... THREE HAIKU extra traps on top of the others-- far from the lobsters an evening storm over-- one star becomes the lowest behind the gravestone-- snow that didn't melt with the rest

You Are.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... YOU ARE Down here things move more slowly than they did. Change is a word we don't have that much call for. You are the girl Prince Charming holds the ball for, The one James Stewart hones his homey drawl for, The...

A Great Editor R.I.P.: Melvin Lasky (1920-2004).(Obituary)(Obituary)
July 1, 2004... MELVIN J. LASKY, the legendary and controversial editor of the London Encounter and the Berlin Monat, used to be called all sorts of names. To his friends he was "the last of the Cold Warriors" and one of the great "intellectual troubadours"....

Green pollution.(Devine)
July 1, 2004... Unless they can negotiate outcomes that will hold and have sufficient leadership ability to keep their followers on course, the Greens cannot truly participate in mainstream politics. --Michael Field, 2004 PROBABLY NO AUSTRALIAN knows...

After the Funeral.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... AFTER THE FUNERAL So we walk through this cockatoo morning surprised at the strangeness of grief these staring cattle the husky beige and green uncaring hills knowing they are still and only we carry you for we...

Works.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... WORKS They turn off the water: they're working on the mains. They park a water cart out in the street. I know this yet all day I keep turning on the taps. My love, I think of you, and all those years. ...

The Affair.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... THE AFFAIR Our last illicit weekend, a little tired and driving to some Blue Mountain getaway or other. On the motorway it is the car that overheats. whoosh I think a whale is caught in our...

Love, You Bear Gifts--.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... LOVE, YOU BEAR GIFTS-- In tribute, I return you seas set in coral and current intricacies, all the sands I can remember and easterly winds bound up in narrow trees. World! New world of touch! And I, like every...

Aeroplane.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... AEROPLANE The plane is still on the tarmac but already every last thing is falling away because I know in just a few minutes I'll be flying over the weather and dally machinery of our love for each other and...

The governor-general is our head of state.(The Constitution)
July 1, 2004... ON JUNE 26, 2003, the Australian Senate charged its Legal and Constitutional References Committee with conducting an inquiry into "the most appropriate process for moving towards the establishment of an Australian republic with an Australian...

Reclaiming the Muslim empire.(Foreign Affairs)
July 1, 2004... Americans were not accustomed to what so much of the world had already grown weary of: the sudden, deafening explosion of a bomb, a hail of glass and debris, the screams of innocent victims... And then last week, in an instant, the World Trade...

Four Haiku.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... FOUR HAIKU a new color for the drawing-- the child too busy to notice the noise his foot makes close to midnight-- one hand colder school children-- snow where they played melts off their...

"The little man".(Literature)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... A CUSTOMER in a bookshop might enquire: "Have you anything on John Wren?" Until a few weeks ago, the answer was likely to be: "Yes, there's Power Without Glory." Today, the answer ought to be: "Yes, there's Power Without Glory, or there's the...

Of sea and words and toil: the poetry of Cesare Pavese.
July 1, 2004... ON AUGUST 27, 1950, two weeks short of his forty-second birthday, Cesare Pavese took an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel room in his native Turin. A suicide note, inscribed on the first page of his 1947 Dialogues with Leuco, read: "I...

Opened Earth.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... OPENED EARTH When it was first ploughed this ground was white with moa bone. In buried caches adzes, heaps of shell midden, a trouve of carved seal bones. From the pa reclaimed into the land's curves were...

Corruption.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... CORRUPTION Once these marshes were migration routes, before men bulldozed the bush, dug foundations straight into seepage. They underestimated the wet king residing here big muddy creeks burrowing blunt heads, ...

Live Earth.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... LIVE EARTH There's a demon of steam in this earth where wet spongy ground, wet like the inside of a lung bubbles scum from hot vents stinking like a bad stomach. The brown animal land fumes; out of...

South Otago Sculptures.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... SOUTH OTAGO SCULPTURES A muddle of tidal platforms, wind thrashed rocks tattooed by surf. There's been moa-hunting in these dunes, behind the steady murmur of cannibal bay where gulls cruise updraughts off the...

The Chinese Miners.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... THE CHINESE MINERS spoke a dry dialect. Dry like otago's gravel beds. If you ever heard them above the badland swagger of other diggers who sited them out of the settlement, created the celestials you might deride...

