Quadrant articles from June 2006

Quadrant archives from June 2006

Uranium and global climate change.(Editorial)
June 1, 2006... IT HAD TO HAPPEN that there would be a reappraisal of uranium mining, and ultimately of the whole role of nuclear power, in Australia and in the rest of the world. There is some irony in the fact that much of the pressure which has forced a...

Appeasing Indonesia.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: Congratulations on a first-rate editorial ("Papua and Realism in Foreign Policy", May 2006). It reminds me of an equally top-quality article by historian John Hirst in the same pages a decade ago ("In Defence of Appeasement", April 1996)....

Corrections on Quadrant's history.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: The Peter Coleman-Frank Devine interview in your May issue was interesting, and taught much about the early days of Quadrant. However, I should like to correct Coleman's recollection on a couple of points touching myself. Robert Manne...

The Blue Poles investment.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: I remember my struggling. Latvian immigrant parents were mortified that the Whitlam government spent US$2 million for Blue Poles. Giles Auty (April 2006) says that even if the painting is worth $US20 million today it's a myth that this is...

A judge for all reasons.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: It is almost impossible to avoid the public utterances of Justice Kirby of the High Court. Recently His Honour gave it as his opinion that DNA testing that allows men to find that they were not the father they thought they were, may...

The accord and employment.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: Your editorial on "Industrial Relations Reform and Sunday Observance" (November 2005)is rightly critical of the "firm belief amongst lawyers that the law can not just affect human behaviour but change the realities of the economic system",...

A new kind of truth?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: A latter-day William of Ockham, having got hold of the writings of Messrs Attwood, Haines and Dawson (January-February and March 2006), would throw away his rusty old razor and, instead, type in on his word processor "TRUTH", then press...

Freedom of information.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: Surely the wonderful Frank Devine stumbled! MacKinnon v Dept of Treasury may be the first case on the Freedom of Information Act to come before the High Court on the precise point in issue in that case, but it is certainly not the first...

Modern philosophy and relativism.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... SIR: I wish to take issue with John Dawson's targeting of modern philosophies in his article "Is Truth History?" (March 2006). Dawson suggests that, at least since the Enlightenment, philosophers have been subjecting the distinction between...

The rights and responsibilities of immigrants.
June 1, 2006... IMMIGRATION IS A PRIVILEGE, NOT A RIGHT THE STARTING POINT for a new way of thinking about immigration is the recognition that no one has a right to be in another person's country any more than one has a right to move into their home. The...

What's wrong with the public service?
June 1, 2006... IN RECENT TIMES the so-called "enterprise economies" (the United States, Britain and Australia) have all experienced major government failures that have been due to the incompetence of their public services. In the United States it was the...

Cheerless culture killers.(universities and colleges)
June 1, 2006... ONE CAN BLOW the activities of postmodernists out of proportion. They have drained much of the blood from humanities courses in universities and schools--they themselves would not dispute that--but in ways they would not care to contemplate...

Moral comfort.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... Moral comfort After all this wandering what is there left but more wandering? Several teeth in a jar and an apparent loss of consciousness, a fading of the curtain under pressure of light, all the dancing has stopped...

Australia's vulnerabilities.(Defence)
June 1, 2006... IN AN EARLIER ARTICLE (Quadrant, July-August 2005), I suggested that Australians lacked a genuine strategic view of national security, relying instead upon short-term responses to events over which they had no control. Thus, most politicians,...

10,000 years of nostalgia: the antiquity of the "progress paradox".(Gregg Easterbrook's "The Progress Paradox")
June 1, 2006... LIFE GETS BETTER, but people feel worse. In seven short words that's what Gregg Easterbrook's book is about. The Progress Paradox (2003) is a revealing survey of modern discontents ranging widely in the social sciences and medicine, and it's...

Something missing.(Austarlian culture evaluation)(Editorial)
June 1, 2006... THERE IS SOMETHING missing. It is the same something missing that there has always been, although we are less likely than in the past to believe that we can overcome the deficiency by collective effort. That something is a national culture....

Towards The End of Summer.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... TOWARDS THE END OF SUMMER The evening is still as the ocean's swell is low the heat hangs cotton and westerly swelter with heads bobbing for relief from the generating streets of engine heats february knows...

Keeping the others out.(Australian public universities)
June 1, 2006... THE BABY BOOMER GENERATION spend much time and slay many trees for paper in the process of looking back to some golden age of Australian public universities. This golden age was ruined by budget cuts, mass education, managerialism and a host of...

Dividing up the research money.
June 1, 2006... THERE IS GENERAL agreement about the importance of research in Australian universities, although the usually assumed overriding importance of commercialisation of research results is only a part of the story--research training, overseas...

