Quadrant articles from October 2003

Quadrant archives from October 2003

Taxation, charities and religion.(Editorial)
October 1, 2003... The Costello brothers seem to be suffering from a bad case of sibling rivalry--one of them, at least. The Rev. Tim Costello, the Baptist minister, seems to have an obsession with criticising his younger (by two years) and more famous brother...

Sterling and stability.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: While one may agree with everything in Professor Flint's article (September 2003), he might have included another element in the "Anglosphere" that contributed to the progress of Australia: the price stability implicit in the...

Menzies and art.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: Both the articles on Mary Alice Evatt (September 2003) refer briefly to my parents, Sir Robert and Dame Pattie Menzies. May I make one or two brief comments? The comments my father made on the French paintings in 1939 were those of an...

Lines by Brennan.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: A reader of Michael Kirby's piece (September 2003) might have received the impression that the following lines, contained in a letter (or other communication) from H.V. Evatt to his wife Mary Alice, were composed by Evatt himself: ...

Letters pages.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: May I, in passing to Frank Devine's timely criticism of the quality of the letters pages of our daily blatts (June 2003), express the view that Adam Cobb's article on our defence policy in the same issue was the most penetrating analysis I...

Jozef Tiso and Slovakia.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: John Russell gives a lengthy description of the slow development for religious freedom in the Catholic Church (July-August 2003), culminating in the Vatican II approval of the Declaration on Religious Freedom and eventual rehabilitation of...

Hot seat.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: Richard Woolcott in his letter (September 2003) about my review of his book (June 2003) says rather grandly, "HarperCollins and I would like the sloppy first sentence corrected. The correct title is The Hot Seat: Reflections on Diplomacy...

Metric perils.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: Is Peter Ryan's old used envelope really 1.4 by 1.0 metres (September 2003) or is this yet another case of journalists getting the decimal point in the wrong place? I presume the numbers referred to were really millimetres, which would...

A Latin mistake.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: Whether the error lies with Owen Dixon, Philip Ayres, the Hon. J.J. Spigelman, or is a Quadrant "typo", I feel it should be pointed out that Horace wrote "Credat Iudaens Apella...", not "Credate..." (July-August 2003, page 46). ...

Knightley and Iraq.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: Certainly in my article (July-August 2003) I take Phillip Knightley "as an authority for the allegation that the Pentagon murdered journalists in the recent Gulf War", as Hal Colebatch states (Letters, September 2003). But only after I'd...

Vice-regal Republicans.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... SIR: A poll taken by Hohart's Southern Cross television following Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon's recommendation of Richard Butler as governor-designate found 83 per cent against the appointment. Alan Ramsey referred to the "gall" of a...

Whitewash confirms the Fabrication of Aboriginal History.(History)
October 1, 2003... THE FIRST VOLUME of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History makes three main points. First, there was no genocide in Tasmania. Second, there was nothing that deserved the label of frontier warfare either. Third, those historians who have claimed...

Plum jam.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... PLUM JAM We hit the ground when the shells hit peaks as high as any at Bald Hills. We do good work here, Mother. By day we chase the enemy back four trenches; by night they send us down to the sea. Between...

Disease--the real invader.(Invisible Invaders by Judy Campbell)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... "MUMMY, what happened to all the Aborigines?" I asked, long, long ago. "They got sick and died," she replied. And, allowing for a seven-year-old's need for simplicity, she was right. There is not a lot of disagreement about this. An Aboriginal...

Inscription on a Tombstone.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... INSCRIPTION ON A TOMBSTONE Wasn't afraid to growl nor to laugh. Smiled with his eyes mostly, was never arch. Seldom fell foul of decent people for long. Hoped for the best but didn't bank on it. ...

Too subtle.
October 1, 2003... TOO SUBTLE Whenever you're told something's too complicated, that it's too subtle for them, tell them the Eskimos have twenty-six words for snow.

Bumbles.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... BUMBLES Nothing pleases the big bumble bees busy and bee-loud in the tree outside my kitchen window more than the yellow flowers that they snuggle up to and joggle, dithering ...

Bias at the National Museum.
October 1, 2003... TWO AND A HALF years after its opening, and in the wake of an insightful review of its operations and the content of its exhibitions by a review panel led by La Trobe University's John Carroll, one has a sense that the winds of change are...

Last Love.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... LAST LOVE Kathleen Olander, eighteen years of age, first meets John Ruskin in 1857 when he is already an old man, seriously impaired by both physical and mental illness. I want this winter to write poems after Wordsworth; ...

America and the envy of the passive.(Foreign Affairs)
October 1, 2003... IT IS NOW 140 years since John Stuart Mill's Considerations on Representative Government was published. It has remained relevant ever since to the problems facing civilisation; today its relevance to the world in general is greater than ever,...

No Fact is a Bare Fact.
October 1, 2003... NO FACT IS A BARE FACT Most are dressed in thermal layers and some are blessed with Turkish socks. Take this rib-cage fire--it's gussied up in ancient finery, an orthodox fever of the...

Camera Obscura.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... CAMERA OBSCURA Some trick that brings the outside in yet turns the real world on its head, as--in our heads--the world outside is what we heard not what was said.

