Quadrant articles from June 2007

Quadrant archives from June 2007

Global warming and scepticism.(Editorial)
June 1, 2007... IS GLOBAL WARMING a real phenomenon? If so, is it the result of human activity? If so, what can we do about it? If it is beyond human control, what should we be doing? And how urgent is it to take action? These are the central issues in what...

The Sydney Anglicans.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... SIR: You have published three letters so far about my article "The Puritan Anglicans of Sydney" (March 2007). The first from Tony Payne in April alleged "errors, distortions, historical anachronisms, and tendentious value judgments" so...

Humility.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... SIR: Tom Frame tackled a potentially ungrateful subject (humility) in the April issue. Despite his efforts, the term remains for me a lofty tenor for simpler taunts like self-effacing, unassuming and gracious. Given his extensive treatment, I...

Richard Atkins.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... SIR: One of the striking aspects of Keith Windschuttle's scholarship is its boldness and ambition. His recent interesting piece, "Abolition of the Slave Trade: The Australian Connection" (April 2007), is a case in point. However, he does me an...

Barzun's influence.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... SIR: While Rafe Champion (April 2007) can reasonably argue that Jacques Barzun's work on higher education seems to have been "in vain so far as our academics and intellectuals are concerned", his name is not altogether "missing from the...

Christian socialism?(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... SIR: Chris Lewis's assessment (April 2007) of how different a Labor government might be in its approach to economic and workplace policies provides much food for thought, but I think the prognosis for the country under Labor is worse than he...

Dawkins and the bible.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... SIR. David Hodgson's conclusion (May 2007), in the form of a mischievously mixed metaphor, that Richard Dawkins should be seen to be "on the side of the angels in the quest for a more peaceful world", came as a relief. I must confess that...

The secret republic.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... SIR: I am interested in but undecided about an Australian republic. I am aware of what monarchists support and their reasons. Recently, at www.aussiecrown.org, I found eight questions, the answers to which would have assisted me to decide to...

Confronting the closed circle: reflections on the war in Iraq.(Defence)
June 1, 2007... IN 1989 THE BRITISH WRITER and war correspondent David Pryce-Jones wrote a celebrated study of the Middle East entitled The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. In this book, Pryce-Jones demonstrated how the Arab world had chosen to...

A Fence of Photos.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... A FENCE OF PHOTOS Kingston Foreshore A fence of photos, pressed in metal, gestures briefly at the past, these workers in their 1920s, grateful for a job at last; hats and waistcoats, smiling mostly, the...

Picnickers at Pirates Bay.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... PICNICKERS AT PIRATES BAY (Tasmanian photograph, 1910) Protected like their lamingtons from sun and blowing sand... Our captioneer then swaps to prose as if from sea to land. The poem that he started though ...

The young Heinz Arndt from the Kaiser to Hitler.(History)(World War I to World War II)(Excerpt)(Biography)
June 1, 2007... THE YEAR 1915 was not a good time for a German boy to be born. As soon as he became aware of the world, he would know that his country had been defeated in a great war, that the Emperor had abdicated and a Republic had been proclaimed amid...

Just So.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... JUST SO I woke up--my head turned just so towards the bedroom door. Anguished. Because I had dreamt I had lost all my teeth. I had dreamt I had nothing left in my mouth. Nothing to bite on, nothing to bite with....

Bert Cremean and the birth of the movement.(anticommunism)
June 1, 2007... ANY ACCOUNT of the origins of Bob Santamaria's long involvement in Australian politics, if it is to be at all enlightening, needs to shift the spotlight away from Santamaria himself. The focus instead should be more on the factional...

Remembering the war generation.(Australia)(World War II)
June 1, 2007... THERE IS A SCENE in one of those remarkable Damien Parer documentaries of the Second World War that sticks in my mind. Some young Australian soldiers are descending, in single file, a muddy jungle track, somewhere in New Guinea. As they swing...

North wind nightmares.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... North wind nightmares I'm trapped in a closet of camel-hair coats with a hair-dryer jammed on "high" I'm chained to the mouth of a fan-forced oven wearing a beanie I can't take off I'm sewn inside a hessian...

Time Being.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... TIME BEING I watched the old soldier down the street stop to suck a cigarette and shuffle to the letter-box. Out. Back. It took him half an hour lugging damaged lungs to cross and re-cross the tiny...

O Tannenbaum!(Poem)
June 1, 2007... O TANNENBAUM! I apologise to Mr Jones, the man from the shop who donated the streamers, gifts, lollies and cordial. He didn't donate the tree, which was natural, sort of. I apologise to Sister Mary James and Jude who...

Ignoring signposts on the road: da'wa: jihad with a velvet glove.(Religion)
June 1, 2007... AUSTRALIAN MEDIA preoccupation with the Muhammad Dawood aka David Hicks case-along with the September 11 atrocities, the Bali, London and Madrid bombings and the Iraqi war--has assured Islamist terrorists like the Taliban, Usama bin Laden's...

