Quadrant articles from March 2001

Quadrant archives from March 2001

CELEBRATING FEDERATION.(Australia)
March 1, 2001... THE CELEBRATIONS of the centenary of the formation of Australia as a nation were quite rightly dominated by a sense of pride and achievement. At the same time there were the usual voices of hate--self-hate, hatred of Australia, hatred of the...

LETTERS.
March 1, 2001... THE REAL MOERDANI SIR: The main issue in the article by Paul Monk (November 2000), "Balibo: Murdani and the Memory Hole", concerns a supposed Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) intercept of a conversation between General Benny...

POLITICAL BIAS IN THE ARTS.(Australia)
March 1, 2001... AUSTRALIA'S OTHER RED CENTRE CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA presents itself to the world as a paradise for surfers, swimmers and sportspeople and as an eventual economic Eden to those who flee harsh political climates to try to come here from...

STAKEHOLDER WELFARE.(Australian social policy)
March 1, 2001... PERHAPS THE GREATEST weakness of left-of-centre politics has been its reluctance to adapt to changed circumstances. The passion of the left for a good society has often translated itself into a dogmatic approach to public policy. Policies which...

LIES, DAMNED LIES AND ... POSTMODERNIST HISTORIOGRAPHY.(Australia)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... "However, another move is required of the discipline [history], one that runs contrary to many of its traditional procedures. This needs to be made with reference to the way history interprets or reads memory. Conventionally, historians have...

WERE ABORIGINAL STOCKMEN UNDERPAID?
March 1, 2001... THE ROLE OF ABORIGINES in the northern pastoral industry has become a highly contentious question. Historians such as Ann McGrath (Born in the Cattle) and Dawn May (Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry), sociologist Frank Stevens...

DRIVING HOME TO THE IDA VALLEY.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Before the moon came up over the Kakanuis, the Ida Range and the Dunstans in the west were blue with a faint tinge of red, the last delicate light of a clear day. A still evening's a blessing, as if the worst of the...

HOME HILLS ROAD.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... "The road ahead goes nowhere," the painter said and pointed: "that's me." I get out of the cab, open the iron gate, and shift loops of wire lying as if Calder's been here and arranged them deliberately. Random is too...

THE ONE BIG STONE ONTARIO.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Ontario is made of stones and water 17 percent water they say and let's rephrase that not stones but one stone very big where not even geological time spans have been long enough yet for the weather to grind enough of it soft so plant roots can...

SHAKESPEARE AND ME.
March 1, 2001... ONE AFTERNOON, when I was eleven or so, my father came home from work with a sheepish look on his face, and a record in a paper bag under his arm. Now, that wasn't an uncommon happening: Papa might wear the same fashion in shirts and trousers...

STONES.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... 1. The earth teems with Stones. There are enough to last for a billion billion years. 2. It is not good that stones are so cheap. They are earnest and dreadful. The world would be ...

MY CLAIM FOR COMPO.(compensation for listening to hospital patients)
March 1, 2001... I SUPPOSE YOU COULD say it was a case of being rubbed the wrong way. A Sydney masseuse was recently awarded $26,000 in compensation by a New South Wales court for the depression she claimed she suffered after years of listening to her clients'...

ONCE, IN RAVENNA.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... We walked on the inside rim of a crypt, just above the floor. Its church had sunk into time or perhaps the nearby sea and land rose on all sides while it slept. Thin columns soared holding back its roof (and its...

IN CADIZ.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... In Cadiz I saw a cigarette factory (wasn't that from Act 1 of Carmen?), three wine bars, a guitar-maker's shop where I asked about the real flamenco so add another bar, and a single room above Plaza San Bias--no...

TOLEDO.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Alerted by a cascade or spring shower of small tin bells I glance over the worn stone parapet and notice a kid herding a couple of hundred goats across the Puente Nuevo and onto that common ...

WHERE IS MUSIC HEADING?(interview with David Hush)(Interview)
March 1, 2001... A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID HUSH THE COMPOSER David Hush has taught composition at the Australian Institute of Music in Sydney since 1998. This interview started during conversations at Princeton and continued via fax and letters between...

