Quadrant articles from March 2000

Quadrant archives from March 2000

LETTERS.
March 1, 2000... THE DEATHS UNDER STALIN SIR: Owing to absences, I have only just seen Paul Monk's almost incredible distortions of data on the Stalinist repressions supposedly given in certain of my books (July-August 1999). Before dealing with that, we...

MUTUALISM: A THIRD WAY FOR AUSTRALIA.
March 1, 2000... MUTUALISM is the number one issue in Australian politics. While this may not be clear to the party professionals and spin doctors, it is the common thread running through public concerns as diverse as globalisation, regional development,...

THE FOXES OF THE NEW CONSERVATISM.
March 1, 2000... WHILE THERE IS already a large and rapidly growing literature on why left-wing political parties in the Western world have moved to the centre, few analysts have identified and explained the conservatives' shift away from free market ideology....

WHAT IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS?
March 1, 2000... SOME THREE YEARS ago I edited a book about the state of liberalism in Australia. The contributors were journalists, editors, poets, a dramatist, a novelist who were all disconcerted by the decline -- a South African might say the slide-away --...

RELATIVISM AND THE RIGHT.
March 1, 2000... CULTURAL RELATIVISM has come in for some severe criticism in these pages of late. In fact, anything which even hints at postmodernism seems to get rather a hard time of it in Quadrant, and most often for good reason. But as much fun as it is to...

THE GENDER OF THE POET.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... She writes the reticent poem. Posts it. Rides out the backwash with cabernet sauvignon. Walks through the house locking the door turns off the lights. Her skirt is too tight. She thinks: Tomorrow in Coles I'll slip a...

A SONG OF EXPERIENCE.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... There are certain songs a singer cannot sing Because roughness, or its lack, is in his voice. What we get in life is what we bring. A singer's of the earth or of the wing: He's born that way, and life will brook no...

FOR PAT COGHLAN.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... Feach anois me Is mo chul le balla Ag seinm cheoil Do phocai folamh. I walked back to An Cuinne to my past -- A pub I'd played in half a life ago Those summers, a student, for the gas (For nothing but the...

DO YOU SINCERELY WISH TO BE RICH?
March 1, 2000... THIS IS A QUESTION that deserves careful thought. I suspect that most readers of Quadrant long ago decided in favour of other objectives, certainly other primary objectives. Power, influence, scholarly reputation, friendships, a happy family,...

JESUS V THE ATHEISTS: A REPORT FOR 2000.
March 1, 2000... A STORY that dips back thousands of years is entitled to start off only a few decades ago. When I was a lad, one of my jobs was to fire the boiler for my father, who then had a dairy in the hills near Melbourne. An elderly neighbour shifting...

VERY VERY FRIGHTENING.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... The phone slapped her across the face in a storm. Her phone took hold of her by the steel knitting needles threw her upside down across the room against the wall. The lightning plunged its fist down the downpipe...

NEWMONI-A.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... Dying in snow, drowning I want to die, long to die I am actually dead there, on the other side. I stare at the ironing think of doing it think I am doing it then it is done. Like being in heaven....

Beach safety warning.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Many of Australia's most popular beaches have become "killing fields" over the last summer -- and the carnage could get worse, according to the National Beachgoers Federation. NBF president Grant McBogan said that the "traditional hazards"...

New "Nazi" allegations rock Vatican.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... The late Pope Pius XII may be best remembered as a "willing tool" of Nazism and "fanatical ally" of Hitler, but most subsequent popes have been "just as guilty", claims British historian John Cornball, author of the best-selling "Pope" series...

CORRECTION.(Correction Notice)
March 1, 2000... In the January 2000 edition of Argus, the name of our Person of the Millennium was given as Miss Pauline Hanson. This should of course have been Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue. The error was made by a proof reader.

Biological discrimination.
March 1, 2000... The proliferating species of feminist who occupies some sort of vague "research" position in a university and who is regularly given space in the opinion pages of metropolitan broadsheets to air her views on how many battles women still have to...

