Quadrant articles from October 2004

Quadrant archives from October 2004

The media pack and the election.(Editorial)(Editorial)
October 1, 2004... PITY THE POOR press gallery. Within the fast week of the current federal election campaign, they were running out of things to say. So they simply said the same things over and over. These were, mainly, the repetition of their own Big Lie that...

Realities of war.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: I was amused at the "musings" of Geoffrey Bewley and David Orgill (quoted by Bewley) (Letters, July-August 2004). Obviously these fellows have never been in a war. Rommel was the most admired general of both sides in the North African...

Our head or state.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: Professor Winterton's paper on the head of state (September 2004) omitted a very relevant pronouncement by the Imperial Conference of 1926 which said: The Governor-General of a Dominion is the representative of the Crown,...

Thomas Merton.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: I must give vent to my anger at John Russell's "hatchet job" (September 2004) on Thomas Merton, the most significant Christian mystic of the twentieth century. It is difficult to imagine why the article was, in fact, written: there does...

Children in detention.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: Bern Brent admits (Letters, September 2004) that he has not read The Howard Years, and perhaps it would be a good idea if he did before offering judgment on its contents. But that said, his approach to evaluating the impact of the Howard...

Dead white females?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: As a failed novelist, playwright, screenwriter, poet and basket-weaving essayist, I lack the requisite sense of irony to do anything other than write to object in the strongest possible terms to Fred Blanks' terrifying suggestion...

One falsification of many.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: Neil McDonald's tediously predictable enthusiasm for Fahrenheit 9/11 (September 2004) includes praise for its lack of "distortion". Christopher Hitchens, that rare being, a leftist capable of thought outside the Leftist Syndrome, has...

Reading aloud, and books on tape.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: Frank Devine's reflections on reading aloud (September 2004) with its intimations of domestic bliss with the former Jacqueline Magee over more than forty years made me wonder whether the former Ross Williams and I have been missing out on...

Toss them all out.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: It's so good to see that others feel the same way I do about our media ("The Slow Suicide of the Newspapers", July-August 2004). But for me their suicide can't be too quick. More and more I feel alienated from the media--that they are...

Australian NGOs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.(Foreign Affairs)
October 1, 2004... IT IS A COMMON view that when Australian non-government organisations (NGOs) intervene in overseas areas of conflict, disaster, or great deprivation, their motives are purely humanitarian. Cases do exist, however, where humanitarian programs...

The politicised science of climate change.(Science)
October 1, 2004... A COUPLE OF YEARS ago I was at a meeting organised by some of the movers and shakers of Australian science and technology who had invited various experts on greenhouse global warming to talk about the most recent report of the Intergovernmental...

Kidding Myself in Kuta, Bali: a Pantoum.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... KIDDING MYSELF IN KUTA, BALI: A PANTOUM They've hired too many actors for the scene The piles of bodies really are a laugh The wounds are so extreme that they're obscene With limbs ripped off and bodies cut in half ...

Looking back on Evatt and the split.(History)
October 1, 2004... JUST FIFTY YEARS AGO--on October 5, 1954--the alternative prime minister of Australia, Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, issued a press statement that tore his own party apart, weakened national politics for fifteen years and bitterly divided much of the...

Gippsland settlers and the Kurnai dead.
October 1, 2004... ONE OF GIPPSLAND'S federal electorates is named "McMillan" after the European explorer who founded the province. A local reconciliation group recently asked the Electoral Commission to change the name of the electorate, alleging Angus McMillan...

Damien Parer's propaganda masterpiece.
October 1, 2004... URBAN AUSTRALIANS first saw Damien Parer in that never-to-be-forgotten year of fear, 1942, the year that changed our view of the world forever, and should have changed it more. Fearful 1942 followed fast on ominous December 8 (on our, and...

Reading the Leaves.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... READING THE LEAVES Across the creek, vines of fog twine around poplar, white oak, distance dimming gray, the world grown close and older--and here my uncle's workboots dirt-clogged and dew-dark as he follows ...

Boy in a Boxcar.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... BOY IN A BOXCAR Smell of creosote, two rails, knit by crossties, stitched across the riverbank's brow, I sit in the boxcar's wide, squared mouth, legs dangling off, palms pressed flat, watch from trapped dark the...

Lament.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... LAMENT From verandah shadows her voice unfurls: Used to be words carried their weight like a wide river, without gushing. Farmers used to stand like tree trunks deep in brown paddocks, pushing back...