Distraction.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... DISTRACTION So why do I feel it's wasteful to be watching in the autumn sun a swallow preening its tail on a weathered footbridge rail?

Words for Windows 2003?(Education)
October 1, 2003... IT SEEMS the Classics are in. Ancient Greek and Roman masterpieces are everywhere: in the last few months Sydney has seen live productions of Euripides' Women of Troy and Alkestis, Sophocles' Antigone (in Greek) and Oedipus the King, a modern...

Lady in the Lake.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... LADY IN THE LAKE A forest of cars held up at the lights in all the colours of autumn greens and reds and russets and murky whites contains at its centre a polished black Porsche, its surface of gleaming steel and...

On the death of Hansonism.(Politics)
October 1, 2003... PAULINE HANSON'S three-year prison stint for electoral fraud may well spell the death of her populist One Nation political party, but is Hansonism, as a political force, alive and well in John Howard's nation? Many Australians have remarked...

On a proposed bill of rights.(Law)
October 1, 2003... THE MOVEMENT towards the introduction of a bill of rights in the Australian Capital Territory is gaining momentum. In April 2002 the Chief Minister and Attorney-General, Jon Stanhope, appointed an ACT Bill of Rights Consultative Committee to...

The Dissolution of a Fox.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... THE DISSOLUTION OF A FOX For an instant the perfect grass-framed dead body of a fox, stretched but as if still running in its sleep, red-brown perfection of fur, pointed ears, mouth agape with effort. Then...

The world of Precious Ramotswe.(Devine)
October 1, 2003... Fine fellows, cannibals--in their place. They were men one could work with and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo meat which went rotten, and made the...

Science in trouble.(Science)
October 1, 2003... C.P. SNOW gave his "two cultures" lecture at a time in the late 1950s which was probably the peak of the reputation and influence of science. The accelerating growth in expenditure on research was at its most obvious. The quality of the...

Are we out of aliens' reach?
October 1, 2003... WRITING IN the Australian recently, astronomer Seth Shostak, visiting Australia for a SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) conference, stated that we should "at least try to make contact if extra-terrestrials exist". His article...

Sisyphus and the meaning of live.(Philosophy & Ideas)
October 1, 2003... IS LIFE MEANINGFUL? IS it worth living? In his celebrated essay "The Myth of Sisyphus (originally written in French, 1942), Albert Camus describes suicide as the "one truly serious problem of philosophy, and sees the question of whether life is...

Sinking Ship.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... SINKING SHIP She could still see the blood soaking through the thick fabric The red coat like camouflage though the blood's hue was redder. As she sat on the cold hard seat, she could feel the warm spread...

The eyes of the icon.(First Person)
October 1, 2003... In these films [Signs and We were Soldiers], but especially in a new movie, a monumentally risky project called The Passion, which he co-wrote and is currently directing in and around Rome, [Mel] Gibson appears increasingly driven to express a...

Laughter and misfortune--a paradox.
October 1, 2003... THERE APPEARED in Smiths Weekly, in 1933, a drawing by Stan Cross which was destined to become famous and which remains one of the best known of all Australian cartoons. It depicts a construction worker hanging desperately from a steel girder...

Potato Country.(Fictional Work)
October 1, 2003... POTATO COUNTRY Spring rain left dams full as bellies after chips for tea; summer pumps a fun-fair of fire-hose pressure over paddocks, the whirligigs are high, hit sky and soak a green crowd. Fields are fanned cooler than...

The truth about Hopkinson.(Poem)
October 1, 2003... THE TRUTH ABOUT HOPKINSON You can always get a body if you know just where to go. There's a body in the lobby and it's sadly apropos The olfactory discomfort will indubitably grow While the weather's like the weather on the...

Elsewhere with equipoise: six poets.(Literature)
October 1, 2003... I'LL TAKE THESE six poets in no special order...... And in describing the poems of Matthew Sweeney I'll begin elsewhere, because the tension entailed in the phrase, "being elsewhere", is apt for the character of Sweeney's work. Years ago...

To my parents on the death of their son.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... After his body had been removed from the house in the zippered bag you did not look at like a crime scene on the small screen had somebody left the television on? You felt like the watchers of a foreign grief, that poor mother and father your...

Two masterpieces on DVD.(Film)
October 1, 2003... WHEN MARTIN SCORSESE'S Gangs of New York was released earlier this year, critics freely acknowledged the veteran director's mastery of his medium, yet they seemed alienated by the film's dark story of revenge set against the gang warfare of...

Hector triumphant.
October 1, 2003... "Hello, I'm Lucasta, I've come to sort out your books." The man in the heavy pinstriped suit on the doorstep looked puzzled. He peered at her through his thick glasses and then looked past her at the plane trees in the square as though the...

The prodigious Connop Thirlwall.(Ryan)(Biography)
October 1, 2003... THIS HAS BEEN a dull, wet, bleak and dispiriting week in Victoria. So it might seem strange that I have selected for my "fill-in-a-few-spare-moments" reading a book entitled Primitiae; or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral...

Smoke Messages.
October 1, 2003... SMOKE MESSAGES Even here the sky wears a mask of whipped clouds, stale smoke trailing from the distant khaki of Mumbulla. Where the ocean is the sky a cloak of wispy grey shrouds the skyline. Tendrils of silver...