Quadrant articles from July 2007

Quadrant archives from July 2007

Reply to God's letter to the editor.(Editorial)(Editorial)
July 1, 2007... DEAR GOD (or should I say, Dear Father, Son and Holy Ghostwriter, for I have heard from you only through your letter penned by your self-appointed amanuensis, Peter Coleman, in Quadrant, April 2007, in reply to my editorial of March), It...

Fun with anthropologists.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... SIR: Roger Sandall's reference (May 2007) to the subtlety, sensitivity and light touch of the anthropologist's ethos reminded me of researchers I knew long ago, in person and by reputation, when I was a patrol officer in Papua New Guinea and...

Global warming.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... SIR: In your June editorial, you say that "the public discussion of global warming in all its aspects is frequently affected by the espousal of its reality and urgency by so many people who have no real understanding of the issues". This is due...

Who wants land rights?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... SIR. Further to Peter Howson's significant comments on Land Rights (April 2007): has there ever been a thorough survey of those members of the Australian population who have registered as Aboriginal, as to how they feel about this subject? ...

The real Malraux.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... SIR: It was very pleasing to discover that the May issue of Quadrant included an article on Andre Malraux, a major twentieth-century writer who receives far less attention in the English-speaking world than he merits. It was regrettable,...

The Iraqi biataxy.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... SIR: Michael O'Connor's thoughtful essay on Iraq (May 2007) captured the essence of the current debate. The essential dilemma is that, while it is easy to declare war, who will conclude a peace where there is none to be found? Iraq is just a...

Hodgson on Dawkins and the Bible.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... SIR: I have not read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I have however read David Hodgson's piece, "Dawkins and the Morality of the Bible" (May 2007) and am surprised that a philosopher and judge can allow himself to write such an opinionated...

Saintly.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... SIR: Jenny Stewart mentioned in her article (June 2007) Judith Wright, poet, of a location near Braidwood, New South Wales. Let us get it straight: the high and mighty Judith Wright sat on her bottom and wrote poems and letters against the...

The dismal beginning to the Fraser years.(Politics)
July 1, 2007... ON DECEMBER 5, 2006, the National Archives Office released to accredited journalists, under embargo until January 1, the Cabinet papers for 1976, the Fraser government's first full year. The Archives Office had invited Malcolm Fraser to attend...

The ABC-setting the record straight.(Media)(Australian Broadcasting Corp.)
July 1, 2007... MY "INSIDE" KNOWLEDGE of the ABC began in 1958 when I was invited to be a panel member of a program in the series Forum of the Air. The subject was, "Is Australia Being Strangled by Colonel Blimps?" The other panelists were Roger Livesey,...

Young Lord Falcon And The Scarlet Woman (An Edwardian Adventure).(Poem)
July 1, 2007... YOUNG LORD FALCON AND THE SCARLET WOMAN (AN EDWARDIAN ADVENTURE) (Wars on Terror the best part of a century ago can be found in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, Arthur Conan Doyle 's His Last Bow, John Buchan's Greenmantle and Sax...

Could Have Been.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... COULD HAVE BEEN Goliath was big but he could have been littler, Mickey Mouse could have been Mortimer Mouse, Chamberlain could have said bollocks to Hitler, Christ could have been a success as a victualler, Coleridge...

Haiku for 2007.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... HAIKU FOR 2007 This is the year of the pig and is better by far than the past one. This is the year that a consummate liar had claimed as his last one. This is the year we will know if the bastard...

Atheism, music and civilisation.(Religion)
July 1, 2007... ... everywhere I saw how readily men construct fables in order to avoid looking reality in the face. The invention of an afterlife would not matter so much were it not purchased at so high a price: disregard of the real hence willful neglect of...

Is America really in decline?(Foreign Affairs)
July 1, 2007... IS THE PRESENT ERA, as has so often been predicted incorrectly in the past, the beginning of the decline of American power and the final stages of the American century, as it was dubbed in 1941 by Henry Booth Luce, the publisher of Time and...

