Quadrant back issues from November 2006:
The new media ownership game.
Nov 01, 2006 ... THERE HAS BEEN a predictable amount of fear-mongering about the supposed impact of the changes in media ownership rules. Fear of a reduction in the diversity of media outlets, of monopolisation of markets by major players, of loss of jobs for journalists, of domination of the political ...
Stolen generation in Tasmania.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Nov 01, 2006; ... SIR: As you will know, the Tasmanian government is determined to pay compensation exclusively to a small group of people having an Aborigine in their ancestry. The basis of the payment is that these people were unfairly removed from their families and taken into the care of the state, ...
Islam and power.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Nov 01, 2006; ... SIR: I refer to recent Quadrant articles and an editorial on the subject of Islam. The most recent editorial spoke of "dhimmitude" and John Stone spoke of "taqiyya". Each article properly warns readers to beware of Islam's intended march towards domination. An article by ...
The external affairs power.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Nov 01, 2006; ... SIR: Guy Favell's response (April 2006) to my article (October 2005) on Justice Callinan and the Commonwealth's external affairs power is a farrago of absurdities. Mr Favell gets off to a bad start by saying that I relied on the dissenting judgment by Latham CJ in the Communist ...
The UN v the world.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Nov 01, 2006; ... SIR: Rosemary Righter sent a birthday card to the United Nations on its sixtieth anniversary ("Overburdened and Inert", September 2006). Her undiplomatic despatch reexamines several critical themes first surveyed in a previous book, published in 1995, being stories of five decades (Utopia ...
Political correctness in academe.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Nov 01, 2006; ... SIR: Your editorial in the current issue, cogent and thoughtful, as always, mentions the dangers associated with political correctness, which, as we know, is alive and flourishing especially in academia and the "quality" Press with no sign of any diminution in virulence. To my ...
Australia and the arc of instability.(The Pacific)
Nov 01, 2006; ... MORE THAN SEVEN years ago, as the United Nations was organising its hasty independence ballot in East Timor, it was clear to sceptics that the ballot would solve nothing and that an independent East Timor would face continuing low-level civil strife. Today, the so-called independent ...
Carol's Eggs.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Carol's Eggs Each girl child contains her eggs.Carol keeps under her bedone dozen in a carton, safefrom plundering friends and flatmates. Eggs make a meal, a girl is eggs.Poached or scrambled, eggs are quick.In the dark, their yolks like eyes ...
Mendicancy or membership? The South Pacific and the world community.
Nov 01, 2006; ... EVEN THE REMOTEST LANDS are now touched by modernity and virtually everyone is now in contact with far-distant places thanks to modern transport and communications technology, as well as the great global mobility of people, capital, enterprises, information and products. Some ...
A tribute to Quadrant.(Tribute)(Speech)
Nov 01, 2006 ... I'M FINALLY SUCCUMBING to Peter Garrett's advice, and it's great to embrace an evening of culture and poetry and all of that, after overdosing on my philistine sporting pursuits over the weekend from one side of the country to the other. But it really is an enormous pleasure for ...
Untitled.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> UNTITLED when I lost youmy father-in-law planted a shrub.viburnum, he said.it'll flower this time every year. when I lost youmy friend sent me a shawl.pashmina, she said.let it hug you sometimes. ...
Laura to Petrarch.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> LAURA TO PETRARCH You saw me once at church--or so you said,among the many things you said of mewithout my knowledge or consent. The "we"which you created in your poet's headbegan amid the Passion: Jesus bledas you amused yourself on bended kneeby ...
Mulch.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> MULCH It only takes a week for them to die:the leaves on our old fig tree in the yard.Life is mostly clinging; getting bybut dying: it just doesn't seem that hard. The leaves on our old fig tree in the yard:all green; all gold; all carcasses in days ....
Fifty years in the front line.(History)(Quadrant)(Speech)
Nov 01, 2006 ... QUADRANT FIRST fetched breath, fifty years back, in the eastern fringe of what was then a bohemian or arts quarter of Sydney. It ran from the Con across to The Rocks, from Hunter Street down to the Quay. Norman Lindsay used to have a studio in Bridge Street. Nearby were Bryant's Playhouse, ...
The end of the Aboriginal stockman.
Nov 01, 2006; ... FIRST LET ME ACKNOWLEDGE that it is more than sixteen years since I have been involved with Aborigines. However, I have maintained my interest and I am a member of the Bennelong Society. Today I am not trying to solve any problems; I am giving you the history of the Native Wage Case and ...
The Hunted.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> THE HUNTED Slowly, quietly, we creep up the bank,Crouching down as we near the top,To stay out of sight. I have Dad's Holloway & Naughton,An English beauty of a gun,Double barrelled, side by side. The tight choke is improbable for birds,...
