Quadrant articles from March 2007

Quadrant archives from March 2007

Science versus religion.(Editorial)
March 1, 2007... THE DEBATE OVER RELIGION takes many forms. When religious belief dominated both popular feeling and the state apparatus it was the wont of those thinkers who were sceptical about religion, or positive unbelievers, to discuss such matters either...

The progressive left, science and museums.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: While reading the summer magazine of Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, Powerline, I could not help but think of the pertinence of Keith Windschuttle's 2006 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture (January-February 2007) and Kevin Donnelly's and...

Carboni's Eureka.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: Don Parham (January-February 2007) presents three people's versions of the Eureka Stockade in order to go beyond the simplistic interpretations. But one of his witnesses, Raffaello Carboni, who wrote the only book-length account by a...

Wake in fright.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: Regarding Simon Caterson's article on Wake in Fright (January-February 2006). The film's location was not Silverton. It was Broken Hill. I was there when it was being filmed and watched the movie when it was screened at Broken Hill....

Theme and variations.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: In "A Tribute to Quadrant" (November 2006) John Howard spoke of the Left's delusion that Ho Chi Minh was a Jeffersonian democrat intent on spreading liberty in Asia. The Prime Minister cited George Orwell: "One has to belong to the...

The tolerance of Islam.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: In the December issue, Lawrence Burke ("The Growing Intolerance Towards Islam") records the intriguing observation: "I have worked and travelled in the Middle East for six years. I am taken with the integration of Islam, Christianity and...

The rise of Akrasia.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: It seems that there is a degree of intellectual weakness which is creeping into modern scholarship. This is not a lack of cognitive function or a poverty of theory. It is what Plato described as akrasia: the ability to act against one's...

Americanisation of Australian English.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: Following publication in your December issue of my article on the Americanising of our language, Dr Ric Bouvier (a retired GP from Melbourne) informed me that hospital casualty departments were renamed emergency departments as a matter of...

How could we help Hungary?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... SIR: I do not wish to criticise Hal Colebatch's excellent "American Conservatives and the Second World War" (January-February 2007) but in passing he quotes the American poet E.E. Cummings' criticism of America's failure to help the 1956...

Australia and the Pacific's lost generation.(The Pacific)
March 1, 2007... Not enough jobs is leading to poverty, unhappiness and it results in crime, violence and instability. In the Pacific, this could lead to a lost generation of young people. --Alexander Downer Australian rural and regional communities...

Sir Francis Galton and the roots of eugenics.(Science)
March 1, 2007... THE LAW OF HALF-INTENDED EFFECTS deserves to be more widely known. It usefully describes what happens to men who act intentionally, and who know more-or-less what they intend, but are shocked when things suddenly get out of control. If only he...

Black Cockatoos.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... BLACK COCKATOOS As they like all creatures came originally from Mind, not matter, the cockatoos are part of the supernatural. And hearing a large flock croak and snarl and creak in the crowns of the gums,...

For the Finches.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... FOR THE FINCHES i A garden sprinkler--luring with its soft whirring a flock of finches. ii The zebra finches-fluffing and preening beneath the spinning sprinkler. ...

Reviving the white Australia policy: the labour movement returns to its roots.(Politics)
March 1, 2007... THE CYCLE OF HISTORY, it seems, is extremely hard to escape. Recent controversy over temporary skilled worker migration to Australia shows remarkable similarities to similar controversy over a hundred years ago. In the present instance,...

The indispensable crown.(The Constitution)(Australia)
March 1, 2007... THE QUEEN, who has reigned for more than one half of the life of the Commonwealth of Australia, seems to be respected, if not admired, even by those who would remove her. The reaction in Melbourne at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006...

But we had more convicts.(History)
March 1, 2007... AMERICA IS DUE for a very big birthday this year--the 400th anniversary of the first lasting British settlement on its soil--at Jamestown, Virginia, in May 1607. A mighty oak indeed grew from this swampy little acorn, but in one small corner of...

The implications of Hamdan's case.(Law)(Hamdan v. Rumsfeld 542 U.S. 507 (2006))
March 1, 2007... IN THE CASE of Hamdan v Rumsfeld, decided in June 2006, the US Supreme Court held that the military commission set up to try Hamdan was illegal, because its structure and procedures violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the...

Hair and Hide.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... HAIR AND HIDE Every new cigarette strengthens The taste of cemetery In my mouth, where I bury all the kisses I Can no longer give you. I have given up The mobile on the table, No news is to be ...

Erratics.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... ERRATICS (Boulders caught in slow-moving glaciers and carried along with the ice) Around you, this cold mother tongue trundles without acknowledging your single presence, dredges chunks of landscape, troughs great...

Believing in God.(Devine)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... GOD ISN'T MAKING ME do this--write about him, I mean. Well, I don't think he is, but I suppose you've got to be careful about excluding the Supreme Being from transactions. What I thought had motivated me, until I questioned it in the...