Rain and Hirohito.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... RAIN AND HIROHITO In Tokyo that autumn the rain fell every day. From the hotel coffee shop each morning I could see a moving frieze of people walking with umbrellas under the cherry trees, making their...

The legacy of Chernobyl.(Science)
June 1, 2006... APART FROM BEING a major industrial accident, the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in 1986 was a significant socio- and geo-political incident. It helped to break up the Soviet Union and accelerated the ending of Moscow's Cold War regime. When...

A visit to a bookshop.(Berkelouw services)(Editorial)
June 1, 2006... COULD IT BE REAL, and within my grasp for $4 Zane Grey's The Lone Star Ranger: A Romance of the Border? Not, of course, for $4, a first edition of the 1915 classic, which, with the author's 1912 Riders of the Purple Sage, may reasonably be...

On a Bronzino at the Uffizi.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... ON A BRONZINO AT THE UFFIZI Her ruffles are strawberry ice, her satin a Sunday School picnic dessert, her dress an essay on thingness, and close to flat-chested she almost gets lost beneath it all, her pale face pinned...

Autobiography.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... Autobiography Yes, for a few years I made a half-decent boy--hipless and shorthaired--only too bookish by far: the books I read never full enough of war or gunrunners, or treasure, or spies, or spoils of piracy. No, I...

The Dangling Man.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... THE DANGLING MAN after the execution of Colin Ross at the Melbourne Jail in 1922 for the rape and murder of 12 year old schoolgirl Alma Tirschke At the end of the failed gallows fall and the miscarriage of the slip knot ...

When the left is half right.(Clive Hamilton works on alienation and exploitation)
June 1, 2006... CLIVE HAMILTON'S WORK as Director of the Australia Institute represents a species of leftist thinking with a millenarian and apocalyptic ancestry. His latest contribution is instructive--if not in the way he intends. In What's Left? The Death...

Colour Newspaper Photograph of a Car in a Suburban Swimming Pool with Irate Husband and Crane Operator (Foreground).(Poem)
June 1, 2006... COLOUR NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPH OF A CAR IN A SUBURBAN SWIMMING POOL WITH IRATE HUSBAND AND CRANE OPERATOR (FOREGROUND) The husband asks, "how long until you can get it out of there!?" the displaced station wagon rests like a sculpture...

Making Up for Lost Time.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME as all around the house nature groans urgently I lean into the secret wire that takes me to the world tonight, the frog will not hop like one wet gumboot along the verandah, no, nor the...

Cracking Nuts.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... CRACKING NUTS your outline is hazy against a fountain of wisteria as you sit on the edge of the concrete bringing down a hammer a cold front on the Fleurieu blows petals over the patio almond trunks...

Keith Windschuttle and the Khmer Rouge.(works)
June 1, 2006... KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE writes in the April 2006 Quadrant that I am "the most brazen" of all "the inventors" of his past. The claim rests on one sentence I wrote in the introduction to Whitewash, republished in the collection of my essays Left Right...

Why I left the left.(aboriginals)
June 1, 2006... So THIS IS WHAT it has come down to. The great debate of the History Wars is no longer about whether Australia was invaded or settled, whether the Aborigines resisted or acquiesced, whether they died from guns or germs, whether academic...

Seven crowded acres.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... Today I am moving to my daughter's room and my son is moving to my writing room. The creative dandruffI sloughed makes him sneeze. We pass on the lawn exchanging cleaning tips. "If you empty the hoover it has much more...

Thirsty.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... I must have water. I must have water. I crave coffee! O coffee! You do not do any more! You do not do it for me! Is this sad, so sad? I drink water. Cool. Cool me. This heat this heat! From the inside out. I burn it....

That inimitable tilt.(father's teaching)
June 1, 2006... STROLLING THROUGH twilit Civic tonight we saw where a pair of sneakers, attached by their laces, had been deftly pitched upward to dangle across the powerlines. The unknown hurler had inscribed on their soles the words, "Gay Police", and as...

Harold Sherwin, Scientist, Contemplates The Numinous.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... HAROLD SHERWIN, SCIENTIST, CONTEMPLATES THE NUMINOUS I freely admit physics isn't all there is and understand nothing but can describe all things I also know what can and cannot be proved not God I can...

Widower In Spring.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... Widower In Spring Gardens, how they respond to rain: each plant revives with pulsing green here, there across lawns and beds where, with such love, she embraced everything the rain released. My wife especially...

