Quadrant articles from June 2008

Quadrant archives from June 2008

What's wrong with AD?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... SIR: I have just started reading Tom Frame's article "Should the Church Apologise to Atheists?" (May 2008) and right on the first page, second column, I find reference to the fifth century CE. CE? What's wrong with AD? Anno Domini? Why this...

Australians in the war.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... SIR: It was good to read Peter Ryan (March 2008), in response to Max Hastings' Nemesis. Like Ryan I found the chapter on the Australians incomprehensible. Hastings was able to deal fairly with the Japanese! There was for someone with my...

Pius XII and the Jews.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... SIR: With regard to Alan N. Cowan's letter (May 2008) I suggest it is he who needs to read more widely about Pius XII and the Jews. Rabbi David G. Dalin, in The Myth of Hitler's Pope, makes it clear that Susan Zuccotti, whom Cowan praises, is...

The separation of powers.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... SIR: The article by I.D.F. Callinan in the April issue deals mainly with the shift of power within the executive branch of the governance, but it also raises some general concepts which have troubled me ever since the Fitzgerald Inquiry in...

I am totally innocent.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... SIR: In an article in the May edition of Quadrant, Keith Windschuttle accuses me of committing the academic malpractice of plagiarism in an article I have published on pornography. He also accuses me of lying. Windschuttle relies on an...

Women in Christopher Koch's novels.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... SIR: In her review (March 2008) of Christopher Koch's latest novel The Memory Room, Sophie Masson drew attention to several of Koch's major female characters, listing these as forerunners to the character of Erika Lange. Masson described Erika...

El Nino.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... SIR: I quite liked Geoffrey Luck's piece "Keeping a Weather Eye Open" (April 2008). It's just a pity that some of his statements were not better researched. El Nino does indeed bring drier than average conditions to Eastern Australia but...

Reforming defence.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... SIR: As a junior officer reading John Donovan's article on "Reforming Defence" (April 2008), I am not surprised that the proportion of officers in the ADF has risen from well under 20 per cent to nearer 25 per cent. In many places it seems that...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction notice)
June 1, 2008... The co-translator of the poem "Late October Hexameters", in the May issue, was Peter V. Czipott, not "Paul V. Czipott". We apologise to Mr Czipott.

The chilling costs of climate catastrophism.
June 1, 2008... SOMETIME AFTER the Soviet Army had crushed the Dubcek regime in Prague in 1968, our great Cold War warrior, Frank Knopfelmacher, was described by his opponents in condescending and patronising tones as a "threat expert". Vietnam had fallen and...

The abused science of climate change.(Environment)
June 1, 2008... THE EXTENT of anthropogenic global warming caused by carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is a controversial and politicised issue and there certainly is no scientific consensus. However, some conclusions (and some important gaps)...

Family Duties.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... FAMILY DUTIES a sestina three places, finest cutlery just so a toast to two lost loves, a meal for one an album, photos, card from long ago that justify the things that he had done the drunken roar remembered all...

Room Vacant.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... ROOM VACANT He'd been here for just on twenty years, And had the little far room down behind. At times you might pass him on the stairs But otherwise he hardly crossed your mind. The one continuing sign of him you...

Regulation and the regulatory burden.(How Good Was Howard?)
June 1, 2008... IN MANY AREAS of government policy, the fingerprints of the prime minister are clearly visible. When we consider the highest-profile issues of the John Howard years--foreign policy, immigration, federalism and the culture wars, just to name a...

Getting the schools back to basics.
June 1, 2008... My message today is a simple one--the Howard government has got to got. Public education cannot afford another three years of this government. John Howard's attempts to unpick every skerrick of the Whitlam achievements and to reframe Australian...

Can we trust the ABC?(American Broadcasting Companies Inc. ABC Broadcast Group)
June 1, 2008... THE EVENING in October 2006 when Mark Scott launched himself, and as new Managing Director, his vision for the future of the national broadcaster to a packed meeting of the Sydney Institute, I asked the first question. Uncharacteristically for...

