Quadrant articles from May 2005

Quadrant archives from May 2005

What kind of republic?(Editorial)(Editorial)
May 1, 2005... THERE CAN BE no sensible debate as to whether Australia should eventually become a republic without some agreement on what type of a republic we should be. It was the failure to achieve any such agreement which brought about the defeat of the...

Whose Jesus, who's Goebbels?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: In replying to my article "Is Jensenism Compatible with Christianity?" (December), Michael Jensen (April) and Claire Smith and Ken Handley (March) fail to mention the main complaint I had about Jensenism. That was Archbishop Peter Jensen's...

Symbolism and the monarchy.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: Simon Caterson, in "Royal Showbiz and the Australian Republic" (April 2005) describes how the present British monarchy has been integrated with the wider celebrity world and laments the vagaries and moral fibre of the Windsors individually...

The best patients.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: In your April issue Robert Murray's article on "Proddies and Micks" brought to mind something my late father Dr George Dowries, a New South Wales country GP, once said. Himself an Anglican, he stated: "Catholics are my best patients...

The head of state.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: David Alexander draws a long bow when he claims that the Governor-General, Major General Michael Jeffery, has knocked down my argument that the governor-general is Australia's head of state (Letters, January-February 2005). David...

The dismissal.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: Sir David Smith's article "The Truth about the Dismissal" (March 2005) illuminates a number of the more colourful events surrounding that disastrous day in November 1975, but ignores or skates around the dysfunctional aspects of the...

The data masseurs.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: Rob Foot's "The Left's Descent into the Abyss" (March 2005) touched me. Like him, I was once one of them, piously, even aggressively. The scales began to fall from my eyes when I was Counsel Assisting the Agent Orange Royal...

Solzhenitsyn and Christianity.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: Some caveats need to be expressed about Michael Brander's article "Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the West" (March 2005). In the first place, Solzhenitsyn's prime and profound importance as a European writer of the first stature arises not...

War: ruthless and brutal.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... SIR: I take issue with Geoffrey Bewley over his slanderous letter, "Was Rommel a War Criminal?" (July-August 2004). Rommel was a war hero to both the Afrika Korps and the Allies 8th Army troops alike. Bewley's intemperate bitchy remarks...

Can Islam meet the challenges of modernity?(Foreign Affairs)
May 1, 2005... MANY COMMENTS nowadays about the challenge of modernity to Islam are reminiscent of what was said in the late nineteenth century about the inability of the Catholic societies to embrace the industrialisation of the Protestant north--though the...

The Wolves and the Poets.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... THE WOLVES AND THE POETS The wolves asleep on the forest floor are dreaming of their mothers, Their flanks a-gleam in the silvered beams of an unremarkable moon. All the poets are good of course and some are better than others....

The prize unwon.(Society)(Intellectual left and ethics)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2005... The man on the left is a man undone, He'd give you his soul, if you asked him for some. A child in his way, for he needs to believe That truth is a song, for each man to sing. The man on the right is a prize unwon, ...

Is abundance bad for you?(Growth Fetish)(book)(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... THERE WAS a recent flurry of publicity about research done by the Australia Institute, a think-tank run by Clive Hamilton, which showed that Australians waste $10.5 billion in goods and services they do not need. The research appears to...

The strange decline and death of the Argus.(Media)(The Argus newspaper)
May 1, 2005... THE MOST SUCCESSFUL company in the world in its field invests a huge amount in an ailing Australian company in the same business. It promises the latest and best world techniques and practices. Its pockets are long and bulging. Surely the...

A Feeding Frenzy of flounders.(media regulation)(Transcript)
May 1, 2005... LARRY SABATO (in Feeding Frenzy, 1991) says there is no activity more classically frenzied than the feeding of sharks, piranhas or bluefish whenever they encounter a wounded prey. They first search out weak, ill or injured targets, and on...

Something Going On.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... SOMETHING GOING ON Invisible as angels, or as air, The little gods descend. So many deities assembled there Should mean one special friend For me. But the runes don't say. It isn't fair. I work for what I spend....

