Quadrant articles from May 2006

Quadrant archives from May 2006

Papua and realism in foreign policy.(Editorial)
May 1, 2006... ONCE AGAIN the party of war against Indonesia is going through a paroxysm of jingoism. Having achieved a "victory" in East Timor, with the creation of an already corrupt and failing independent state, it is now bent on achieving a similar...

Funding research.(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... SIR: The repeated narrative of academic decline in Quadrant deserves comment, especially when it finds its way into the national press. The opening sentence of the article on page 4 of the Weekend Australian for March 4-5, entitled "'Rubbish'...

No golden age.(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... SIR: Malcolm Saunders' article on the current state of Australian universities (March 2006) will no doubt strike a chord with many academics. However, your non-academic readers may be left with the impression that, prior to John Dawkins'...

Faulty scientists.(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... SIR: The statement in your March editorial that "the intellectual rigour of the sciences is increasingly absent from the humanities and social sciences" illustrates the modern tendency to exaggerate the efficacy of science simply because its...

Terra nullius.(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... SIR: Since Michael Connor (Bulletin, August 2003) and John Dawson (Quadrant, July-August 2004) challenged Henry Reynolds over terra nullius, the debate has shifted to the relevance of terra nullius to the 1992 Mabo judgment, which found that...

Campaigning historians.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... SIR: I was surprised to see David McKnight's objection (Letters, March 2006) to my quoting him accurately. He wrote of earlier Left historians of the Cold War romanticising communism and disregarding evidence and in fact becoming participants...

Andrew Bolt and the facts.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... SIR." In his review (March 2006) of Andrew Bolt's recently published collection of his newspaper columns, Still Not Sorry, Max Teichmann refers to Mr Bolt's commitment to "the facts" as a stand-out attribute which helps account for Mr Bolt's...

Secret armies in Western Australia.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... SIR: Hal G.P. Colebatch (April 2006) is sceptical about whether Western Australia had any pre-war "secret armies", especially secret armies involving his father. Tangentially, I am curious about Western Australia's post-war "secret...

Thirty-six years of fear and greed.(profit making is important for a company to survive)
May 1, 2006... I BEGAN MY WORKING LIFE as a general journalist. There's almost nothing in newspapers I haven t done, from editing them down to compiling the shipping movements and tide times. By 1969 1 was covering crime and politics, but was getting bored by...

My life as a young Australian novelist.(Reprint)
May 1, 2006... THREE STORIES IT'S HIGH SUMMER; I'm fourteen, walking home from school. Sweat is pouring down my face and I almost miss it. There's a furniture truck parked in the street outside my house. My first thought: oh shit, he's done it again. ...

The road not taken: flying to Santiago de Compostela.(Short story)
May 1, 2006... ARRIVING AT the former edge of the known world by plane almost entirely disqualifies me from writing from Santiago de Compostela; although I can plead one mitigating circumstance. My gazetteer--"in a new English translation, from the original...

Building and selling the snowy.(Snowy Mountains Authority)(Viewpoint essay)
May 1, 2006... ON HEARING that the Snowy was up for sale my thoughts went back half a century to those days of enthusiasm and purpose when I was young and Sir William Hudson was leading the Snowy Mountains Authority in a modern crusade to carve an engineering...

Death of a Playwright: Listowel's John B. Keane.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... DEATH OF A PLAYWRIGHT: LISTOWEL'S JOHN B. KEANE "John B. is dead," Listowel said, Incomprehension on its brow; "John B. is dead," Listowel said, "We're only an ordinary town now."

A Product to Sell.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... A PRODUCT TO SELL A product! A product! A product here to sell! We'll market it through children For we know very well That children get their parents To indulge them and to buy Anything from junk food ...

Ruckard Drury.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... RUCKARD DRURY Ruckard Drury, spailpin, Laboured all his life For pig-ignorant farmers. One day, a farmer's wife Had Drury at her table, Her fare was tea and bread But she served him up bad butter ...

Islam and Western democracies.(after World Trade Center and Pentagon Attacks, 2001)(Viewpoint essay)
May 1, 2006... SEPTEMBER 11 was a wake-up call for me personally. I recognised that I had to know more about Islam. In the aftermath of the attack one thing was perplexing. Many commentators and apparently the governments of the "Coalition of the...

The existence of Jesus.(questioned )
May 1, 2006... SO DAVID H. LEWIS (Quadrant, May 2005) thinks Jesus never existed and that "2000 years of Western thought and culture has all been founded on a fallacy". Lewis is right in mentioning G.A. Wells' arguments for the non-existence of Jesus but...

