Quadrant articles from November 2003

Quadrant archives from November 2003

The High Court's centenary ... and Vale Jim Cairnes.(Editorial)
November 1, 2003... THE RUDE HEALTH of our polity at the centenary of the High Court of Australia, celebrated last month, is in part due to the very qualities of that court. It has shown that it can survive the roundabouts of politics and fashion, succumbing to...

Morality and history.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... SIR: Fond as he is of false contrasts, Keith Windschuttle claims (October 2003) that "[t]he current debate about Aboriginal history is not a moral debate but an empirical one. It is about what really happened in the past. "Well, of course it is...

People-smuggling.(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... SIR: We must thank Chandran Kukathas for his tongue-in-cheek article on "The Virtue of People-Smuggling" (September 2003). It was, presumably, intended to make people think why people-smuggling is wrong. There are three phases: getting...

Hitchens and facts.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... SIR: I doubt Richard King's claim that Christopher Hitchens has shown himself able to recognise unpleasant political facts (September 2003). As a (former?) dissident Trotskyist, Hitchens is unable to recognise the evils of communism in general....

Knightley and facts.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... SIR: If I had been a "principal researcher" for Philip Knightley's Australia: Biography of a Nation, as Neil McDonald claims to have been (Letters, October 2003), I would not be in any particular hurry to advertise the fact (I note Mr Knightley...

Powers that be.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... SIR: I am grateful to read D.M. Armstrong's valuable review of George Molnar's Powers (September 2003). But I note that the review contains an error that Armstrong claims as his own. Armstrong proposes that "Accepting the powers enables one to...

Does Australia have an identity problem?(Australia)
November 1, 2003... THIS IS A QUESTION that would have interested Robert Gordon Menzies, but would not have troubled him. That's one of the things I like about him. He was robust. In the events of 1956, in which he was involved, my sometime colleague Elie Kedourie...

On Being Refused Publication in the Spectator.(Poem)
November 1, 2003... My poems don't cross the borders of his land: The editor's enjoyed them, but he writes That the readers of his mag. won't understand So he's keeping these "fine poems" out of sight. My poems address my nation is his plea--...

DDT and the new colonialist.(Foreign Affairs)
November 1, 2003... WHEN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Richard Mukuya first began to run a temperature, his parents in the rural Kenyan village of Kisii tried not worry. They were hopeful that their son had contracted just another one of those nameless childhood diseases that...

Multiculturalism and the dhimmi.
November 1, 2003... TWO VALUABLE lessons have been learnt from the recent controversy involving Keith Windschuttle. The first is that one should get one's facts right before venturing into print. The second is that one should not use, and abuse, history for...

Remembering Khaibar.
November 1, 2003... WHEN AMROZI BIN NURHASIN, the smiling Bali bomber, entered a Bali courtroom on the day of his sentencing, he was shouting, "Jews, remember Khaibar! The army of Muhammad is coming back to defeat you!" What was this Khaibar, and why should it be...

All at sea at Greenwich.
November 1, 2003... IT WAS ANNOUNCED in January 1999 that the British National Maritime Museum at Greenwich would be modernised. Richard Ormond, the new director, said it was old-fashioned and must change with the times. He explained in Blairspeak: "Unless we find...

Algebra.(Poem)
November 1, 2003... 1. The way we shuffle pillowtalk With what our xs did And how they're at a flywire door Taking back the kid 2. The way an x's memory dries Like liquid on the skin The way they are a souvenir You can't put in the bin ...

Taking the farm car.(Fictional Work)
November 1, 2003... TAKING THE FARM CAR There's luck in being alive. Ravenous for speed, born determined to drive, my younger brother would grin and kid me into another quick forbidden spin. Almost standing, he'd peer over the steering wheel....

Lawrence v Texas: a right to personal freedom?(Law)
November 1, 2003... ON JUNE 26, the United States Supreme Court handed down judgment in John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner v Texas, a landmark constitutional case in which the two petitioners, both of them gay men, had challenged a Texas statutory provision...

The Brush.(Poem)
November 1, 2003... THE BRUSH More hair in my brush this morning bald patches here and there like her Witch, always locked away in that "laboratory" making her magical potions Smells like a graveyard and there's...