"A Poet's Poet's Poet"? Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79).(Literature)
June 1, 2006... FOR MANY YEARS, Elizabeth Bishop's name was overshadowed by that of Robert Lowell (1917-77), an altogether noisier, more controversial poet. Yet despite her 1956 Pulitzer Prize, it was he who seemed to garner most of the awards, the invitation...

The Encounter.(FOUR POEMS FROM CHINA)(Poem)
June 1, 2006... THE ENCOUNTER To have taken the boat downstream to the village, and to find the narrow path up through the bamboo barricade beyond the stony beach where a young woman is hacking at the washing on a stone by the...

The Forbidden City.(FOUR POEMS FROM CHINA)(Poem)
June 1, 2006... THE FORBIDDEN CITY the shock opulence provides the minimalist repetition of harmony prevails and so on while high above the spot on the floor where the general stood to report the steel ball was waiting...

The Likeness.(FOUR POEMS FROM CHINA)(Poem)
June 1, 2006... THE LIKENESS Once upon a time, my grandmother poured salt into a cellar, held it upside down, not noticing the top was open and of course the salt poured through, making a perfectly conical mound on the table. I...

The Surprise.(FOUR POEMS FROM CHINA)(Poem)
June 1, 2006... THE SURPRISE Deep in the middle of my seventh night in China, in the village of the Autonomous People of Dong, away in the northernmost hills of the Province of Guanxi, the costumes and performances flamboyant, the final...

On the wrong track.(Kokoda cristicism)
June 1, 2006... THE RECENTLY RELEASED Kokoda does not attempt to portray even part of the campaign on the track in 1942. Instead writer-director Alister Grierson and co-writer John Lonie have used the time-honoured vehicle of the patrol movie to convey the...

The Lure.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... THE LURE The man in charge of the boat that takes you out to the smaller island, where you will see the famous seabird colonies, the chambered tomb, the geology the retreating ice left behind, dislikes you very much ...

A Western state of mind.
June 1, 2006... CAPTAIN KIRK wanted us to believe that space is the final frontier, but here on Earth there is still plenty of frontier left, even if its existence in an age of globalisation and overpopulation is increasingly imaginary. The American West ended...

Years Ago.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... YEARS AGO Like a broken jigsaw puzzle Whose pieces may never complete A picture of sun, moon, stars, Improbably shining together On a field of wheat, A single farmer Stands at a plough, smiling back ...

Dayfall.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... DAYFALL Across the park, a sudden Flurry of grass, as a lawnmower Slices its prey, and from The trees, insolent Lapwings soar, defying rain, Heading for the Jerome wood, Where their blind chicks gape for...

A day in the life.(Short story)
June 1, 2006... The gates open and there's a surge, a pulse. Shapes stream by, colours push and shout, and they carry me along. Smiling clown faces look down at me from the walls and ceiling. I stare back at them, as we roll along, moving with the flow. ...

Mount Wellington.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... MOUNT WELLINGTON (for Ralph Spaulding) The north end like a whale's huge head, We both agree, our one bone of Contention is the simile Most suited to the silver flash Of tower sticking out of it. For me, a...

The photo.(Short story)
June 1, 2006... I remember that coat, double breasted, angled pockets with flaps. My mother had ordered it from the David Jones catalogue. When I first put it on, it was so large I walked inside a few steps to get to the front. Those cold days though, under...

Gone.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... GONE Still, the old, bright-painted Wooden horses, no longer bucking, The music gone with the cry Of children, drowned in A curtain of black rain. Smoke from the truck exhaust Smothers the flash Of...

Was.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... WAS On your chalk hills, a gong moon Shines before sunset; The beat of starling wings Reflect in white water. A young man with a scythe Cutting grass, beside A ruined gateway Makes no shadow. ...

Why Anglos run the world: a taste for war.(The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century, by James C. Bennett; Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, about $90. Increasingly during the past few centuries, the English-speaking World...

Man of the year.(1932: A Hell of a Year)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... 1932." A Hell of a Year, by Gerald Stone; Macmillan, 2005, $35. THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with history is that there is so much of it. Thousands of years of it from several countries fill library and bookshop shelves and most nights it is...

Before the fall.(The Education of Dr. Joe)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... The Education of Dr Joe, by Joseph N. Santamaria; Connor Court Publishing, 2006, $24.95. THE FAMILY of Dr Joseph Santamaria recently celebrated the hundredth year since the first Santamarias left the Aeolian Islands for Australia, and Dr...

Kokoda in perspective.(Jonathan King works )
June 1, 2006... JONATHAN KING is a writer and an enthusiast; I always associate his name with the imaginative "Tall Ships" adventure of Australia's Bicentennial. n the March 2006 issue of Mufti (the Victorian RSL's journal) he writes an interesting article...