Prayer.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... PRAYER Oh, for my mother in her pain, Almighty and all-loving Lord, I come to plead with you again. For years her body's been a bane That's put all gladness to the sword: Oh, for my mother in her pain! ...

Pause.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... PAUSE Does he ever pause, the shearer, to take pleasure in the way his comb, stroke by stroke, colours the sheep such a clean and creamy white?

Loquats.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... LOQUATS i My littlest boy-- dropping from the loquat tree after his brother. ii In the doorway-- my two sons playing marbles with loquat stones. iii "Dad, is this ripe?" He shows me...

The good Australian and the lure of Islam.(Mena Abdullah )
May 1, 2006... SOME FORTY YEARS ago the Sydney writer Mena Abdullah published a collection of stories about the travails, pain and joys of growing up Muslim in Australia. It was Time of the Peacock, published by Angus & Robertson. The late Ray Mathew was her...

At Table.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... AT TABLE We watch the news with our drinks and olives. Terrible scenes glide by. We are building up immunity, discarding memory if we can. But then we see the orphans, two and three-year-olds, rows of...

Letters.(Poem)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... LETTERS Who does not save old letters, that is, those who still write them? First missive from a darling child, I hop you are well, last letters from a parent, friend, love letters tied with ribbon and the...

Breaking out of the museum: the consequences of Dr Coombs.(Nugget Coombs )
May 1, 2006... FOR APPROXIMATELY thirty years the policies of separatism and self-determination which Nugget Coombs was able to impose upon the political elites of Australia, and consequently on Australia's Aboriginal people, ran without check or hindrance....

Human rights or rites?
May 1, 2006... IN HIS 1951 BOOK Two Cheers for Democracy, E.M. Forster devoted a short essay to George Orwell which included these lines: Liberty, he [Orwell] argues, is connected with prose, and bureaucrats who want to destroy liberty tend...

Oncology Ward.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... Oncology Ward Nobody says. But we all know. Around 3 a.m. she walked up the hall, past the lifts, pulled herself over the rail to the cold multi-coloured marble floor way below. Wai-lo Wai-lo Unceasingly,...

A portent.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... A Portent for Dennis That cry in the woods like none I ever heard sent up a racket of crows, a fury of wings by the edge of the stream. That sound--as if non-human anguish deeper than deep woods lay at the heart...

Flag Rescue.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... Flag Rescue Little flag, this morning I found you brown and crumpled On the sidewalk on Babcock Street, exposed by the snow-melt, With your brown more vivid than your red-white-and-blue-ness, So I picked you up, took you...

Conservative reasons for the Iraq war.
May 1, 2006... THE BRITISH political philosopher Michael Oakeshott famously summed up conservatism thus: To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible,...

An interview with Peter Coleman.(Devine)(Interview)
May 1, 2006... IN OCTOBER this urbane, sceptical, implacably independent journal celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its first issue. This is some achievement for a shoestring operation, meanly treated by the Australia Council, which has generously funded...

Science and consensus: two heads good, three heads better.
May 1, 2006... One man's experience is nothing if it stands alone.--C.S. Peirce STEVEN WEINBERG'S article discussing Einstein's mistakes in the December 2005 Physics Today was characteristically measured and respectful. But to anyone interested in the...

La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo: Captain Quiros and the discovery of Australia in 1606.(History)
May 1, 2006... FOUR HUNDRED YEARS ago, on May 14, 1606, Captain Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, a Portuguese explorer in the service of Spain, made landfall on an island which is now part of Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides). He believed that he had reached the...

Two trees.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... TWO TREES i. What We Hear There is a tree falling in our back lot, a willow, gigantic and scarred, with torn limbs hanging at oblique angles, its base a tangle of vines and wild rose. It is falling slowly, ...

Pandering in the universities.(Viewpoint essay)
May 1, 2006... THE ARTICLES by Malcolm Saunders--The Madness and Malady of Managerialism" (Quadrant, March 2006) and its predecessor, "The Bullies and the Bullied" (March 2005)--brought together so much information, and marshalled so many insights and...

Koestler, Orwell and the inversion of logic.(George Orwell, Arthur Koestler)
May 1, 2006... IN THIS ARTICLE I intend to discuss the epistemological inversion that develops in the mentality of Rubashov, the main character in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. And I will show how it is connected to the logical construction of the basic...