Silt.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... SILT for Dorothy Johnston How the old house silts up--with records and tapes unplayed, with poetry, yellowed, unread and guitar strings broken and limp. Faded hats from our salad days match dresses too small at...

A depressing new agenda for aboriginal politics.
June 1, 2008... IN THE BUILD-UP to the last election campaign, a small news item got largely lost in the melee. Since the Rudd victory, however, the reported topic has assumed a new importance in the Australian political agenda. On September 13, 2007, the...

Rehabilitating the convicts.
June 1, 2008... THERE ARE THREE cruel libels perpetrated against the Australian people. One is that we are a nation of racists; the second is that we have conducted a "genocide" against the Aboriginal people; and the third is that we are "stained" by our...

Leech.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... LEECH Hirundo medicinalis Little lug of blood. An extra toe in wet socks. A red blister growing unseen, unfelt in crevices and creases. It fills like a balloon; like a haemorrhoid. A swollen berry once carried by the...

The dangers of ethnic nationalism.(Essay)
June 1, 2008... ETHNIC NATIONALISM, the desire for one's race to be pure and to exclude others from one s claimed territory, can in extreme cases cause ethnic cleansing, as we saw in the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s. To think of ourselves as having a...

Just blokes doing a job.(William Charles Wentworth )
June 1, 2008... As I READ Peter Cochrane's fine book on the beginnings of Australian democracy, William Charles Wentworth seemed less and less like Edmund Burke or Thomas Jefferson and more like John McEwen. The high-toned conservatism of the earlier...

After Drought.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... AFTER DROUGHT How sweet it is, the sound of falling rain after years of unrelenting dry, I thought I'd never hear the sound again. The falling plays a favourite refrain as soft as stroking, quiet as a sigh. How...

Jervis Bay Requiem.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... JERVIS BAY REQUIEM The trees were yellow with light. Birds sang triumphantly as if a shroud had been lifted off the earth and the souls of the dead were being resurrected. I was lying at the end of the day...

An interesting career to follow: Les Hiatt, 1931-2008.(Obituary)(Obituary)
June 1, 2008... LESTER RICHARD HIATT, libertarian, anthropologist, sometime dentist and golfer, died suddenly in England on February 10. Les was born in Gilgandra, New South Wales, on December 30, 1931. He attended Hurlstone Agricultural High School; from...

Two Haiku.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... TWO HAIKU each gust leaves fall in bunches--our last day as tourists awake before the dream is over--each new sound in the dark a raindrop

Doc Martin, culture warrior.(Television program review)
June 1, 2008... SLIPPED INTO AUSTRALIA without fanfare three years ago and unobtrusively aired by the ABC at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, when A-list people are busy dressing for their glamorous nights out, the British television comedy series Doc Martin has...

Honk for Shakespeare.(As You Like It )(Theater review)
June 1, 2008... SPEAKING OUT for the traditional teaching of Shakespeare in schools drives campus ranters wild. Wonderful. Rightly, they see this as expressing contempt for Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and any other recently downloaded "ism". As...

A Pew in a House.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... A PEW IN A HOUSE Gaunt and severe as the gaze of any elder, From a kirk like the one I knew This pew now in a suburban house Is jetsam and relic. Aloof, it forbids use, An unbending Presbyterian. Captive,...

The fine art of benefaction.
June 1, 2008... THE MENTION of a signal art work, and the precipitous price paid for it in the same breath, inevitably diminishes our intuitive response to it. As the writer Jeanette Winterson once briskly put it: "The viewer does not see the colours on the...

Culture wars in regional Australia: the Howard Hinton Art Collection at Armidale.
June 1, 2008... IT IS WELL WITHIN living memory, and keenly remembered, that after a long motoring trip across the New England Tablelands of New South Wales, travellers would drive up to the imposing facade of the Armidale Teachers College, on the crest of its...

In Her Fortieth Year.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... IN HER FORTIETH YEAR The night my sister received the news that she would die before long she sat straight up in the hospital bed and hardly paused for breath but spoke like a woman who'd put up a fight: ...

