Quadrant articles from September 2004

Quadrant archives from September 2004

Immigration and its discontents.(Editorial)(Editorial)
September 1, 2004... IMMIGRATION REMAINS one of the most sensitive subjects of public debate both in Australia and in the world, along with the factitious issue of "asylum seekers", and attracts the same kind of irrational passions and mindless prejudices. The...

"The Ward fabrication.".(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: In reply to your correspondents Max Hartwell, Elizabeth and Mark Ward, and Robin Gollan (Letters, July-August 2004), in my article (May 2004): I did NOT repeat and agree "with Vice-Chancellor Baxter's allegations". I did NOT...

Theatrical wonders.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: In Geoffrey Partington's article "Pyrrhic Victory" (June 2004), he takes issue with my "lengthy review" of the Sydney Theatre Company production of Howard Barker's play Victory. First, I am not a reviewer as Mr Partington claims. My...

Retirements at Newcastle.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: It is not often that one would dare to take issue with Sir Bruce Williams, one of the most respected and authoritative figures in Australian higher education administration. Nonetheless, his article "Managerialism and the...

Children behind barbed wire.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: As someone who spent a year and a half behind barbed wire in the Australian bush and also the son of a Theresienstadt survivor, may I contribute a view to the contretemps in your June letters pages about Holocaust language and asylum...

The strength of Mormon life.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: The recent article on Mormonism by Ray Agostini (May 2004) dwelt more on the LDS Church, its history and theology, than on Mormon culture. While the church has done some wonderful work, such as producing a fully concordanced version of the...

Paternal, or just practical?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: Russell Blackford ("Liberty and Paternalism", June 2004) asserts that "compulsory seatbelt legislation is genuinely paternalistic". I was surprised. When the legislation was introduced, I thought that it was mainly for the benefit of the...

History, national identity and guilt--collective or individual? Lessons from Germany.(Europe)
September 1, 2004... THE ISSUE of a community's or a nation's collective identity is being discussed with renewed interest around the world. This is so mainly because globalisation and growing migration draw attention to the importance of a shared image of a...

Taking responsibility.(Law)
September 1, 2004... FOR MANY YEARS now, courts throughout the common law world have awarded damages to plaintiffs without paying any regard to the concept of personal responsibility. Many of these cases are collected in websites on the internet. In a speech I...

Veronica.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... VERONICA for Anthony Cronin On her deathbed she was at first not dying but humouring you all and trying to gauge the current political situation In harrumphs that sapped her strength she swore ...

Elephant.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... ELEPHANT "a day is the length of a gnat's life: I want you for the lifetime of a big, mad animal, like an elephant" --Dylan Thomas --the last myth in a dry country: aloe, euphorbia and the wind's dark infrastructure,...

A national security election?(Defence)
September 1, 2004... FOR SOME MONTHS, commentators have been speculating that the 2004 federal election would be fought on national security issues. The continuing turmoil in Iraq and questions of the withdrawal of Australian troops, political squabbles over the US...

Maria's Garden.
September 1, 2004... MARIA'S GARDEN In between the thunderstorms you bind up tomato plants. Their leaves release sharp scents in the still air and the earth steams. Tendrils with pale flowers surround and reach to hold you lest you...

An interview with Daniel Pipes.(Interview)
September 1, 2004... DR DANIEL PIPES, director and founder of the Middle Eastern Forum, an American think-tank, is one of the world's foremost experts on the Middle East and Islam, most specifically on Islamism, and Islamist terrorism. The son of the renowned...

Perils of the postmodern pathway.(Philosophy & Ideas)
September 1, 2004... POSTMODERNISM as a system of thought is not what it used to be, it seems. Or perhaps it never was. Keith Windschuttle's 1994 book The Killing of History fired an early salvo or two at what had by then become the intellectual vehicle of choice...

Leo Strauss and the "New American Century".
September 1, 2004... FOR MOST PEOPLE, the possibility of using the words George W. Bush and philosophy in the same sentence would seem laughable. From the first days of his presidency, the US incumbent's intellect has been the stuff of comedy, a fact sometimes...

Thirteen Views of a Grey Heron.
September 1, 2004... THIRTEEN VIEWS OF A GREY HERON i Serene beside the unsettled bulrushes--standing heron. ii Is it a koan you are meditating on, grey-robed heron? iii Heron walking--each step...

Moral communities and the state: a rejoinder to Russell Blackford.
September 1, 2004... CONSTRUCTIVE and courteous debate occurs occasionally more than frequently in this country. The desire to win an argument and discredit one's opponent often produces more heat than light while it destroys the conditions conducive to continuing...

Thomas Merton, the restless Trappist.(Religion)(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2004... THOMAS MERTON, the best-known Trappist monk of all time, was accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan in Bangkok on December 10, 1968. Unknown to all but a few friends before 1948, Merton erupted onto the wider American scene in that year with...

The Loneliness of Salt.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... THE LONELINESS OF SALT Wanting the comfort of waves, my aunt looks out to sea. From inside the cocoon car she stares and stares, waiting for salt solace. She has left her cold house, her days of filing the...