BATH.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Kindness, an Irish lilt in her voice, spares me the effort of running the water and supports my elbow when, stripped of everything but wound dressings, I take a giant step into the tub. Warm water wells into my...

THE SHELL.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... is smooth as a white mushroom cap, conical, married to the rifts and curves of a hill's geranium flank, and its spiral soon culminates in a satisfying nipple. Shall I scoop up this shell, go down to the field where...

THE CAVE.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Rocks wall me in. Their turbulent layers jammed together press unbearably on my head. The clammy air spawns moisture beads on ledges, ridges, trickles down long stone faces. Feeble light and the passages ahead ...

TODAY THERE IS TIME.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... to touch the silken stillness of myself, map its landscape, the missing left breast, to lay my nervous palm softly as a bird's wing across the new plain, allow tears to fall yet rejoice that the surgeon...

TEACHERS FOR THE THE KNOWLEDGE NATION.(Australian facetiae)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... WARNINGS from Australian deans of education at the nation faces a worrying shortage of teachers have been echoed by the Institute of Australian Educational Policy, the independent Ghasthurst-based "think tank" attached to Manning Clark...

Paranoia Corner.
March 1, 2001... "ABC viewers will have noticed that [recently] the popular `It's your ABC' station identification sting has been replaced by `The ABC, the national broadcaster'. What may at first seem to be a trivial change has profound implications for...

WORTHY OF THEIR HIRE.(chief executive officers)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... ANYONE WHO DOUBTS that greed is a mainspring of capitalism need look no further for proof an at the salaries the hierarchs of commercial corporations pay themselves once they've scrambled to the top. And not only in commerce. With the...

HOLY of HOLIES.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... According to Sir Gustav Nossal, addressing the girls of a Melbourne school, it is hard for white Australians to understand the Aborigines' "spiritual affinity for the land, which is as sacred to them as Jesus is for us." Well that h not...

AUBERON WAUGH -- A MEMOIR.(Obituary)
March 1, 2001... IT IS A MEASURE of the esteem in which his colleagues held him that within two days of Auberon Waughs death of heart failure on 16th January of this new century, the Times, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times, Australian, Sydney Morning...

THE MARCH OF THE GUILLOTINES.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... The Shade of Sir William Schwenk Gilbert Transmigrated into the Body of Kate Wu (a First Year Media Studies Student at Middlesex University) Observes the Early Stirrings of the Machine Revolution in 2010. See the guillotines are...

THE RESURGENCE OF HISTORICAL LAWS.(Review)
March 1, 2001... THE IDEA that history trundles along according to inexorable laws is widely thought to have had its day. The schemes of Hegel, Marx and Comte--and of a host of lesser lights such as Henry Thomas Buckle--have, it is claimed, long since ganged...

YELLOW FLOWERS, OTUREHUA.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... There's a field of rampant, pale yellow flowers east of the road north of Oture. Thirty acres of the bloody stuff, the farmer says, and I'm damned if I know what it's called. Unobtrusive for months, now it's grown like fury...

COIN.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... for Judy The very moment she died I dropped a coin in a bar across town I offered it my brief appraisal then left it shivering in the rubbish like a tear-streaked face a few minutes later, however ...

LESSER EVILS.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... You go for what haunts you less, the ache of memory or forgetfulness, the scary temporary repose in virtue, the best of loyalty before it's stripped away. There's no time for imponderables like trust,...

JAMES MCAULEY AND THE COMMUNIST MENACE.(Review)
March 1, 2001... JAMES MCAULEY, at the height of the Cold War, noted with wry humour that his fervent anticommunism had seen him portrayed in leftist circles as a "Catholic fascist hyena. He could also be startlingly candid about his own shortcomings. In...

BRITISH COLUMBIA.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... No matter if the ruler laid flat across the flat map and compared to the scale in the corner says the trip is 600 km the distance your wheels must turn is four or five times that as the road climbs and climbs and winds and turns this way and...