The Murder in the Street in Lecce.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... THE MURDER IN THE STREET IN LECCE At the same time--as I reached out my hand to close the door because of the great wind rushing I realised the door, and the window, were closed. I opened the door as if it was all I...

The End of the Affair.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... THE END OF THE AFFAIR Of course, with hindsight, a clean break would have been sensible, hygienic, neat, postage-stamps parted at the perforation, neither with part of the other like torn meat. He might have bottled...

The Crossing Place.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... THE CROSSING PLACE Teenage boys sing in the summer cathedral; their bodies growing too fast, they're exuberant, rampant with life, callow and beautiful; voices connecting earth to sky, inviting light to touch grass ...

Menace.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... MENACE It's not just the colours, the burnt-out blacks and blazing oranges It's not just the flying, the buzzing wings and erratic barging It's also the walking, the stop-starting and upstart dart-poking ...

Tobacco, seduction and puritanism.(Society)
July 1, 2007... TODAY 13,000 PEOPLE will die from tobacco-related disease. Today 90,000 children will smoke their first cigarette. Most often tobacco is discussed as if it had only one face, and that is of disease. This is an empty perspective. In an...

The line through the heart.
July 1, 2007... THE DESIGNATION "uncle", when bestowed by others, expresses affection and confidence. This was certainly the case in 1943-45 when the Fourteenth Army in Burma referred to their general (later field marshal, viscount and governor-general) as...

Capernaum.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... CAPERNAUM You cannot elude your destiny, you cannot get rid of your talent. --Cardinal Newman To watch men walk away When it's too hard To get it, To see women sell out The best part Of themselves,...

The Playing Fields of Newcastle, 1944.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... THE PLAYING FIELDS OF NEWCASTLE, 1944 Beneath the swings are depressions made on bare dirt by brown feet marking take-off for the topmost bar, forbidden by parents, who aren't looking now. We jangle the swing chains,...

Prayer Against Pain.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... PRAYER AGAINST PAIN If you love me still oh Lord make me well Let your goodness spill to this place I fell Lift me by your will high above this hell By your power kill pain's clangour and knell...

Spring.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... SPRING I'm sadly frayed but the world abounds with spring: little birds braid the forest with nests and song, the sky's inlaid with pale blue, and bright yellow flowers invade the paddocks where the...

Farewell, professor chips.(Universities)
July 1, 2007... WHAT MOST OF US remember about our days at school and university are the outstanding teachers (and the very bad ones). The iconic Mr Chips is the teacher we all wish we'd had. If the quality of our undergraduate educational experience is...

The iron cage closes.
July 1, 2007... IT SEEMS I AM a relic of an intellectual tradition that is now obsolete. Some years back I did a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Social Sciences and went on to do Honours in Philosophy. I'm now doing a doctorate in Sociology at the Carseldine...

Sky Talk.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... SKY TALK Tidal pools are black totem markings on shields of chocolate-brown mud. A tiny, perfectly circular island shrinks to green culture on a slide. The land opens up like a paint-box: we see fields stitched...

Flying High.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... FLYING HIGH Birds, too, know it's terrible luck to break up on the ground. Birds with attitude have been sucked into engines and spat out as something less. Ocean never bites off more than it can chew. Birds...

Father.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... FATHER from a line by George Szirtes My father carries me across a field. How did you enter this field? Foxily, through a hole in the hedge Under cover of darkness and birds' nests. My father carries me across a...

Threshold.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... THRESHOLD High doors sway batting warm air and cold this way and that through the days of our lives. Our hands rest where a thousand palms have pressed before us-pushing towards whatever awaits. ...

As the Latter and Former Rain.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... AS THE LATTER AND FORMER RAIN Unexpected girls sway into the choir stalls, their various gaits invoking birds or horses arrange limbs and faces like flowers in a vase let loose the colours of their voices come...

