Quadrant articles from May 2001

Quadrant archives from May 2001

WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH THEIR ABC?(Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
May 1, 2001... DEBATING THE DEFECTS of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is, in many respects, a mug's game. There are so many blind partisans of the ABC's role in our community that even reasonable critics find it a dialogue of the deal While there are...

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2001... SOME PERSPECTIVE IN ORDER SIR: The letter from Julian Woods (April 2001)is a refreshing reaction to the Manning Clark controversy. It is surprising that no one has come forward earlier to put the matter in perspective. Much has been...

THE FAILURE OF ABORIGINAL SEPARATISM.(social policy, Australia)(Statistical Data Included)
May 1, 2001... IMAGINE THE WHITE spiritual father and mother of Aboriginal separatism, Nugget Coombs and Judith Wright, sitting down during the 1960s to ponder the future of their adopted people. What profound disappointment in their own lives could have led...

FEAR DRIVE MY FEET.(Review)
May 1, 2001... `The lone hand and the rifle that win where armies fail.' -- Weary Dunlop As an Australian soldier of 18, Peter Ryan was sent out, alone and untrained, to conduct intelligence patrols deep in the jungles of Japanese-occupied New...

STATUES.(George Molmar and his work)(Review)
May 1, 2001... This is a reprint of one of the most delightful books of drawings ever published in Australia. George Molnar's brilliant cartoons and their witty captions appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and Quadrant over the decades and won legions of...

LUCY-LOCKETT.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... The champion runner of intermediate was burly, unlikely Lucy Lockett. The two-twenty, the quarter-mile and half, never by much but by just enough of something bothered and desperate, so whitely, so ungainly, so...

CRASH DRIVER HAD CAT ON HEAD COURT TOLD.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... (from the Daily Telegraph) A cat was sitting on his head she said, A black cat on his head and that was that. The cat was like a hat and on his head. He could not see the roundabout for cat, She said. The hat she...

REMEMBERING GALLIPOLI: A VIEW FROM THE NEW CENTURY.
May 1, 2001... Soon there'll come--the signs are fair-- A death-storm from the distant north. Stink of corpses everywhere, Mass assassins marching forth. --Alfred Lichtenstein, "Prophecy" (1913) FOR MOST AUSTRALIANS, Gallipoli is a sacred ground of...

MY FATHER'S CLOTHES.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... During the last nights of my father's life I took refuge in his wardrobe in the silence of its forest, among clothes I had never seen him wear, that he had not worn for years. Silk shirts so light on their...

MAKING OUR HOUSE.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... This is our house. You make a square And make two windows, there and there. Between the windows make a door, A roof on top, down there a floor, And on the roof a chimney high, With smoke going doodling to the...

DOCTOR AS DEMIURGE.(physician and patient relationship)
May 1, 2001... THE LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DOCTORS AND PATIENTS Honour a physician with the honour due unto him for the uses you may have of him, for the Lord hath created him. For of the most high cometh healing... --Ecclesiasticus 38 ...

THE JOURNEY AFTER.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... I wedded in the noonday's perfect heat, Although it seemed The marriage should begin when we would meet The one-fifteen which pulled in--late--and steamed A bitter breath of metal in the sun. The heat that hung so...

ANY REPUBLIC WHATEVER IT TAKES.(constitutional ammendment, Australia)
May 1, 2001... These safeguards [in the constitution] have been provided, not in order to prevent or indefinitely resist change... but in order to prevent change being made in baste or by stealth, to encourage public discussion and to delay change until...

A note to contributors.
May 1, 2001... Over the next few months Quadrant will be setting up its own website. Initially, this will carry a table of contents, the editorial, and some features of the magazine. Ultimately we hope to provide a major part of the magazine online, as well...

THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN.(Australia)
May 1, 2001... THERE IS A BLIZZARD of blame about the economy. The introduction of the GST and especially its unacceptable cashflow and administrative burden on small business is the chief culprit. The sudden downturn in the United States economy is the...

SUNDAY HAS DIED.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... When I was ten I remember, Sunday being quiet. The supermarket was closed, the bookstore was closed, everything was closed-- except the church. Sunday was the day Mum roasted a chicken. Sunday...

THE HISTORY ITCH.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... (after George Ewart Evans) 1. To live like a brilliant idea outside our given time, to live, warm as a thought inside the time another lives, we like these things and can't have them. And still I watch...

RETRO RELIGION.(Archbishop George Pell appointment, Australia)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... Fighting to be heard above the shrieks of protest from fellow-objectors and the popping sound of bursting liberal blood vessels, one of the most vocal critics of the appointment of Archbishop George Pell to the Roman Catholic see of Sydney was...

From the Prophecies of Nostraargus: AD 2001: KIM THE RECONCILER.(modern proverb, anecdote)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... "I see a fat man who desireth in his heart to be ruler of the people, and as in a dream his desire is granted, and upon the instant, tarrying not, lo, he protrateth before a Council of Elders and cry out with a loud voice: sorry, sorry, I...