John Howard and the missing biographers.(Politics)
October 1, 2004... IN RECENT MONTHS, a stream of Mark Latham biographies has been published. Craig McGregor's Australian Son: Inside Mark Latham (Pluto Press) was launched on July 31. Michael Duffy's Latham and Abbott: The Lives and Rivalry of the Two Finest...

Le temps a laissie son manteau.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... LE TEMPS A LAISSIE SON MANTEAU (Translated from the French of Charles d'Orleans) The season's laid aside his shroud Of ice and sleet all shivery, And's now decked out in finery Of sunny skies without a cloud. All...

The republicans' dishonesty.(The Constitution)
October 1, 2004... THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION was drafted by Australians, approved by the Australian people, and may only be altered with the approval of the Australian people. If constitutional change requires the approval of the Australian electorate, it...

The "form and pressure" of Australian philosophy.(Philosophy & Ideas)
October 1, 2004... THIS IS THE MOST wonderful book. It is the second fine book that Jim Franklin, one of the most important scholars now working in Australia, has published. (The first was The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal, brought...

Two Prose Poems.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... TWO PROSE POEMS In the night, a guttering that overflows onto concrete makes the sound of a big dog at its drinking bowl. From where I'm lying I can see through the slant blinds the rain settle over the red fur of a motel...

Somare's Paddle.(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... SOMARE'S PADDLE Somare's paddle hung on the wall. An artefact topped by a Murik Lakes figurine. I had to return it to its owner living in Castlemaine. Somare delivered me tomatoes and other garden produce from...

The Lodger.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... THE LODGER Sometimes at night I smell toast and I know the old priest is making breakfast. He thinks I don't know he lives here rising when I sleep, a shadow shuffling round the kitchen with the lights off ...

Brigadoon in the Kimberley.(Devine)
October 1, 2004... Brigadoon, Brigadoon, Blooming under sable skies. Brigadoon, Brigadoon, There my heart forever lies. Let the world grow cold around us, Let the heavens cry above! Brigadoon, Brigadoon, In thy valley, there'll be love. THERE'S NO ESCAPING...

The rise of the dealer.(Art)
October 1, 2004... JOSEPH DUVEEN was a legendary trans-Atlantic art dealer whose career of selling paintings to the very wealthy was based on the simplest of premises: that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money. By 1910, Duveen had spent...

Nightfall.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... The street lamp is lost in halo, the path thick with almond flowers; shadows make way for my feet on the worn, stone steps. There is even a moth to surprise me turning its back, as a Bogong will, in that quiet...

Berlusconi's Italy.(Europe)
October 1, 2004... "CARISSIMO, Italy has been unstable since the Visigoths sacked Rome in 456 AD," observed Luigi Barzini Jr. "It will remain unstable indefinitely." That was more than twenty years ago. I had asked Barzini, who was a great authority on his...

Giant Asphodel.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... GIANT ASPHODEL for William Carlos Williams I wonder which parts of me that I do not know will die with you. Like my two small feet in the surf poking out of a wave. You used to tell me about it and it made...

Her Eyes.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... HER EYES There's a piece of sky the size of turning round on the spot reflected in that puddle. The branch of a tree as soft and shaky as my woman after love. People say sometimes that they'd like...

The rebel's ecstasy: bohemian and journalist Adam McCay.(Literature)
October 1, 2004... JOURNALISM, poetry and alcohol: the three are inseparable in the story of Adam Cairns McCay (1874-1947). LATE ONE AFTERNOON in 1933, a pretty seventeen-year-old girl twirled around in a new dress, admiring herself in the mirror. She looked...

Outpost.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... OUTPOST Some must have been new, dazzling like hubcaps when sun struck right, red flags, posts straight as plumb lines, though truest to memory one rust-singed, loose-anchored, a stick wedged to hold the flag half...

Pentecost.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... PENTECOST Shingles flapped and scattered off the roof like frightened chickens, rain didn't fall but slanted, bruised stained glass to a purple too dark for scripture, just hymns sung from memory, sung soft ...

Dylan Thomas.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... DYLAN THOMAS Scawmy, gray-souled November blinds the whale-road, pall draper over this ship bearing one whose name means of the ocean in a language he denied allegiance to, though his lines rang with...

The future of the short story.
October 1, 2004... COLLECTIONS of short stories are currently difficult to market. Is this because they are no longer as popular with readers as they used to be, or because publishers find it more profitable to push novels and various forms of non-fiction? The...