The strange world of Allpoetry.com.
May 1, 2006... ALLPOETRY.COM is a website for poets to post their work and to communicate with one another with comment and criticism. It also has other aspects--for example it makes available many classic poems which people might seek to look up (under the...

Capote: the man and the film.(Movie review)
May 1, 2006... WHAT DOES a critic say about a film like Capote? It is good in many ways, but after examining the original material you come to believe that the film is subtly wrong, even though Dan Futterman's script is based on Gerald Clarke's first-rate...

The Language.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... THE LANGUAGE I was born into no country, falling into a city, the idea of homeland on hold. Out of the womb I rolled, into a language overheard like a rumour on the other side of her skin: language as native land....

The Leone ranger.(Sergio Leone )(Biography)
May 1, 2006... "I've ALWAYS BEEN fascinated," says Sergio by Sicilian puppeteers. Their puppets act out the drama of Orlando and other knights fighting the Muslims. But because the puppeteer know the village where he presents his show, he gives the puppets...

Joy Flight.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... JOY FLIGHT From up here, it's all so much more objective. Stuntman for a moment in your head, you stand on tip-toe on one of the wings and tilt the horizon just a fraction, sneaking yourself a little more ocean...

Feather & Down.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... FEATHER & DOWN Sleep comes floating towards us nightly, shipping we cannot avoid. With luck, we negotiate its unloading from a position of animal warmth--luxury, nothing less. I find myself thanking anonymous ducks,...

Solo Sonata.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... SOLO SONATA Bartok--in a New York fiat, bereft-pieced pain together in black notation. Given form chaos cries out. Balancing as fine as on one hair the mood holds, sustaining lovers like two fiddles...

Bolshoi.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... BOLSHOI Breathing the same dark air with hundreds, still we are apart--different by our work, our dress, held back by rail and velvet curtain, pinned down by the overhanging stage. Just above us dancers freely ...

Six Haiku.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... SIX HAIKU part of the number before the ink runs out--hotel room pen posters down the street of last week's circus acts--old rain backs up the gutter stirring up the sand castle--a wave all the way...

Poppy day.(Halloween)
May 1, 2006... November was the saddest month. The month of the Holy Souls, when the priests wore purple vestments and there were devotions every night that Ruth's mother went to to pray for the souls in Purgatory. You had to keep praying for them, she said....

Lunch with Miss Grover.
May 1, 2006... Imet her in the foyer of the Novotel, just north of Wollongong. She was sitting at a glass table behind a grand piano, reading a newspaper. She wore a denim skirt and a green and black lace top that she'd bought second hand the day we saw a...

The Distance Between Them.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THEM That was the giveaway. All the way down they had walked like that, in step, but sufficiently apart that no accident could cause one to brush against the other. He kept well towards the centre...

Witness.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... WITNESS Looking for October's orchids I climb down to the creek bed and find indigo bush growing where the pool was once I knew where to place every footfall which rocks would give or roll wrenching a...

Six Haiku: autumn.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... SIX HAIKU autumn-- the party balloon floating away isn't ours a candy dish needing more-- late evening rains strong storm winds-- shadows not covered by the snow cars splashing thru--...

Narrative resurgent.(Our Island Story)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Our Island Story, by H.E. Marshall; Galore Park Publishing in association with Civitas, 2005, about $60. A BEAUTIFUL BOOK is now available whose stories, pictures and occasional poems will delight and inform its readership in equal...

In the days when the left was red.(Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite, by Kenneth Gee; Desert Pea Press, 2006, $29.95. LABOR PARTY factionalism, now largely a matter of personal ambition among interchangeable apparatchiks, once concerned issues of great...

Death and photocopiers.(New and Selected Poems)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... New and Selected Poems, by Dennis O'Driscoll; Anvil, 2004, $39.95. DENNIS O'DRISCOLL encountered death early in his life. The details are not supplied in the biographical note to this fine new volume, but they quickly emerge from the early...

Alchemy.(Poem)
May 1, 2006... ALCHEMY Like an alchemist I work at the fire--feeding it rubbish and refuse until the great jarrah log is embedded with glowing nuggets!

The reference shelf.(maintaining a library of referance books)
May 1, 2006... A FEW MINUTES AGO, on pure impulse, I jumped up from the desk and measured the aggregate length of the shelves occupied by my reference books: that is to say, shelving for dictionaries, encyclopaedias, thesauruses, dictionaries of quotations,...