Quadrant articles from June 2003

Quadrant archives from June 2003

Corporate philanthropy, government and blackmail. (Editorial).
June 1, 2003... CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY has become a new fad in talk about the relationship between business and the community. But while philanthropy, the love of one's fellow humans, is undoubtedly a desirable trait, it is its manifestation in giving money...

Darwinist dogma. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... SIR: What is it about me that causes Mr Mautner (see May 2003, page 78) and Mr Seiver (Letters, May) to froth at the mouth? I just don't understand it. I am going to assume that Mr Seiver is an adult. If he isn't then I hereby offer an...

Meaning matters. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... SIR: In his letter (May 2003) Andrew McIntyre castigates me severely for my article "Solving the Problem of Meaninglessness" (March 2003). According to Mr McIntyre my analysis of our contemporary situation is "negative", "despairing", "full of...

Utopian pipe dreams. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... SIR: In the May 2003 issue were two letters and a lead article that might best be classified under the general title "Revenge of the Utopians". We begin with Andrew McIntyre's rabid, anti-Christian polemic against an excerpt of Michael Casey's...

Speaking the truth. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... SIR: Patrick McCauley raises an important issue in "Fear of Dissent" (March 2003) in describing the overt censorship exercised by the denizens of the Left in the forums of public debate and in the media, and he is perceptive in identifying...

Can we defend ourselves against terrorism? (Defence).
June 1, 2003... If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere. --Clausewitz MAJOR WAR is now almost casualty-free, measured in days, push-button precise and surgically clean--just look at...

Through a mould-encrusted lens: Australia's media and the Iraq war. (The Media).
June 1, 2003... HAVING HAD the recent Gulf War placed under a media microscope, perhaps the time has come for an examination of the microscope. Unfortunately, an initial scrutiny suggests that the machine--at least the Australian model--shows serious flaws and...

Lachlan Macquarie Inspects Cox's Road. (poetry).(Poem)
June 1, 2003... LACHLAN MACQUARIE INSPECTS COX'S ROAD they laid down the road before him like carpet (any road being carpet over those roughhouse mountains) he bumped over contour, can hardly be said to have travelled...

Port Hacking. (Poetry).(Poem)
June 1, 2003... PORT HACKING at maianbar the sand-spit is a swollen uvula speedboats irritate the throat

President versus prime minister. (Politics).(Tobago constitutional history lesson for Australia)(Australian Republican Movement )
June 1, 2003... GEORGE SANTAYANA wrote in 1905: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and Talleyrand said of the Bourbons: "They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing." The recent constitutional history of Trinidad (formally the...

Strange. (poetry).(Poem)
June 1, 2003... STRANGE Strange how her singing, as she tidies the next room, banishes the fears at my desk.

Basking.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... BASKING The basking lizard ignores the kitten's huge staring eyes behind the glass

Victims of income tax. (Economics).(tax reform not happening in Australia)
June 1, 2003... FOR THE NEAR future, the unfinished business of tax reform will remain just that: unfinished. It's partly the result of the condition of the Howard government's finances; but a better explanation is that it's been shunted to the bottom of the...

Apfelstrudel for Erwin. (Poetry).(Poem)
June 1, 2003... APFELSTRUDEL for Erwin Beneath the perfect powdering of snow: layer on pastry layer fine as flakes from skin, petals from a rose. They're interleaved with apple, a cinnamonned moistness which sings trickles from...

Cattle kings of old Australia.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... AT THE END of the nineteenth century, Australia went through a boom-and-bust cycle followed by drought. A century later the pattern is repeating itself. The present dryness has focused attention once again on inland Australia. We now see it as...

The polygraph interview.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... THE POLYGRAPH INTERVIEW The machine quotes me by taking my pulse. Now I know where my lies are stored--my blood. All along they were there in my blood, dormant in their microscopic thousands like a self-inflicted...

The perils of surrogate motherhood. (Bioethics).
June 1, 2003... FEW THINGS are more heartbreaking than infertility--a condition that afflicts about 15 per cent of couples in most Western nations. I say this from first-hand experience as a person adopted as an infant by an infertile couple who grieved over...

The Touring Company of the Bolshoi Ballet.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... THE TOURING COMPANY OF THE BOLSHOI BALLET The touring company of the Bolshoi Ballet. What they have sent us. Too young, too old, too short and too--not quite. Not that I know. At the morning class. On stage in the...

Nom de Plume.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... NOM DE PLUME I met an old friend in a dream. He was going under a pseudonym. Eric Blair. That's how I knew it was him. But he would never have used that name.

Flight into Egypt.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... FLIGHT INTO EGYPT The family is resting in the shade of an unconvincing tree, the radiant child on his mother's lap, the paniered donkey grazing. And what is Joseph doing? He reclines upon the ground, chin...

After the Storm.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... AFTER THE STORM Small jellyfish scattered on the shore are limpid little cakes, as if some frantic caterer of the deep has been fulfilling orders. Tossed up, too, those bulbous weeds like entrails the...

The yobbo decline of the letters page. (Devine).(letter to the editor)
June 1, 2003... ON AN AVERAGE day, Australia's eight metropolitan daily newspapers, and its two national ones, publish more than 200 readers' letters to the editor, out of about 1500 they receive. This makes for anxious mornings for editors, as they sip their...

