Horror double-feature. (Ryan).(Anzac Day, Malcolm Fraser)

ONCE UPON A TIME, city cinemas enticed patrons with the delights of "double-feature" horror movies. (Maybe they still do?) These programs had their fans, though I suspect that quite a few of the seats were warmed by the bums of people getting in out of the rain. You might watch Dreaded Dracula followed, after the briefest interval, by The Mummy? Shriek. (One such "double-bill", I recall, was promoted all over town by exhortatory posters urging, "Come along, and bring your ghoul friend!")

No mere monthly columnist can compete with that sort of high art. Yet I dare below to present a double-feature horror of my own. Spasm I is entitled "David Day Benighted"; Spasm II is called "Malcolm's Marbles Melt".

Quadrant readers are, as we know, mature, intelligent and (above all) sensitive, and are therefore likely to be offended by what follows. You have been warned: switch off now, or perhaps flip back the pages to Mr McGuinness's soothing editorial.

SPASM I

DAVID DAY, lately starring on ABC television, I played a convincing sourpuss role bad-mouthing the Anzac tradition against the background of the departure of one of the last remaining Gallipoli veterans. What credentials had Day for this broadcast exercise in tastefulness and tact? Chiefly, I suppose, his authorship of two books: Reluctant Nation: Australia and the Allied Defeat of Japan 1942-1945 and Claiming a Continent: A History of Australia, both of which I reviewed at the time of their appearance, respectively, in 1992 and 1996.

Neither volume, in my view, came within a bull's roar of the standard we should expect of an Australian historian treating great national themes. The worrying errors of fact in both books made them unreliable as works of reference; even more disturbing was their lamentable failure to engage with the true spirit of the times they describe.

Day seems not fully to have appreciated that, in the Second World War, Australia's population was a third of what it is today. We were mainly a primary-producing nation without an industrial base. Our "war effort", as we used to call our part in the world struggle against European and Asian fascism, was a proud one: no nation, in proportion to population, fielded a larger military force of its men and women in uniform.