Whalers.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... WHALERS A puzzle of bays masked by cloud, high hills obscuring sun where the first european was birthed. Settlers built thatched houses on whalebone piles, used vertebrae for picket fences. Imagine a...

Glass House Mountains.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... GLASS HOUSE MOUNTAINS The woman who looks after other people's kids has a boyfriend at the Glass House Mountains. On every drive down there she watches the petrified cores of these volcanoes abandoned by twenty-five million...

Big Sky Country: New England, New South Wales.(First Person)(Short Story)
July 1, 2004... THE SKY takes up most of the space here. Walking along the road between the houses, I am dizzy with the sensation of looking up: funnelled like a time-traveller into an exhilarating blue vastness. It is a swaggering thing, our sky: not pretty...

Adders.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... ADDERS Sometimes it seems that life is shaped by your own unconscious. You fear a dog might jump out on that lonely path, only to find some schnauzer is snapping a hole in your ease. You dread your neighbour's son...

History and Legend.(Film - Charles II: The Power and the Passion; Troy)(Movie Review)
July 1, 2004... BACK IN THE 1950S, when my generation was introduced to seventeenth-century British history, the period covered at high speed was the reign of Charles II. It is easy to see why. The theme of the course was the rise of parliamentary democracy,...

A Jesus in everyone's cupboard?(Critical Essay)
July 1, 2004... I IT'S TOO JUNGIAN to say we all have an archetypal Jesus informing us. But Sophie Masson was on the right track in her article "Cathedral of the Imagination" (Quadrant, May 2004) where she identified the long trail of art in painting and...

The Hope Valley Line.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... THE HOPE VALLEY LINE When our electrician was killed and the elms made a guard of honour, saluting him, shoulders braided with green, crowns embroidered--Elm hateth man and waiteth-- it was just another in the long line...

Like Love.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... LIKE LOVE Like the thundering herd, Like a tart in a trance, Like the song of a bird, Like a dream of romance, Like the ghost of a chance, Like the bung of a bell, Like the thirst Afrikaans, Like the...

Betsy and the emperor.(Story)(Short Story)
July 1, 2004... It's past midnight, and Otilia cannot sleep. She took a Diazepam tablet two hours ago. Then another one, an hour and a half later. Not the slightest sensation of drowsiness. She is as awake and lucid as ever. The tiredness she felt in the...

Two heartbeats and a step away.(Story)(Short Story)
July 1, 2004... Dad is creaking about the kitchen, his socks in his right armpit. Sometimes he wears a sock in each armpit but when it's really cold, they are in the same one. The toes flop out like rabbit's ears. For a moment he looks to me like a hybrid. I...

The shooter.(Story)(Short Story)
July 1, 2004... The day was clear as young flesh. Each object in the landscape was as sharply defined as a fish in a fish-bowl. The great hills fled into the valleys where rivers began their strange tales of origin. The distant horizon was curved as finely as...

Con man of the western world: the life and death of Willi Muenzenberg.(Books)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Muenzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, by Scan McMeekin; Yale University Press, 2003, about $60. EVERYBODY SEEMS agreed that Willi Muenzenberg (1889-1940) was a genius....

Not Bringing Home the Bacon.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language, by Don Watson; Knopf, 2003, $29.95. THE RESPONSE to Don Watson's book Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language seems characteristic of Australian intellectualism, in its near-total failure...

Some Animals Are Equal.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman; Penguin, 2003, $29.95. THIS IS THE REISSUE of the 1970s Pulitzer Prizewinning graphic novel, here in its two parts: "My Father Bleeds History, mid 1930's-winter 1944" and "And Here My Troubles Begin,...

Affirmative Or Negative?(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Chinese Dilemma, by Ye Lin-Sheng; East West Press, 2004, $24.95. Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, by Thomas Sowell; Yale University Press, 2004, $38.95. FROM A POLICY PERSPECTIVE, of the countries close to...

Postcard to Clive.(Poem)
July 1, 2004... POSTCARD TO CLIVE Dear Clive, I've just now finished your Collected, that warehouse, stacked with wit and snappy phrasing, where almost nothing needs to be corrected. There's not a comma that requires erasing despite...

Giants in the earth.(Ryan)
July 1, 2004... LAST WEEKEND I rearranged "heroes comer", an alcove in my study hung with photographs. Not a great deal of high photographic art: most of the pictures are grainy black-and-white enlargements of ancient snapshots. Not one of the subjects was a...