Reading aloud.(Devine)
September 1, 2004... MARK LATHAM'S recommendation that we read aloud to children is too specific and limited. The world would be a better place if adults read aloud to one another. Of course, this is a view of the world seen through the prism of my own...

Borrowed Landscape.
September 1, 2004... BORROWED LANDSCAPE Paddy Maguire's Pub, near Chinatown, Sydney The trees, that do not belong to me, on the hill, that does not belong to me. This is my premise. The people in a house that grew like a mushroom. But with...

A Steam-Driven Computer.
September 1, 2004... A STEAM-DRIVEN COMPUTER Proud Lord George Byron needled his generation limping to sundry boudoirs writing measured verse revelling in languid despair pen and penis his passions Boring his way through ...

3/7/01: the lesson of John Masters, novelist.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... IT IS TOLD HOW, following his service with the 4th Prince of Wales Gurkha Regiment, JM went to New York to offer his expertise as a tour guide for trekkers in the Himalayas. In addition, he had volunteered to be the agent for a newly designed,...

18/8/01: tact and the past's intactness.(Literature)(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2004... THE PROBLEM is to imagine a bygone person or society with a justice that is sufficient to the past, not a reflector-plate of the present. To do this requires the out-of-body projections familiar to conscientious character-novelists. A...

21/8/01: exquisite timing.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... IN EDITH WHARTON'S The House of Mirth, Lily says of herself, "There's no turning back--your old self rejects you and shuts you out." Her cry of anguish to Gerty is the key to this exquisitely woven novel, and beautifully well-timed. We go...

22/8/01: character-clip: T.H., Bricklayer.(Literature)(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2004... WE HAVE HAD "Old Tom" back to cement-render the outside walls of the dining room. Massive, white haired, square-jawed, and the long face of a druid, he still hefts his barrowloads of cement, shovels, sand and lime into the mixer, lifts cement...

20/12/02: the prankster.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... MOST JOIN, some will not join, and a few experience the emotion behind both those drives in the compound emotion. This is the prankster. The impulse to play a trick is expressing the wish, "I am of you," and "I am distinct from you" in the same...

15/1/03: David Foster's the glade within the grove.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... THE NOVEL is a superb feat of organisation or perhaps--given DF's chemistry training--of blending a vivid solution. Country with city, music with machinery, the classical age with modernity, Arcadia and Utopia with rural and wilderness...

27/1/03: H.G. Wells' Tono Bungay.(Literature)(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2004... THE NOVEL takes a pre-consumerist England and anatomises the onset and progress of consumerism in a way that is acute. The entire world that advertising creates is carefully pinned back like an anatomist's specimen, revealed, its further...

6/4/03: character-clip: art and modesty.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... TODAY I WENT to the house of J to practise with the "Shieldmaidens" troupe in their Nordic costumes for our Icelandic gig at the Folk Fest. At a moment when the ladies were rehearsing on their own, J showed me his workshop and the furniture he...

12/4/03: society-clip: the assumption.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... THE DIFFICULTY in expressing an independent opinion in Australia is that, as soon as you open your mouth, people assume they are listening to an agenda rather than a viewpoint.

28/6/03: character-clip: architectonics.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... TONIGHT FOR DINNER came an Indian gentleman scholar, P. I picked P up from the Youth Hostel where his dignity seemed untroubled by his dormitory accommodation. He presented me with a copy of his book on Frank Moorhouse, and we had good...

13/8/03: character-clip: who gets a grant?(Literature)
September 1, 2004... EXCHANGING NEWS with sheepfarmer G on the phone tonight, I told him about the survey which found 600,000 Australians counted creative writing as their main leisure activity. "More than follow any single sport," I parroted my source. ...

9/11/03: character-clip: a stammer.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... AGAIN ON THE PHONE to G, we bemoaned the constraining regulations that hedge the powers of schoolteachers to be able to commit their full expressive being to the job. No touchy-touchy, no referring to country of origin, no this, no that. We...

13/11/03: character-clip: Albertines.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... ON OUR EVENING WALK tonight, Anne and I came upon our Norwegian neighbour, B, watering his garden. He showed us how one shrub had thrived and another hadn't, and allowed us to know that today was the third anniversary of the occasion his unit...

10/3/04: Chekhov coldly.(Literature)(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2004... AT THE POETRY READING a month ago, Marion H cited a remark by Chekhov to the effect, "When you wish to move the heart, write more coldly." Having recently read through the collected Chekhov short stories and four of the plays, I found this...

22/4/04: Disraeli and the art of the novel.(Literature)
September 1, 2004... IN CONINGSBY at least, the invention Disraeli shows is very much more naturally invested in the art of oratory than the art of characterisation. He is exuberant when inventing syntactical variation, crude when delineating the character of...

Whited sepulchres.(Society)
September 1, 2004... MANY ACCUSATIONS of sexual abuse, like those of rape, are false, and many are true. Famous examples of false accusation include the Salem trials in Massachusetts in 1692. Nineteen women were executed for witchcraft after false accusations by...

Who is our head of state?(The Constitution)
September 1, 2004... THE JULY-AUGUST issue of Quadrant published an edited version of Sir David Smith's submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee's inquiry into an Australian republic, in which he argued that the governor-general, not...