WELLSPRING OF A NOVEL.(Alan Gould discusses his novel The Schoonermaster's Dance)
March 1, 2001... I TAKE OUR TOPIC to require from us an account as to how the imagining of a work of literary art begins, and whether the body's five antennae--of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell--contribute anything sufficient towards animating an...

OH, IT MATTERS.(translated excerpt from Georgy Ivanov's poem 'Fog')(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 1, 2001... The stars above, poetry below. The rest doesn't matter. --from "Fog" by Georgy Ivanov, trans. by Daniel Weissbort Stars and the caviar taste of poetry are inaccessible to most. What matters more is the red wheelbarrow, glass...

OTHER MEN WOULD CRY FOR.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Our father was a savage man. His middle name was blood. Worked at Swift's, the poultry Auschwitz, slitting throats as they spun his way. His face was scarlet by 9 a.m. He came home in flagrant whiff of hemoglobin...

WHICH VERSION?(editing motion pictures)
March 1, 2001... SCENES ON THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR THERE IS a famous story about the old Lindfield Kings projectionist in the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever the movie, he would be at Lindfield station by 11 p.m., ready to catch his train home. "How do you do...

THE CORONER'S FINDING WAS OF DEATH BY ACCIDENT.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 1, 2001... You only come back after twenty-five years, because someone fetched your name. Brittle and earnest as sticks, the angularity and tetchy eccentricity mute protest at a selfhood so easily disregarded. Your glasses...

The Inheritance.(Short Story)
March 1, 2001... When I got back from Europe I moved in next door to Mum, and because of that, a lot of people think we must be really close. Either that or they think there must be something wrong with me. Which is the line the brothers and sisters usually...

Art and the Mermaid.(Brief Article)(Short Story)
March 1, 2001... Once upon a time it came to pass, so it is said, that an enormous storm swept the coast of New South Wales, doing extensive damage to the ocean beaches--destroying jetties, breakwaters and washing away retaining walls. Mountainous seas swept...

MAGGIE GORDON, WIFE OF THE POET, SPEAKS AT HER HUSBAND'S INQUEST FOR SUICIDE--25TH JUNE 1870.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 1, 2001... You see Sir--I had so little of his much divided heart, and he has left such swag of unpaid bills and poems. But now to put aside my grief and other woes and set down this: to tell the truth no--I was not surprised....

SAYS YOU.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Easy as pie says Mud-in-your-eye, Quiet as a mouse says you, Cold as a stone says Lin-lan-lone, It's true, it's true, it's true. Wise as an owl says Throw-in-the-towel, Free as a bird says you, Hoarse as a crow...

The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.(Review)
March 1, 2001... The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, by Virginia Postrel; Touchstone Books (Simon & Schuster), 1998, $22. THE OF LIFE is having a party. Bring along each volleyball, a net, and a copy...

Rolf Boldrewood: A Life.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Roll Boldrewood: A Life, by Paul de Serville; Melbourne University Press, 2000, $65.95. AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE has been conveniently divided up into two opposing camps, the nationalists who repudiated their British origin, and the...

Bird and Other Writings on Epilepsy.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Bird and Other Writings on Epilepsy, by Susan Hawthorne; Spinifex, 1999, $19.95. BIRD is essentially a livre compose on the mystery of, and medical knowledge about, epilepsy. It seems to be aimed at two overlapping audiences: those who...

Beautiful Veins.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Beautiful Veins, by Mal Morgan; Five Islands Press, 2000, $18.95 (includes CD). BIRD is essentially a livre compose on the mystery of, and medical knowledge about, epilepsy. It seems to be aimed at two overlapping audiences: those who read...

SIX HAIKU.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Birds sing above me-- Their simple language Is beyond me. Pup chasing tail Remembering The squats he's visited. Poring over Manuscripts, old man with a Look of genesis. Builder with...

THE RED, WHITE AND BLUE.(Harold Scruby of Ausflag Limited)
March 1, 2001... HAROLD SCRUBY is executive director of Ausflag Limited. He may very soon be looking for a new job. In charity, one might describe Mr Scruby as a man with no especial gift for silence. Less kindly, he could be called a media hog. Every moment of...