Menace.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... MENACE Huddled beneath the pines that night, we'd crept from our houses nearby I suppose it might have looked as if we came to gawp and spy. That was not what brought us out. Alarmed when the new wife screamed,...

The soft-marking syndrome.(higher education)(Essay)
June 1, 2008... "WHY WOULD ANY sensible, qualified, capable or independent-minded person want to pursue an academic career [in an Australian university]?", declared professional editor Michael Giffin to the Senate inquiry into higher education in 2001, after...

John Clare Catches a Scent of Goose Grass in the Grounds of Northampton Asylum.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... JOHN CLARE CATCHES A SCENT OF GOOSE GRASS IN THE GROUNDS OF NORTHAMPTON ASYLUM some days I dither in the half-light of memory some days I do not this moming the wind is whistling-- enough to make an oddling leap-- ...

The Gaggle.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... THE GAGGLE On the distant hillside they are a string of white seed pearls slinking down to the still mirror of pond. After a splash-bath they groom themselves on the bank, twisting their pipe-cleaner necks into...

Banishing the men.(Aboriginal men )
June 1, 2008... ON A RECENT SBS Insight program discussing the federal government's Intervention in the Northern Territory, Des Rogers, an Aboriginal man, pointed out that Aboriginal men had been completely disenfranchised. Tony Abbott added that in a...

The fibro school by the swamp.
June 1, 2008... "TEACHER-IN-CHARGE--Maria River via Kempsey. Second Class Rail Warrant Attached." Yes, this was all the information thought necessary for me to begin my teaching career in some far-flung comer of the Department of Education empire. Well, I knew...

Golding on the fall.(William Golding)
June 1, 2008... WHAT IS THE FALL? LAST YEAR I met a man who admitted that, if he were to apostatise, or his theology and ecclesiology were swept away, he would still believe in the fall as its reality stands at the centre of his understanding. What is the...

19/7/76: of cars and kegs and doubtful legs.(Fictional work)
June 1, 2008... RECOUNTED IN HIS civilised and cheerful growl, this evening Alec Hope described for me a ream he had involving myself, Kevin Hart and David Campbell. Together we drove along a country road in ADH's white station wagon, the back filled with kegs...

24/9/99: a quickening.
June 1, 2008... TODAY, on either side of the cycle path, have appeared irregular tapestries of everlasting daisies, phosphorescent yellow against the green of the new grass. Mothers with strollers pause on the pavements, less to chat than to present themselves...

14/8/03: attaching to the animal spirit.(Gertrude)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... THE CLUE to Gertrude's character in Hamlet is the promptness with which she remarries. She has strength of character only to the degree that she attaches to a powerful male. One must watch her speeches in terms of those that are uttered in the...

3/7/07: frontline dispatch.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... AT ANNE'S WORKPLACE in BG Hall there arrived R to take up a post as an assistant and who, in the slightness of her stature, resembles Peter Pan's Tinkerbell. She has a stud gleaming from her left eyebrow, another implanted at the tip of her...

10/12/07: layers of ancient scrutiny.(views and prejudice against the English people)
June 1, 2008... IN MY FORTY-ONE YEARS in Australia I believe I have heard the English disparaged more often than I have heard Aborigines disparaged, and I do not count in this the well-disposed chiacking directed at The Poms which, in the early months of my...

The hours.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... THE HOURS The window he jumped from framed a grey canvas with not even the sky painted in. A pale featureless winter landscape, an unruffled pool of deep and abiding cold: his books and the one-bar...

Solstice.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... SOLSTICE I lit the fire early in a grate of ice fruit wood and wrist-thick old briar catching quickly and climbing in coils spreading along the ceiling of the low roofed sky. I pulled an old garden chair to its...

Time to say "thanks" as well.
June 1, 2008... NOW THAT the federal parliament has formally said "Sorry' to indigenous Australians, I believe we should also be saying "Thanks" as a mark of true respect. All my forebears came to Australia in the early days of settlement. Those who...