Searching for the year dot.(human evolution)
Nov 01, 2006; ... LONG, LONG AGO, before the Tampa incident, the Dismissal and even the First Fleet and Captain Cook, there was the Year Dot. After millennia of haze, that year has now been fairly confidently established as about 50,000 years ago. This was when the first modern humans crossed out of the ...
Democracy and the thin veneer of civilisation.(Religion)
Nov 01, 2006; ... THE GROWING SUSPICION with which nineteenth-century thinkers came to regard religion led to it being treated as a form of ideology. But over the course of the twentieth century it became clear that sometimes it is more illuminating to treat ideology as a form of religion. The work of ...
Posthumous Poem.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> POSTHUMOUS POEM Gone, the insistent clamourof the world. All gone-thespin, the toil,the hurry, the worry. All I'm left with is silence-thebest ...
News of Indonesia.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> NEWS OF INDONESIA The light hits the slatted blindand comes into the room in stripes,bars of sunlightcross the daily paper on my desk.My Indonesian studentcasts an interrupted shadowover the headlineand his ...
As Country was Slow.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> AS COUNTRY WAS SLOW for Peter Our new motorwayis a cross-country fortand we reinforcementsspeed between earthworkswater-sumps and counterscarps,breaking out on wide glimpses,flying the overpasses-- Little paper lanternsmarch up and ...
Sandwich.(Poem)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> SANDWICH abuildingwith...
Oooh Oooh Ah Ah.(Poem)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> OOOH OOOH AH AH kookaburras ...
The plasticine managers.(Philosophy & Ideas)
Nov 01, 2006; ... IN A SMALL TOWN not far from where I live is a rather unusual monument. It is a water-metering device known as the Dethridge Wheel. For anyone who has travelled through the irrigation districts of south=eastern Australia, such wheels are a common sight. Every farm has such a meter on its ...
Boys' Stuff.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006 ... <Pre> BOYS' STUFF On sheets of A4 he drawsa rocket, a transformer, a car with speedy strokes and speedy wheels.The rocket has a haze of flare that bums up the paper atmosphere.The rocket--Soviet parade-size rumbles past admiring linesand ...
A Blue Satin Suit With A Peplum.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> A BLUE SATIN SUIT WITH A PEPLUM What a pilgrimage to find it.Harvey Nichols, Marks & Sparks, Dorothy Perkins in main streets and side streetssmall shops and emporiums in search of something for my petite daughtersomething ephemeral (this season's ...
The toxic lure of fleet street.(Devine)
Nov 01, 2006; ... IF I HAD MADE IT in Fleet Street, I would have missed out on a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, in my own chauffeured limousine, with Dorothy Kilgallen, a nubile columnist from the New York Journal American sitting in my lap. That's something to think about. A touch of Fleet ...
At the Taj Mahal.(Poem)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> AT THE TAJ MAHAL Krishna stopped the car. "See those gates?On the other side are rickshaws,you must take one to the Taj.Please return in an hour, beforeit gets too dark. I must not linger,sir, mum, this is a bad place."So we saw. A thousand grubby ...
How the opposition makes a difference.(Politics)
Nov 01, 2006; ... HAVING STUDIED political science since 1995, culminating in my completion of a PhD during 2005, I remain mystified by a major generalisation made in Australia's political science literature that there are no longer significant policy differences between Australia's two major political ...
Bread Line.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> BREAD LINE Sarajevo Symphony cellist Vedran Smajlovic plays Albinoni's Adagio for victims of the Serb siege of the city, September 1992 I Along a wall cut crumbling as a loaf,brick dust and mortar a blessing of flouron our shoulders, we ...
Ultra-violet: Exodus 8: 16-19.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> ULTRA-VIOLET Exodus 8: 16-19 Our living room windowswere filled with hearth orangeor screen-saver green,the blue of our wide-screens. Now they're trapped with blacklightas the sun drags the nightdown upon itself. Gnatsare finding their ...
A brief history of change.(Society)
Nov 01, 2006; ... IT'S A GOOD MENTAL EXERCISE, I think, to take yourself back to a particular decade, and see what you can remember of it. It's said of the 1960s that if you can remember them, you probably weren't there. But the 1970s were different--less innocent, more outrageous and definitely ...
Fatal Familial Insomnia.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA My family has a secretaside the usual agog whispers of black sheepand the black dog it is the secret of insomniathat leads to the graveno-one knows when it will fall neither daughters nor sons are sparedeyes will ...
Hop.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Hop The grasshopperbeats the shutter ... Aha, but lookthe pixels caught the blur ...