OUT, DAMNED QUIET.(Ghasthurst airport planning, Australia)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... The row over a third airport for Ghasthurst rages on, with residents and local amenity groups ranged firmly against the proposal and the Coalition for a Better Ghasthurst pressing for an early decision in favour. The Coalition has been...

ONE POLL ONE VOTE.(ABC News Inc. (Australia), Kerry Burchett)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... LABOR WILL WIN the next federal election with a massive landslide majority of up to 99 per cent, according to a new opinion poll commissioned by ABC news and current affairs. The new poll has an "inbuilt infallibility factor" that prevents...

MARGARET SOMERVILLE AND THE PERILS OF BIOETHICS.(The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit)(Review)
May 1, 2001... IN AN OBVIOUS SENSE, deep thinking is required to tackle ethical issues related to the use of biomedical technology. This is clear enough whether the issues are familiar, such as the rights and wrongs of abortion and euthanasia, or those of...

RITES OF PASSAGE.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... I saw a youth transform into a tree, And strangely enough that youth was me. And only through my tears of pain, Did I water my roots to come human again.

REVISITING COVENTRY IN SPRING.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... You and I have lived here in the same place--our days, And on ones such as these you easily think you are free, All this blue stooping, unbidden to feed from your hand, All this green stuff--life--insouciant as a model swishing...

THE BREAD WE EAT.
May 1, 2001... ON MARY GILMORE MARY GILMORE was one of the most famous Australians of her time. As people who were alive in the 1940s and 1950s may remember, in those days Gilmore was looked on as a kind of totemic figure and was held to embody all those...

SHADOW ARTISTS.(Australian poets)(Review)
May 1, 2001... IS THERE DETECTABLE in the personality of any given poet, a shadow-artist where the nous usual to a different art informs the poetry? I have wondered, for instance, whether it is more a sense of brushstroke rather than verbal felicity that...

KING VULTURE FATHER.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... I've spent all morning in the Menagerie. I sat in the Vallee des Rapaces and stared at four vautours papes-- Sarcoramphus papas, surprised by the beauty of these New World royals, with their purple and coral heads ...

FROG HAIKU.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... Pale in my headlights on the glistening road--a frog hiccupping along! Walking by the marsh. Moaning frogs calling. My heart, too, moaning for love. As I approach the reedy marsh, one hundred frogs...

FIDELITE ET MALADIE.(The French Film Festival)
May 1, 2001... JUST BEFORE Bertrand Tavernier's 1999 visit to Australia the French director was involved in a very public clash with Steven Spielberg. When Tavernier was here, both men were playing it down, but it had been pretty spectacular, nothing less...

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A WERE-JAGUAR.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... All morning I walked through the rain until I'd seen every animal in the Menagerie, even the minibeasts in the microzoo. However high I set the magnifier I could not find excuses for you. Like a sleepwalker, I glided...

Almost NOW.(Short Story)
May 1, 2001... It would be crowded along the streets at night in the old part of the city. There would be snatches of that wailing, churning musk and fragrances of those potted pipes which men would pass from one to another; taking a deep draught of that...

SUPERMARKET REVERIE.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... (In England most people buy their lottery ticket in supermarkets) "The day I win the lottery I Will Divorce my wife and show the kids the door, Ravish a teen-dream on the kitchen floor (That wanton at the checkout fits the...

Grainger on Music.(Review)
May 1, 2001... Grainger on Music, edited by Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross, with Bronwyn Arthur and David Pear; Oxford University Press, 1999, $125. PERCY GRAINGER was first laid bare, so to speak, in John Bird's 1976 biography. It came as...

Santamaria: The Politics of Fear.(Review)
May 1, 2001... Santamaria: The Politics of Fear, edited by Paul Ormonde; Spectrum Publications, 2000, $24.95. I STRONGLY CRITICISED some of B.A. Santamaria's ideas and actions in the last part of his life and told him so when he was alive. I am not a...

First Nations? Second Thoughts.(Review)
May 1, 2001... First Nations? Second Thoughts, by Tom Flanagan; McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000, about $40. TOM FLANAGAN has been writing on Canadian original issues for twenty-five years. After serving and participating in the Royal Commission on...

The Forever Lands: Australia's Northern Territory in Word and Images.(Review)
May 1, 2001... The Forever Lands: Australia's Northern Territory in Word and Images, by Mark O'Connor and John Kirk; Beyond Images (Camberwell East, Vic), 2000, $49.95. OUR PHYSICAL experience of being Australian isn't complete until we have gone beyond...

JUSTICE KIRBY'S CLARK.(Michael Kirby, Manning Clark lecture)
May 1, 2001... THERE IS MUCH to be said for Justice Michael Kirby; the only pity is that he should be obliged to say so much it for himself. We Australians, as the lucky audience of his nigh-unstoppable flows of wisdom on almost any subject under the sun,...