Camel Bird.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... CAMEL BIRD I was an ostrich when I dreamed, The dream I dreamed the other night And how magnificent it seemed To be an ostrich when I dreamed: My fluttering ostrich feathers gleamed, I strode the barren plains of...

H.W. Arndt in the Internment Camp: a 1940s documentary.(History)(Chapter from a forthcoming biography of H. W. Arndt (1915-2002) by Peter Coleman, Selwyn Cornish and Peter Drake)(Excerpt)
May 1, 2005... "PLEASE ATTEND Hampstead Police Station on 3rd October 1939 at noon, and bring with you all papers regarding your nationality and those connected with your profession or business." So began Heinz Wolfgang Arndt's ordeal as an enemy alien....

Blue Herons in the Evening.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... BLUE HERONS IN THE EVENING Blue-grey wings the colour of scree on late summer afternoons; wing-beats slow as flags flapping in a drifter, two herons in flight in the twilight in front of the glowing white...

In a South Dunedin Garden.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... IN A SOUTH DUNEDIN GARDEN My dad's dad, Louis, looked alter his tools, his implements. He sharpened chisels and saws, cleaned the head of his hammer till it gleamed like a glans. He tapped shovels and...

The NUS versus freedom of association.(Universities)(National Union of Students)
May 1, 2005... RESPONDING to the government's proposals to legislate for voluntary student unionism (VSU), the New South Wales President of the National Union of Students was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald of February 17 to have said that...

They Came From Aaargh They Came From Ugh.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... THEY CAME FROM AAARGH THEY CAME FROM UGH They came from Aaargh, they came from Ugh, They came from Traviss Toomey, And most of them were desperate, and all of them were doomy, And some were unicellular and some were...

Bradman the liberator.(Devine)(Sir Donald Bradman)(Ashes Test matches and Australian - British relations)
May 1, 2005... You all live in a convict colony, A convict colony, a convict colony... --song of the Barmy Army, English cricket supporters I'd rather be a Paki than a Pom. Oh, I'd rather be a Paki than a Pom, Pom, Pom... ...

Other people's photographs.(First Person)(family memoirs)
May 1, 2005... ONE BALMY summer's evening, we are walking in the streets near my brother and sister-in-law's house in Sydney. It is council collection day for unwanted large household items, and there are piles of stuff left out on the pavements--old chairs,...

Escaping the gravitational pull of the gospels.(Religion)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2005... EVERY CHRISTMAS and Easter the leading media publish "authoritative" articles illuminating aspects of the Christian story. So, for example, last Christmas the Times of London carried a piece by "the world's leading gospel scholar" Professor...

Elk.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... ELK Northeast Sweden, 1989 When I walked the tracks out of Skelleftea I walked with men on boulders big as skulls it's where I learnt the ways and the song we'd walk the tracks to the iron mine, and back I always...

Spirit Braille.(Art)(Australian Aboriginal art)(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... SPINIFEX is one of the most ubiquitous plants in Australia, the various species representing resilient adaptations to our infertile soils. Termites, similarly hardened by the continent's extreme conditions, have a unique ability to digest the...

Food.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... FOOD opportunity is the crunch of sugar in the apple crumble sweet as a flash of light in the dark hole of sensation the chew and mouthing of a cutlet bone the rubber-band swallow as it goes down how neat it...

True Stories.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... TRUE STORIES An earlier version of his long true story has affinities with Matthew Paris's thirteenth century map of Britain, its landmass like a huge grub about to morph; provisional, unformed, largely untested ...

Men without borders.(Film)(W.M. Maidment, Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney)(Doctors Without Borders documentary)(Obituary)
May 1, 2005... ON APRIL 4, 2005, the former Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney, W.M. Maidment, died shortly after receiving chemotherapy. Bill was a major influence on nearly four generations of students, scholars, teachers,...

Modern Italian poetry.(Literature)(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... ALTHOUGH IT IS tempting to frame Italy's tumultuous trajectory through the twentieth century by placing the twenty-odd years of fascist rule under il Duce at one end of the century and Berlusconi's (aka il Cavaliere) buffoon-style tyranny of...