The new story of English.(Language)
July 1, 2007... EVERYBODY KNOWS--because they were taught it at school--that the language of this article originated with Anglo-Saxon conquerors of England between about 450 AD, when the Romans left, and about 600, when the Pope introduced Christian...

Wagtail Nest Tanka.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... WAGTAIL NEST TANKA 1. Again Willy wagtails, coming back to the carport again this spring, build their new nest on top of the old one on the crossbeam. 2. Tower A bird counterpart to the...

That's your opinion: a conversation with Sol Lebovic.(Interview)
July 1, 2007... SOL LEBOVIC was group manager of marketing services for News Corporation when managing director Ken Cowley observed that what the company really needed was a political opinion polling service. Lebovic said he would be interested in running it...

On the Deaths of Philosophers.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... ON THE DEATHS OF PHILOSOPHERS For Katie studying Philosophy SOCRATES, tried for corrupting young people, was sentenced to death by the state. Giordano BRUNO was burned by the Catholic Church--a most horrible fate! ...

The foundation of Western Shanghai: (Part One).(History)
July 1, 2007... AS SOON AS the formal treaty ending the first Opium War was signed at Nanjing in August 1842, the opium traders despatched their floating opium warehouses to Wusong at the mouth of the Huangpu River. The treaty, which opened five ports,...

Furniture Dreaming.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... FURNITURE DREAMING After those effusive painting galleries there is comfort to be had awhile in a display of chairs. Sure, they've been designed by the kind of men who'd wear black T-shirts and expensive...

Does the rain have a father?(Science)
July 1, 2007... "MY FATHER was a zoologist and a writer of books on natural history," states Edmund Gosse in the first chapter of the book--published exactly a hundred years ago--that tells the story of his relationship with his father. That hardly says the...

My privilege to be.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... MY PRIVILEGE TO BE for Hadzem Hajdarevic, Sarajevo May 2006 barefoot like someone who cannot find shoes that are not made of dead animals hungry like someone who can taste the bodies of fish in the soup guilty...

Provincial City.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... PROVINCIAL CITY "The policemen walk down that street in pairs. Opium dens, gambling joints. Packypoo!" Dad had parked the Morris Oxford so we could peer down the most famous street in our city. A narrow street, a...

From the pipe works.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... FROM THE PIPE WORKS Stolen clay sliced from the block with wire, like ripe cheese, lumpen grey yet soft as silk, despite the grit--this was your gift. To us it was a child's toy lugged home in a...

Elwyn Lynn: master of arts and letters.(Art)(Biography)
July 1, 2007... DURING 2007 AND 2008, there will be five solo exhibitions of the paintings of Elwyn Lynn, in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Bowral. This is a remarkable scale of exposure, considering that Lynn died ten years ago, and that his work never went...

Taking Photographs Without a Camera.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS WITHOUT A CAMERA Consider the stills that thrust themselves into the place where they must be seen. The ones I took, or they took me. Here's one. This is me. I am standing in St Vinnies, Newtown,...

An exile's view of Bolivia.(First Person)
July 1, 2007... MY PARTNER JOHN AND I are holidaying in Port Stephens, and a waiter asks John, after he places our order, whether we are visiting from England. John was born in England but has been living in Australia for over thirty years. Those with a...

A history with altitude.(experiences with the body at a certain height)
July 1, 2007... YESTERDAY I ASCENDED the liquidambar tree in our new garden until I attained its summit where the branches bearing my weight were no thicker than the wrist of a five-year-old child. In three days I will be fifty-eight, and there is a case...

Getting into jazz.
July 1, 2007... "IT'S ONLY A PHASE," my mother said. "He'll grow out of it; just see." That was fifty years ago now and I'd just turned sixteen. Up to that point I can remember only the 78s we had of the country classic, "Riders in the Sky", some pop tunes...