Love for the Nearly Dead.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... LOVE FOR THE NEARLY DEAD If only we had asked her where she fought in the history wars, before it was too late. If only I had listened that winter night she tried to speak about her mother's life. I...

Song of the Crestfallen Pigeon.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... SONG OF THE CRESTFALLEN PIGEON The pigeon on my window-sill adores a bird of wood that gazes from this other side as if she understood. Brought here from America, she wears a perky crest and feathers grey...

Jeevesville, USA.(Devine)(P.G. Wodehouse's character Jeeves in his Blanding Castle novels)(Critical essay)
June 1, 2007... UNABLE ALWAYS TO SUPPRESS the smartarse which lurks within me, I experienced a sense triumph recently when I became convinced at I had discovered the true source of P.G. Wodehouse's inspiration. Is this a matter of consequence to the...

Pain, postmodernism and Popper.(Science)(Karl Popper)
June 1, 2007... I COME BEFORE YOU TODAY in some ways in awe and in trepidation. * I say awe because, as I have started to look into the literature on pain, I have been impressed by the sheer intellectual excitement of your work. I can think of few other fields...

The decline and fall of the West.(Education)(Essay)
June 1, 2007... THERE HAVE BEEN many complaints in recent times about the failures of the educational system. Professor James Allan of the University of Queensland wrote an article in the Australian on April 11 in which he bemoaned the inability of...

Section 98.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... SECTION 98 No firing squads at dawn for cowardice or desertion... alone among its allies, Australia muddled through: An act passed down in Melbourne (Section 98) held off the higher brass, their...

The Guantanamo detainees and the Military Commissions Act.(Law)
June 1, 2007... IN "THE IMPLICATIONS of Hamdan's Case" (Quadrant, March) we considered the decision of the US Supreme Court in Hamdan's case, which struck down the military commissions set up to try Guantanamo detainees. Following that decision, Congress...

Look Where the Lake's Gone.(Poem)
June 1, 2007... LOOK WHERE THE LAKE'S GONE Look where the Lake's gone-- round Marks Point and out to sea through dimpled green hollows. It's left flats of crumpling cocoa where creatures of the Shallow get on with the afternoon's...

Writing and reading the canons.(Literature)
June 1, 2007... CANONS DON'T suddenly appear. They evolve. Their evolution influences how we write and read them. There's a chicken-and-egg scenario here. What comes first, a canonical text or its ideology and aesthetic? If we believe in divinity and...

Fascism on the screen.(Film)(Critical essay)
June 1, 2007... BACK IN THE MID-1970s when Leni Riefenstahl was reinventing herself as a "documentary photographer", that very public New York intellectual Susan Sontag wrote an article titled "Fascinating Fascism". Among other things she attacked the evasions...

Refugees.(Poem)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... REFUGEES The parents are showing to the children the pictures of their home before it was burned down and they are showing the pictures of relatives who were killed with the gesture of wiping off the fresh blood from the...

Love is not Love.(Poem)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... LOVE IS NOT LOVE 1. It was never love. Not love. It was what the Italians call the thunderbolt. We stared. We exchanged eyes. It was easy. Not what we might have wanted. Not what we had planned. Many...

The Fruits of our labours.(Story)(Short story)
June 1, 2007... Three days after his daughter disappeared, Harry Driscoll phoned the police. "Cuddle Creek Police." "Ah, I'd like to report a missing person." The receptionist gave an assenting grunt. The line buzzed noisily. There was a second...

The SS version.(Books)(Schutzstaffel, a large security and military organization of the Nazi Party in Germany)(Les Bienveillantes)(Critical essay)
June 1, 2007... Les Bienveillantes, by Jonathan Littell; Editions Gallimard, 2006, 25 [euro]. IT IS HIGHLY DISTURBING to see the fall of the Reich and the Holocaust through the eyes of an unrepentant SS officer. We are used to Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz...

What were we thinking?(Books)(Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud)(Critical essay)
June 1, 2007... Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson; Orion, 2006, $45. IDEAS, as Peter Watson admits in the introduction to his ambitious guide to how we understand our understanding of the world, do not have an especially long history....

The danger of speaking out.(Books)(Infidel)(Critical essay)
June 1, 2007... Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Free Press, 2007, $34.95. THIS IS A DISTURBING BOOK about the clash of civilisations. It begins with a frightening introduction telling how its author became the subject of headlines around the world. On a...

Rudd is a dud.(Ryan)(Kevin Rudd)(Column)
June 1, 2007... IN THIS COLUMN three years ago (June 2004) I wrote about two topics not at first sight very closely related. The first was Anzac Day; the second was Mark Latham, that bright Lucifer who so briefly lit up the Labor Party. In June 2004, as today,...