Coolamons of Stone.(Brief Article)(Poem)
October 1, 2004... COOLAMONS OF STONE These small depressions rubbed in the rock, these shallow coolamons of stone-women worked at them for years with seeds and songs and grindstones.

Mercy.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... MERCY Returning later with my rifle, I find that the sick kangaroo has toppled into the creek and needs no further mercy.

Screening Joan of Arc.(Film)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2004... IN NOVEMBER 1999, shortly after I'd filed a brief review of Luc Besson's The Messenger: Joan of Arc, I came across in the pages of History Today an article by Ronald F. Maxwell, The Messenger: Dumbed Down Dame--Is Poetic Licence a Licence to...

The answer is a lemon.
October 1, 2004... THOSE WITH a love of cinema--especially those of us with a lifelong affair with the flicks--would have cheered Sally Morell and her recent piece in the Melbourne Herald Sun (August 16) headlined, "Give unworthy Aussies the flick". She quoted...

Three a.m. and the Stars Were Out.(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... THREE A.M. AND THE STARS WERE OUT When the phone rings way too late for good news, just another farmer wanting me to lose half a night's sleep and drive some backcountry wash-out for miles, fix what he's botched,...

Veni.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... The sun will hardly rise in Iceland now, summer long gone, and all the four-wheel drives that peeled the Golden Circle chew on snow or gnaw at glaciers: free-ranging lives have shrunk into a hibernating ball, are wound...

The shape of things.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... THE SHAPE OF THINGS Bundanon, 2004 Triangles are rarely unsettled-- firmly based, well-balanced, focused on the light, like people with open arms & spontaneous smiles. Circles are recycled...

The Slap.
October 1, 2004... Hergesheimer has a brother. If I call him Hergesheimer. Who doesn't speak to him. Nor in writing. Not a word. A silence. Complete. Never in touch. Our Hergesheimer, for example, attains a next birthday? As though he, our Hergesheimer,...

A musician's logic.
October 1, 2004... The warm immediacy of the night pressed in and grew heavy and Raff became conscious of the sound of crickets. He eased his aim off the edge of the piano and looked down at the now useless left hand. The fingers were long and slender but were...

Saint-Simon and the Devil.(Short Story)
October 1, 2004... The Duke of Saint-Simon was in the King's supper-room, writing his memoirs in his head, when he noticed a stranger in the crowd. And such a stranger! A precieux, in gorgeous silks and satins, long, extravagantly curled black wig, startling...

Pain.(Brief Article)(Poem)(Illustration)
October 1, 2004... PAIN 1 When I wake, pain chooses the colours for my day-- one blue, one black. 2 Acutely aware I am trying not to be aware of my pain. 3 I take another two pain-killers......

The Machiavellian poetry of James Burnham.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life, by Daniel Kelly; ISI Books, 2003, $53.95. James Burnham, by Samuel Francis; Claridge Press/Newsweek Books, 2003, about $40. BROWSING THROUGH my file of James Burnham's polemics...

The new pragmatic idealists (I).(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Latham and Abbott: The Lives and Rivalry of the Two Finest Politicians of Their Generation, by Michael Duffy; Random House, 2004, $32.95. THERE HAVE BEEN two outstanding pieces of Australian political writing to appear in recent times, Don...

The new pragmatic idealists (II).
October 1, 2004... AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS usually spend their apprenticeships learning not to think beyond the prevailing orthodoxies. Mark Latham and Tony Abbott have spent most of their careers defying this and yet have risen spectacularly in their respective...

Ten-pounders and other poms.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... The English in Australia, by James Jupp; Cambridge University Press, 2004, $37.50. THE ENGLISH have contributed perhaps half the national gene pool and the basic culture, but this is the first comprehensive study of them as a distinctive...

For the sake of the colony.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1829-1850, by Kirsten McKenzie; Melbourne University Press, 2004, $34.95. THE PRIVATE LIVES of public figures have always been of interest to the voyeuristic inclinations of the public,...

Simply indispensable.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Peter Simple's Domain, by Michael Wharton; New European Publications, 2003, about $45. MICHAEL WHARTON, the London Daily Telegraph's "Peter Simple" columnist, closed the first edition of his beautiful, hilarious and moving autobiography,...

Unmentionable Papua New Guinea.(Ryan)
October 1, 2004... IN 1930, the French government spent less money on higher education than it did on buying fodder for its cavalry horses. This odd fact from long ago is not wholly irrelevant to our present concerns, because it is an example--a piquant one--of...