The Trouble.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... THE TROUBLE That was the trouble, just that, and that's what she told him. For a long time he looked at her sideways, avoiding the issue while maneuvering about the house or passing her coming and going through...

Jakarta Traffic.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... JAKARTA TRAFFIC In one moment while we stopped, a thin, curving bamboo pole wound with gold ribbon end to end soared high over the pavement, to suspend a gold palm-leaf lantern, which bobbed over our heads, there...

The haunting.(First Person)
September 1, 2004... ALL OF US are haunted by something in our childhood--an event or a person, an atmosphere or a feeling. I am haunted by a house, the house my parents bought the year I was born. It was a large, crumbling eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manor...

Bottle-Brush.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... BOTTLE-BRUSH for Emma Jones Look red, Look right, Blood dripping down my street at night! I could open my palm and find a hall full of village idiots! Crimson toughs and woody squats grouped along the...

The Live-Long Day.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... THE LIVE-LONG DAY They sit round the TV's flickering fire like hobos of their own home, stare and sleep in yellowing armchairs, two carrier bags always at their feet-- inside are the things they'll need for hospital...

Assignations.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... ASSIGNATIONS Doors of old hallways creak in the branches like creeping upstairs couples whose every movement causes the shady lighting of the sun to swing. We rug the space between our cars. The air provides...

Journo.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2004... JOURNO My desk's across from Racing. I'm Murders-Paedophiles-Falls From Grace who bellow back through a fly-screen while my pen wags across the page: I make stick figures without limbs, a foot with a snapped...

The importance of nuclear energy for Australia.(Science)
September 1, 2004... THE COMMONWEALTH government is to be complimented on its recently released energy policy document. It is pragmatic and follows the line of informed realism in its advocacy for the continuing use of Australia's conventional fuels. It is a...

Who wrote Mozart's music?(Music)
September 1, 2004... ONE OF THE MOST unrecognised, and certainly most unpunished, of all criminal cultural misdemeanours is that of deliberate, cold-blooded misattribution of artistic creations. Much of it goes back for centuries. Often it has been done...

Dark corridors.(Film)
September 1, 2004... THERE IS a delightful story David Stratton likes to tell about the great French director Bertrand Tavernier. When young Tavernier was to make his first film in the early seventies, he took the project not to some young New Ware writer but to...

Lifestyle.
September 1, 2004... LIFESTYLE In the stacked cities they dance the Narrow Kitchen barista, barista! we go to wear black. barista, barista! will you cook in your kitchen? will you drink in your suit? Will you come on the...

Mushrooms, rat poison, yabbies.(Story)(Short Story)
September 1, 2004... I was eleven years old when Jack Folsom came into my life. It seemed like any ordinary day. I came home from school, dumped my bag and headed for the yabby-hole with a string line and some bait. The yabby-hole was my favourite place because...

In Winter.
September 1, 2004... IN WINTER Winter-bare trees: thoughts on a vague sky. We walk on such leaves and the gentle lies we told those days now drift a little way and then subside. There is consolation in this...

He worked at the writer's trade: the Wound and (Broken) Bow of James T. Farrell.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, by Robert K. Landers; Encounter Books, 2004, about $50. I FOR ONE had high expectations of the Australian tour of the famous American novelist James T. Farrell (1904-79), author of...

Orphans of the Holocaust.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from Hitler's Reich, by Alan Gill; Simon & Schuster, 2004, $34.95. THIS REMARKABLE BOOK plays a set of historical variations on the heart-strings. Some are heartwarming, others heart-breaking. Many...

Hidden Hughes.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Collected Poems, by Ted Hughes, edited by Paul Keegan; Faber & Faber, 2003, $99.95. POSTHUMOUS collected poems upon a shelf can seem like a row of tombstones--a graven place fit for epitaphs that is seldom visited--each tome reiterating...

The Catholic distinction.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, by Ian Ker; Gracewing (distributed in Australia by Freedom House), 2003, about $50. IT SEEMS TIMELY to be discussing Catholic revivals. Just as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ...

The Gods' Grandson.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Martin Boyd: A Life, by Brenda Niall (second edition); Melbourne University Press, 2004, $34.95. ON HIS DEATHBED in Rome, Martin Boyd converted to Catholicism. But at his request, they buried him in Rome's English Protestant cemetery. In...

A well-wrought conspiracy.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown; Corgi Books, 2004, $19.95. IT HAS LONG BEEN a staple of fiction that conspiracy theories sell. In the modern era, we are well aware of conspiracies through such media as The X-Files and Alias on television...

Worm Farm.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... When shaking out their dinner to the worms, I only give them carefully measured scraps for what they eat is strictly on my terms. No juicy meat for them; old bread, perhaps, bean ends, corn husks, a few potato peelings, the cottage cream I left...

Problems with the truth.(Ryan)
September 1, 2004... DO YOU REMEMBER the old promotional slogan: "Bananas Are Cheap and Plentiful"? Just now there is a glut, not of nourishing bananas, but of The Truth; there seems to be a lot of it going around, like flu. This we can safely attribute to the...