CHRISTMAS BUSH.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... The box sits on top of the lowboy in our bedroom. My wife painted it gold, then dark green, then sanded the final coat back so that streaks of gold appear, like treasure beneath dross. On the lid a reproduction of...

THE EVIDENCE FOR LAMARCK.
March 1, 2000... IS IT POSSIBLE for an active scientist to communicate esoteric research findings in plain everyday language? The short answer is no. This may only be possible for stories on more popular topics such as dinosaurs, the "Big Bang" and...

HERE, NOW, ALWAYS.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... It is in the glazed eye by the roadside and the ants crowded there. It spaces one beast from another, gives bulk to clouds, steps out paddocks, and stitches blown grass to fences. It is a man bent to pick up kindling, and...

IMMIGRATION, THE UNTOUCHABLE.
March 1, 2000... JEFF KENNETT is right-wing and he's in it. Geoffrey Blainey is conservative, but he's definitely not in it. Phillip Adams is a left-winger and he's right in it. Leftist and feminist Miriam Dixson, author of The Real Matilda, is no longer in it,...

DADA.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... A man in a small 20th floor apartment in Singapore decided to give up the ghost. He draped a cloth over his budgie's cage and tied it down. No one knows why. Let's call it consideration. He carried the cage to...

MATES.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... Most of your friends like to see themselves as good people, and that's okay, for by and large they are, what we see of them.

SOMETHING IS ALWAYS USHERING US.
March 1, 2000... RECENT AUSTRALIAN POETRY LET US SAY you've started. You have a collection of pages where words have arranged themselves in a pleasing column for you, and you are tempted to call these pages your poems. This being the case, there are, in...

CHRISTMAS BEETLES.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... Her black carpal hook in my finger a light burr of wings in half-dusk. The heat and weight of cicadas in song, drowning out the hot wet crush of us in the car. Children running between vans and trees, beetles...

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER KOCH.
March 1, 2000... OUT OF IRELAND, Christopher Koch's long-awaited new novel, a companion volume to his earlier Highways to a War, was published late last year. Set in the 1840s, it tells the story of Anglo-Irish political prisoner Robert Devereux, transported...

VITALITY IN THE HOLLYWOOD GENRES.
March 1, 2000... GENRE FILMS are alive and well in the new century. Or at least it looks that way given the films made in 1998 and 1999 for release this year. Is it a retreat into safe formulas -- a triumph of sterile commercialism? Not necessarily. Certainly...

The Artist.(Short Story)
March 1, 2000... The hand stretched out towards him, gnarled, swollen and misshapen. The purple skin was embedded with the dry husks of old scabs, and red veins protruded from the surface in ugly twisted courses of engorged blood. "Good," said a voice....

Je m'en Vais.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Je m'en Vais, by Jean Echenoz; Les Editions de Minuit, 1999, FF95.00 (14.48 Euros). IT ALMOST GOES without saying that literary prizes are often a joke -- except, that is, for their recipients. Britain's Booker Prize juries are renowned...

A Wander in the Eternal Colony.
March 1, 2000... A Wander in the Eternal Colony, by Mark Uhlmann; Ginninderra Press, 1999, $20. MARK UHLMANN'S first book was a collection of short stories which brilliantly evoked the pain and confusion of the Australian experience over the past thirty...

Fighting for the Republic: The Ultimate Insider's Account.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Fighting for the Republic: The Ultimate Insider's Account, by Malcolm Turnbull; Hardie Grant Books, 1999, $27.95. WHEN IT COMES tO elections, my favourite saying is that "defeat is an orphan, while victory has many fathers". In Malcolm...

APOLOGIES.
March 1, 2000... SHORTLY BEFORE you received this issue of Quadrant -- on Thursday 17th February, to be exact -- there occurred the anniversary of the death of Giordano Bruno. The name of this excommunicated Dominican has hardly filled our front pages over...