Thirty years in their teens. (Letters).

SIR: I hope that Clive James, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Peter Carey, Richard Neville, Tom Keneally, Robert Manne, Robert Hughes, Anne Summers, David Williamson, Peter Porter, Barry Oakley, Hillary McPhee, Robyn Nevin and every other self-proclaimed "artist" and "intellectual" of the last three decades can read. With luck, your editorial (June 2001) on bias in the arts and literature might have embarrassed the whole futile pack of `em into shutting up at last, and slinking away to enjoy the unparallelled material comfort they've arranged for themselves over the course of their ruthless thirty-year colonisation of creative opportunity. Only then will my generation be able to sweep the decks clean, and have a go at knocking up work that speaks to and for all humanity, rather than merely that small, symbiotic gang whose greying members still get exercised (one way or t'other) whenever His Goughness clambers upright to sprinkle a few more superannuated pearls before the intelligentsia running this dusty joint. The truth is, all you Flower Power imposters have had more than a fair chance, and you've all completely, thoroughly stuffed it up.

For all its noise, the Boomer generation (comprising actual Boomers and their slightly older "Icons") has been one of the most creatively sterile of all time. In sheer volume, more "art" and "argument" has been churned out since 1968 than in any other period in history, yet almost none of it will retain any relevance once the last of the Summer of Love dinosaurs finally carks it. Rendered (at last!) unable to go on assuring the world just how brilliant they all are, their collective output will stand revealed as so much farting-in-church. One of the Great Irrefutable Proofs that God is not merely alive and ...