With diplomatic zeal: the memoirs of Richard Woolcott. (Foreign Affairs).(The Hot Seat: Reflections on Diplomacy from Stalin's Death to September 11)(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... AT THE VERY END of The Hot Seat: Reflections on Diplomacy from Stalin's Death to September 11, Dick Woolcott essays a self-assessment in which he says, "I was an ordinary man on whom Australia bestowed extraordinary opportunities." He was...

Without Clothes.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... WITHOUT CLOTHES Banished from the Garden, they move naked through art history, always clutching leaves to their genitals, strangely prescient of those unclothed marches to that Aryan solution. Yet the calm...

The Car.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... THE CAR Unwanted as an elderly employee who's slowed down, the car's been bumped over the brook in the park, stripped of identity on the gravel under the viaduct and abandoned by an owner who couldn't care less that...

Pavlov Would've Loved Her.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... PAVLOV WOULD'VE LOVED HER Whenever my dog and I walk the track towards her arc, above the squelch of wellingtons, dog claws scraping stone and the rattle of nuts in a bucket, we are aware of sow dreams-- ...

The strange case of Michel Houellebecq. (Literature).
June 1, 2003... IF EVER A CASE exemplified the clash between modern realities and modern pieties in France, it is that of Michel Houellebecq, whose succes de scandale novels have earned him immense notoriety, immense sales, and immense ire. Most recently, his...

Multiplying the moon.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... MULTIPLYING THE MOON No opening in the house is shut but the heat's a cage I have to bear. By the back door where I burnt my soles this afternoon I long for air cool as a fish's belly to creep out of Pymmes...

Gary Catalano.(Obituary)(Biography)
June 1, 2003... GARY CATALANO, who died last December, was a remarkable figure in recent Australian writing. Poet, art historian and critic, he was the author of a number of important studies like The Years of Hope: Australian Art and Criticism 1959-1968...

Wells, Churchill, the tank and the bomb.(relationship between H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill)
June 1, 2003... SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL and the pioneering science-fiction writer, Fabian socialist and social prophet H.G. Wells are seldom thought of together, but there may have been a strange link between them: both forecast atom bombs long before Einstein...

Almond Blossom Haiku.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... ALMOND BLOSSOM HAIKU I Bees i Such magnificence even the bees are absorbed-- blossoming almond. ii The more blossom it has, the more bees it hasn't-- winter almond tree. iii ...

The colour of saying: tutoring at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive.(Biography)
June 1, 2003... Once it was the colour of saying Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill... --Dylan Thomas "The Colour of Saying" AS I PARK outside 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands, Swansea, I still cannot quite believe I am about to tutor poetry...

Flying South.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... FLYING SOUTH Your fonder memories are the shiny haloes propellors make on flights over mountains on clear days when you're on your way home.

Bronwyn Jones (1944-2003): (known professionally as Bronwyn Binns). (Film).(Obituary)(Biography)
June 1, 2003... EVEN AN OUTSIDER at Bronwyn Jones' memorial service in St George's Anglican Church, Malvern, would have realised she must have been an extraordinary woman. The eulogy by Andrew Curnow, the Bishop-elect of Bendigo, described Bronwyn's...

The Flirting.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... THE FLIRTING It was quite an adventure, the journey through the garden stepping, terraced, down the hill to my grandfather's dunny with lurching, unlatchable door. Red-backed spiders lay in wait, watching you...

The Deckchair.(Short Story)
June 1, 2003... It was one of the times my parents left me at Brooklyn. I was five and Grandpa took me out for my birthday in his runabout to yank in unwilling blue swimmers. That was the first time I saw it. As I hauled in a crab trap, a bow wave churned the...

Rock Dragons.(Short Story)
June 1, 2003... At looked to be an impossible climb. But the plumping teenager seemed anxious to prove to her guests that their journey had been justified. The elderly couple stared up at the towering weathered granite, a huge monolith that lay across the...

Death in the temple.(The Lost King of France: Revolution, Revenge and the Search for Louis XVII)(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... The Lost King of France: Revolution, Revenge and the Search for Louis XVII, by Deborah Cadbury; HarperCollins, 2002, $29.95. I told about Louis Sixteenth that got his head cut off in France long time ago; and about his little boy the...

The balm of books.(A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict)(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, by John Baxter; Doubleday, 2002, $45. PRESUMING THAT readers are usually attracted only to autobiographies of people they admire or are interested in, John Baxter was wise or well-advised to...

Abandoned, but not desolate.(Belonging: A Memo)(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Belonging: A Memoir, by Renee Goossens; ABC Books, 2003, $27.95. THE TRAGICAL consequences of abandonment, physical or emotional, have come down to us as the classical myth about Ariadne on Naxos. It has become a myth with operatic...

Playing with power.(Power Politics: The Electricity Crisis 'and You)(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Power Politics: The Electricity Crisis 'and You, edited by John Spoehr; Wakefield Press, 2003, $19.95. THIS INEPT cri de coeur comes from a South Australian academic who yearns for the days of Tom Playford. Liberal Premier of that state for...

Danse Macabre.(Poem)
June 1, 2003... DANSE MACABRE What a charming surprise--a European style village in the drab Australian bush with lovingly cared for gardens blossoming luxuriantly lush like in an earthly Paradise. Alas, it's a retirement...

Overmighty ally syndrome.
June 1, 2003... WROTE THE AUTHOR of the Book of Proverbs: "There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea four... The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with...