Bream, North Queensland 1959.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... BREAM, NORTH QUEENSLAND 1959 A farmer took his young son fishing three or four times in all. He showed the boy how he untangled shrimp from the water-weeds, how he marked the good spots with pebbles, how he...

The Puritan Anglicans of Sydney.(Religion)
March 1, 2007... ON MONDAY March 13 last year, Commonwealth Day was celebrated for the first time outside the UK in Sydney's glorious Gothic Revival St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral in the presence of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Queen Elizabeth...

The value of the secular.
March 1, 2007... Pious or even merely church-going people seldom realise how much good will, one might even say wilfulness, it requires nowadays for a German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously... [Aphorism 58] ... religion is one more means...

Driven to Driver.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... DRIVEN TO DRIVER First you perceive it as a kind of absence, an unravelling, a knot loosened and unpicked, the skeins of gut rolled back to their smooth rippling. Pain was your life's partner, ...

Picking up threads.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... PICKING UP THREADS I thought I'd left you behind, slipped from my shoulders the weight of our history and put it down with relief; Then I dreamt of a house with faulty foundations: water seeped up to the...

Some unofficial war history.(Melbourne)(Personal account)
March 1, 2007... WE USED TO HAVE cable trams in Melbourne: in fact, they lasted until 1937, or thereabouts. One line ran along our street, Rathdowne Street, in North Carlton, winding its leisurely way through the city, until it finished up at the beach. ...

Ethics in science-fiction disasters.(Literature)(Essay)
March 1, 2007... ONE OF THE PARADIGM science-fiction "disaster stories is John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951. Wyndham wrote many other science-fiction stories but The Day of the Triffids stands out as truly inspired. It is simple,...

Three queens.(Film)(Marie Antoinette: The Journey)(Movie review)
March 1, 2007... A FILM ABOUT Marie Antoinette that stops short of the Revolution and leaves out the Diamond Necklace Affair. Impossible! Yet that is what writer-director Sofia Coppola has done in the first American film about the tragic queen since the 1938...

Goose Bumps.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... GOOSE BUMPS Even women's small jumpers on this discount wire wardrobe outside the shop that burned taking the shop next door as well "Newspapers At Safeway" the Texta-ed card says Even the small T-Shirts...

On a Chinese screen.(timepassing in China)(Personal account)
March 1, 2007... I'm sitting here wondering where life has gone. What it'd be like at home now, and if I'd still recognise it. But I reckon I would. Here is home for my wife and our kids, and now their kids. An apartment with bedrooms like broom cupboards,...

The Fish.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... THE FISH How they appear: tunneled vision in a brackish world. But they weave through it, ambient, loose as the drops that brush their skin, slick colony of mists. Or do not weave. These snaking vines, these...

The red and the black: a "cultural Christian" in an age of sneering Atheists?(Books)(Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... The Catholic Church has but one desire and that is to see us destroyed. --Adolf Hitler Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends...

How dare Christians vote!(Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia, by Amanda Lohrey; Black Inc. (Quarterly Essay, Issue 22), 2006, $14.95. AMANDA LOHREY'S essay Voting for Jesus is the latest in a series of laments that Christianity is playing too...

The good companion.(Geoffrey Parsons: Among Friends)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Geoffrey Parsons: Among Friends, by Richard Davis; ABC Books, 2006, $39.95. THE MUSICAL IMPORTANCE accorded to pianists who eschew a soloist career in favour of professionally accompanying singers and instrumentalists in recitals has...

Romance of a magistrate.(Robbery Under Arms)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Robbery Under Arms, by Rolf Boldrewood, edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby; University of Queensland Press (The Academy Editions of Australian Literature), 2006, $175. THE AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC Robbery Under Arms, first published in...

As I pour wine in the dark.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... As I pour wine in the dark I listen to the sound it makes I know when the glass is half full.

The Face of the Body.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... THE FACE OF THE BODY The artist's model sees everything but she never speaks. The actor calls the chest and belly the face of their body. She puts on her clothes to be unrecognisable. None of them remember her face. The...

Fragment.(Poem)
March 1, 2007... FRAGMENT ... for he was wearing the sable coat he had inherited and beside him, on the table, was the mascara of immaturity.

How to climb high technology.(The Australian Miracle: An Innovative Nation Revisited)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... The Australian Miracle: An Innovative Nation Revisited, by Thomas Barlow; Pan Macmillan, 2006, $25. THE PRINCIPAL VALUE of this book becomes apparent on the first page of the preface, where the following anecdote is related. The Executive...

The foot-soldiers of history.(Ryan)(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2007... IN LAST NOVEMBER'S Quadrant I ate a rather large slice of humble pie on behalf of us journalists. It proved so indigestible that I'd like here to have another bite at the cherry. (How's that for mixed metaphors.) I called us the...