Let Loose.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... LET LOOSE No edge to this living room. A cerulean table is making love to a floor that can't separate itself from the walls and I am so immersed in blue I could believe I've risen to the sky. Who is the woman...

Three Horses.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... THREE HORSES Come in. Come in, and see what no-one has witnessed. You step in and you're outside. So outside. There are no humans, just three horses in a field, the sky pressing against your forehead, urging...

Crybaby.(Story)(Short Story)
May 1, 2005... The boy at the lip of the well recalled the muffled plop of the rock which his father had thrown down. A wait of a second or so, and a sound which had to be a splash. So far away. Vaguely, the boy wondered what sound his father would make, and...

Exterminator-in-chief.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's Man in the East, by Joseph Poprzeczny; McFarland and Company, 2004, (see end of review for Australian price). ONE WOULD THINK the thousands of books about the Third Reich would by now have left nothing new to say....

A grand old man of the west.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Steadfast Knight: A Life of Sir Hal Colebatch, by Hal G.P. Colebatch; Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004, $32.95. SIR HAL COLEBATCH, Premier of Western Australia in 1918-19, was a type recognisable in Australia between 1850 and 1950. He was...

... And Waugh begat Waugh ...(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, by Alexander Waugh; Headline, 2004, $55. AFTER ALEC WAUGH assembled the letters he had received from his father, Arthur Waugh, he attached a note to the bundle saying: I feel that these are...

The triumph of the otiose.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Malice in Medialand, by David Flint; Freedom Publishing, 2005, $24.95. MAX SUICH summed up the Australian media in a manner which only required David Flint to provide chapter and verse. Flint certainly delivers his side of the equation....

Oakeshott in the real world.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, by Paul Franco; Yale University Press, 2004, $63.95. ON RETIRING from the Politics Chair at the London School of Economics in 1969 Michael Oakeshott remarked, "Some people say the world's the thing; and...

The homeostatics of happiness.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... The Happiness Paradox, by Ziyad Marar; Reaktion Books, 2003, $36.95. Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, by Carl Elliott; Norton, 2003, $24.95. THE WESTERN WORLD has never been more prosperous than it is now, even...

Axe-wielding poetry.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley; Bloodaxe, 2004, about $30. CRITICISED by many poet-reviewers but well received by the public, Nell Astley's first anthology of "real poems for unreal times", Staying Alive,...

Christieana.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, by Charles Osborne; HarperCollins, 2000, $22.95. Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, by Jared Cade; Peter Owen, 2000, $53.95. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple--Life and Times, by Anne Hart;...

That which the whole world cannot contain.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... Corpus, by Michael Symmons Roberts; Cape Poetry, 2004, $31.95. Damnatio Memoriae, by Sebastian Barker; Enitharmon Press, 2004, about $35. THREE YEARS AGO, writing in the Times, Michael Symmons Roberts analysed the achievement of the...

Lunettes.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... LUNETTES When my father crept in, all I saw were his glasses in the moonlight, watching as he lifted my nightdress. Forty years later I open the dictionary and find lunette. My finger points and I remember that's...

Faking it further.(Book Review)
May 1, 2005... The Invention of Dr Cake, by Andrew Motion; Faber & Faber, 2003, $17.95. BIOGRAPHY? Gothic melodrama? Metafiction? Nowhere does Andrew Motion's The Invention of Dr Cake disclose its genre. What is clear, however, is that his latest, slim...

I Had Not Thought There Were So Many.(Poem)
May 1, 2005... I HAD NOT THOUGHT THERE WERE SO MANY (a review of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry edited by Billy Collins, Random House, 2003, about $25) I had not thought there were so many good poets in the States. I don't say...

Ripe justice.(wrongful imprisonment case of Darryl Beamish)
May 1, 2005... MORE TELLINGLY than any scientific study by psychologists, the genius of Marcel Proust anatomises those fine-drawn skeins of memories, half-memories and pre-rational associations which (however much we alter) preserve the continuity of our...