Housman, Baldwin and the King.(Ryan)

FOR A COUPLE of years back in the 1970s, I contributed a column to the Australian newspaper, and then (after an interval) to the Melbourne Age. There, after some months, a new editor asked me to perform weekly, because he "just didn't fancy" fortnightly columns. I knew what he meant: in a daily newspaper, a weekly column seems to make sense, and so does a monthly one: fortnightly (though it's hard to explain) rather resembles Mr Bossom MP, the new Conservative member who took his seat in the Commons under Winston Churchill. "Curious name," rumbled Winston, when they were introduced. "Neither one thing nor the other."

After more than seven years without a single deadline missed, the Age gave me the sack: something to do, I was told, with Prime Minister Keating not being amused by something I had written.

So in September 1993 I was grateful that Quadrant's then editor, Robert Manne, picked me up from, so to speak, the journalistic gutter, and installed me where I still cling to existence as a monthly columnist.

Monthly deadlines set a problem of their own. Today is September 29, and my copy must be filed within a day or so for November. The clang of election campaigning continues to fill the air, and one can only guess at the likely shape and course of Australia's next three years. But by the time this article appears, every reader will have known the election result for several weeks. Unless he is prepared to leave certain interesting and important sorts of subjects alone, the monthly columnist must sometimes speak from a world rather different from the world in which he will be heard. Well, he can only do his best.

Numberless times over the past ten years this space has betrayed a deep attachment to the poetry and to the personality of A.E. Housman--a soft impeachment indeed, to which I readily confess.

The awfulness, the triviality of the electioneering we currently suffer seems somehow worse because it is polluting the usually genial season of spring. How apt is Housman:

 
   There's one spoiled Spring to scant our mortal lot; 
   One season ruined of our little store ...