Divided Garments.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... DIVIDED GARMENTS "And what will you bury her in?" It was not a question I could answer. Her life long marked by cringing- ill-fitting coats hand-clasped over swollen belly and dangling pass-me-downs; ...

Early Courting.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... EARLY COURTING Every time we emptied one we'd smash it against the wall shouting BLUDO, BLUDO, BLUDO. I still don't know who/what Bludo was. Rebels that we were, we worshipped the golden idol of our fathers. A beer...

Crumbs from a revolutionary table.(1950s and 1960s demonstrations)
July 1, 2007... WATCHING THE RIOTERS demonstrating in Rostock against, as they say, globalism, multinationals, poverty, George W. Bush, global warming, Iraq and McDonald's--and that was just for starters--and learning that over a hundred German police were...

Stonewall Jackson Takes a Roman Holiday.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... STONEWALL JACKSON TAKES A ROMAN HOLIDAY The story goes he started letting go And shedding every inhibition While he was stationed down in Mexico That comes from being reared a Presbyterian. That his vacationing...

The drama of teaching and the recent past.(Film)
July 1, 2007... THE HISTORY BOYS, according to Miranda Devine (Sydney Morning Herald, June 4), "is a fraud. It is a pederastic fantasy about teachers who fondle their students' genitals in the nicest way and the boys don't mind at all. It's about a British...

The Shortest Distance.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... THE SHORTEST DISTANCE Most birds don't bother taking their wingspans so far above their business, preferring a sharper view. Sandwiched in metal we get perspective, but the view is framed in advance-- most of the...

Mr Malfast.(Short story)
July 1, 2007... Arriving at the Travel Research Unit office one morning, Richard Mitchell accidentally banged his briefcase down on his desk. He'd half-tripped over a bump in the carpet, and in the brief loss of balance, he dropped his briefcase. Everyone...

With jeans on.(body in a bag)
July 1, 2007... In the movies bodies are usually found by children playing. Maybe it's the portrayal of innocence finding evil that writers like. The kids generally don't appear again in the story after that. We used to eat separately from my Dad because...

Xanadu.(Poem)
July 1, 2007... XANADU Vodka consumed alone and sipped with ice inaugurates a glittering display of my victorious mind that soon resembles one of those lit-up cities, briefly caught sight of from a plane at night ...

What is to be done? "I do not know," says the great bell of bow.(A Loose Canon: Essays on History, Modernity and Tradition)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2007... A Loose Canon: Essays on History, Modernity and Tradition, by Brian J. Coman; Connor Court Publishing, 2007, $29.95. Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. --Tennyson ALL IS NOT...

Nisi Dominus Frustra.(A Loose Canon: Essays on History, Modernity and Tradition)
July 1, 2007... A Loose Canon: Essays on History, Modernity and Tradition, by Brian J. Coman; Connor Court Publishing, 2007, $29.95. WHEN BRIAN COMAN'S first essay, "A Short History of the Rabbit in Australia", which is in this collection, was published in...

Black slaves in Sudan.(Slave)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... Slave, by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis; Virago, 2004, $29.95. "I'D STARTED TO BELIEVE that this was how the world was: the Arabs enslaved the blacks. These could be the words of one of Muhammad's black slaves in Arabia 1300 years ago. But...

A dismal record.(Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, by Norman Lebrecht; Allen Lane, 2007, $49.95. HERE IS AN IRRITATINGLY gossipy, titillating, anecdote-rich, smart-arse book that tells an unpleasing and unfortunate truth. Its cover not merely gives us...

HIV/AIDS and beyond.(The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, by Henry H. Bauer; McFarland & Company, 2007, US$35. THIS BOOK'S TITLE arouses suspicions: is the author really questioning the connection between Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)...

Never upon a holiday.(Ryan)(boasting, showing- off, and envy )(Critical essay)
July 1, 2007... SOME MONTHS AGO, in this space, I wrote about the now near-forgotten American academic economist Thorstein Veblen. His best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, was published in 1899, and for some years enjoyed enormous fame. Veblen...