Two Haiku.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... TWO HAIKU Remembrance Day--nothing out of the comer of the statue's eye first day plans-children play in waves leaving the ocean

Torturing the truth.(Rendition)(Movie review)
June 1, 2008... RENDITION SHOULD be shown to all intelligence officers as a vital part of their training, former IS officer Warren Reed told me when I ed him for a professional assessment of the film. I have to admit I was surprised. Certainly John Le Carre...

My Lover's Ear.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... MY LOVER'S EAR Lying down after a swim my lover's ear holds seawater in its folded rim like a rock pool. Cartilage gullies plateau into a neat damp lobe, faintly furred as a baby fern. Concentration ...

Midday, Kata Tjuta.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... MIDDAY, KATA TJUTA Something has been left behind. Great humps of rock prop up the sky unevenly, the last remains of some Dreamtime animal now weathered into a motley of fossil-domes. We walk between two of the...

The Mincer.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... THE MINCER Fitting the handle to the twisting blades of what might be stomach or heart, is a feat. When it's fully assembled the heavy innards can be viewed through the gape in the head. A screw buttons the rings...

Botox.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... BOTOX Even a kilo of it won't save your skin now won't slow the bone-licking creatures swarming towards you even as the last sod is lobbed And settling your bones deeper inside your dirt doona won't...

In the course of duty.(Story)(Short story)
June 1, 2008... Police Constable Kevin Long crouched low in the bushes beside the bend in the road. He was beginning to sweat profusely and flies buzzed around his head. His knees ached. He was having great difficulty operating the "speeding gun" he had been...

The gentleman from the Lotteries Commission.(Short story)
June 1, 2008... He wore an air of certainty, much as you would a fine hand-made silken hat. And his smile carried with it a gentlemanly presence, his lips gently closed rather than pressed together under the manicured hairs of a whitish, faded red, somewhat...

The Regeneration of Night.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... THE REGENERATION OF NIGHT This flowering at day's end when new shoots sprout from the dark, rich soil of being, from the spirit that wakes when we sleep and sleeps when we wake. This nightly...

Remembering the forgotten.(Forgotten Anzacs: The Campaign in Greece 1941; Pompey Elliott; Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific)(Book review)
June 1, 2008... Forgotten Anzacs: The Campaign in Greece, 1941, by Peter Ewer; Scribe, 2008, $59.95. Pompey Elliott, by Ross McMullin; Scribe, 2008, $39.95. Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific, by Gavan Daws; Scribe, 2008,...

The Remarkable Mayling Soong.(Book review)
June 1, 2008... Madame Chiang Kai-shek, by Laura Tyson Li; Grove Atlantic, 2007, $29. WAS THERE EVER a trio of sisters like the Soong sisters, Eling, Chingling and Mayling? They married the three most powerful Chinese of their day, the financier H.H....

Today is Shopping Day.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... TODAY IS SHOPPING DAY She turns to close the door, this slow shuffling hut, a snuffling, burrowing animal hunched already to wear the glancing insolence of a street, hungry not for her. And, as you too have...

There is a God, after all.(Book review)
June 1, 2008... There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew; HarperOne, 2007, $35.99. He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no...

Singapore High-Rise Restaurant.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... SINGAPORE HIGH-RISE RESTAURANT Out of the mist here, thirty storeys high sky-scrapers bob around us, angle-cut icebergs standing in a hot pearly sea like a dream.

Observed.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... OBSERVED And after more than thirty years A letter from a former lover Is still something special to be saved, Sometimes opened under cover.

Visiting Ypres Cathedral.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... VISITING YPRES CATHEDRAL Sometimes I used to wonder What it would have been like To be in the First World War. And now I realize I am.

Reactionary Observations at the Pistol Club.(Poem)
June 1, 2008... REACTIONARY OBSERVATIONS AT THE PISTOL CLUB When you feel you've lost the plot Cordite's smell can help a lot. And here's a well-known shooters' trick That I've proved true once more: Imagine your enemy's face on...

Dining at the Greeks.
June 1, 2008... I WAS AMONG the lucky ones from my class who, in 1940, stepped straight from school into a job. Aged sixteen, I became a junior clerk in the public service--an "office boy". Practitioners of "human relations" had not then invented their weird...