Judicial activism is alive and well, even in retirement.
November 1, 2003... TO MARK the High Court's centenary on October 6, the print media devoted a great deal of space to the Court itself, to some of its most notable cases, and to the Chief Justices and Justices who have comprised its benches. It was interesting to...

Confronting the curse of Sir Humphrey.(Devine ... Australian politicians resist freedom of information laws)
November 1, 2003... THE MOST STIRRING sentence I have read in a newspaper for ages appeared on page 2 of the Australian on September 24 at the end of a low-key, quietly displayed but bracingly sinister article by Michael McKinnon. The sentence read: "There are...

The price of freedom--2003.(Defence)
November 1, 2003... WE APE at a watershed in our national security policy and in need of a deep sense of perspective on it. Bob Santamaria's book of essays and addresses, The Price of Freedom, first published by the Campion Press in Melbourne in 1964, provided an...

Aboriginal children and mathematics.(Education)
November 1, 2003... A CAUTION WHAT FOLLOWS mainly concerns children who are ostensibly the beneficiaries of an Aboriginal education especially shaped to meet their distinctive needs. Large numbers of children who today identify as or are classified as...

Lavender.(Poem)
November 1, 2003... i On a thin stalk a lavender bloom--coloured to suit its name. ii It even smells lavender--the lavender flower wafting. iii Lavender flower--to the eye and to the nose, ...

Whatever happened to the wasteland?(Society)
November 1, 2003... ONE END of the Melbourne suburb of Carlton is dominated by 1950s Housing Commission blocks of flats, stark, box-like structures twenty storeys high, with their design pattern infinitely repeated. At the other end of the suburb is the new...

Echoes of the past.(Film)
November 1, 2003... THERE IS A STORY that my friends at the State Library solemnly assure me is absolutely true, about a supposed researcher for a documentary who rang to ask if they had any colour film of Captain Cook. "No, there is no colour film of Captain...

His Last Pint.(Poem)
November 1, 2003... HIS LAST PINT He came into the village one last time Defying cancer by an act of will As he came into the village in his prime. He left with me as his clock began to chime Nine o'clock; swallowing a pill, He came...

Miss lonelyheart pays back.
November 1, 2003... When I was divorced by my wife and banished from what they always call the "marital home", I moved into a flat on my own. This had the advantage of cutting in half my daily journey to work; but it also signalled for all the world to see the...

The bonsai ballerina.
November 1, 2003... He moves crabwise over rocks towards me where the Indian and Southern oceans collide, the horizon jagged with energy. Fields of water smack together, foam spitting and curling, but it s sheltered in our cove. He is naked, unconcerned. He...

Half a literature.(The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature)(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature edited by Amit Chaudhuri; Picador, 2002, $23. IT'S DIFFICULT to negotiate your way through the cacophony of sound that Indian literature creates. Postmodernists like Rushdie, Mistry, Seth and...

Essential trivia.
November 1, 2003... And, Behold, a Burning Bush: An Aussie Gentile on the Holy Mount in Search of What was Written by Men in Step with God by Bill Priest; Seaview Press, 2002, $21.95. FEW BOOKS begin with a quotation from Exodus. Which may be just as well, as...

The occult and early modernism.(Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: the Case of Marcel Duchamp)(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp by John F. Moffitt; SUNY Press, 2003, about $60. THIS book is the most recent addition to the "SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions" which includes such diverse and...

The Commodious port.(Port Adelaide: Tales From a "Commodious Harbour")(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... Port Adelaide: Tales from a "Commodious Harbour" by John Couper-Smartt; South Australian Maritime Museum, 2003, $80. THE MASTER for the Environment, Dr David Kemp, recently announced that the federal government would be allocating $2.9...

A brief introduction.(Ryan)
November 1, 2003... On the evening of September 3, at a Quadrant dinner held at the American Club, Sydney, Professor Geoffrey Blainey delivered the annual lecture in memory of Sir John Latham, sometime Chief Justice of Australia. Professor Blainey was introduced...

A Widower.(Poem)
November 1, 2003... They thought to make you marry when she died; Accounts of matches came from women who Would share your life should you take one as bride, But, constant as your love for her was true, You lived alone for nearly thirty years...