Stealing Chairs.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> Stealing Chairs Stealing chairsfrom Lygon Street restaurantsis an art. You learn it at college;to sidle up to the prizeand stride away as if it was stuckto the small of your back. Dave had four tucked away in his room:Il Primo, Tiamo,...
The future of water.(Environment)
Nov 01, 2006; ... READY ACCESS to both fresh water and energy will become an increasingly important consideration for communities and nations in a likely turbulent twenty-first century undergoing climate change. In Australia the potential availability of around 4500 kilolitres of stored water per person has ...
At A Dinner Party In Melbourne.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> AT A DINNER PARTY IN MELBOURNE I ducked out the back, and lit up with joy,A Cuban escape from the couples inside:They're happy, they're smiling, they're chattingAnd touching, they're laughing and planning.The fifth wheel, the odd man, I smoke out the back. ...
The Cry Of A Crow In Camberwell.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> THE CRY OF A CROW IN CAMBERWELL Voice of heat-shimmer and dust,Of dry dams, of dead lambs,Of fences decaying with rust. Of eyes plucked from corpses,Of work cast adriftIn an ocean of grit, dirt and ...
A large crow in the doomed saloon.(Music)(spell checking manuscripts)
Nov 01, 2006; ... MY ADMIRATION for the vanishing profession of humans who check written copy before it reaches official print is, within certain limits, unbounded. They are being made extinct by such unpredictable inventions as spellcheck, but they have been invaluable though never infallible. Here are ...
A Lance for hire: 400 years of Don Quixote.(Literature)
Nov 01, 2006; ... MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO called it "the Spanish Bible"; Don Quixote may not be holy writ, but like all great literature it describes us. Cervantes steps out of Spain when its golden age had waned so rapidly as to seem "no more than an illusion" and tarries in ours. We, on the other hand, remain ...
Sun Protection Factor.(Poem)(Brief article)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> SUN PROTECTION FACTOR Seasons of terrible sunburnthe red imprint, the silent brandingan orange-haired boy can be brutalisedby the dehydrating, headache-making summerthrobbing pain that hums as insistently as the cicadaslike the horsey-bite slap on a ...
The Flying Inn reconsidered.
Nov 01, 2006; ... WHEN I WAS A CHILD going through my late father's library, my maternal grandfather pointed out an old copy of G.K. Chesterton's The Flying Inn, published in 1914, and said: "That's a good story!" I wish now that Grandfather had lived long enough for me to talk to him about many things. I ...
Two kinds of artistry.(Film)
Nov 01, 2006; ... JEAN RENOIR (1894-1979) has a special place in the carts of film critics. He is the only great director--possibly the only director--to have dedicated a masterpiece to the memory of a film critic. To be sure the circumstances were unique. The film was the restoration of Rules of the Game ...
Sven Nykvist 1922-2006.(In memoriam)
Nov 01, 2006; ... FEW, VERY FEW, movie cameramen achieve the celebrity of actors and directors, a fact that is perhaps a little surprising as so many still photographers have achieved world fame--Brassai, Steiglitz, Doisneau, Adams, Cazneaux, Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Curtis, Leibovitz--the list goes ...
But Isn't.(Poem)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> BUT ISN'T Six weeks: there's hair again, a man's stubble,Prison-tough, it's almost voguish,The style of those normally denied style.Stranded there her glasses are like something leftOn a park seat--silly out of use even comical.A magazine, slipped from ...
Her Father's eyes.
Nov 01, 2006; ... Truths emerge amongst those of us who are destined to live in old city hotels. One of these is that you rarely get to know why a man has arrived from nowhere one day with a couple of suitcases. Another is that you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a man's suffering without him realising ...
Cold War blues: with one eye on Baghdad.(The Cold War, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite)(Book review)
Nov 01, 2006; ... The Cold War, by John Lewis Gaddis; Allen Lane, 2006, $32.95. The Mitrokhin Archive II, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin; Allen Lane, 2005, $59.95. Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite, by Kenneth Gee; Desert Pea Press, 2006, $29.95. ...
Notes towards a new renaissance.(Martin Fitzgerald)(James Franklin)(Alan Barcan)(Book review)
Nov 01, 2006; ... Postmodernism in Education, by Alan Barcan, Martin Fitzgerald, James Franklin and Barry Spurr; Warrane College Monograph No. 11, Warrane College, University of NSW, 2006. I FIRST CAME FACE TO FACE with postmodernism eight years ago when I was studying for a Diploma of Education ...
From under love's table.(Book review)
Nov 01, 2006; ... Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, by Sharon Olds; Random House, 2004, $34.95. SHARON OLDS (born 1942) is an American poet who has received many honours in her own country; most recently, in 1998-2002 she was the incumbent of the New York State poet laureateship. Strike ...
Thank God for eccentrics.(Book review)
Nov 01, 2006; ... The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, by Byron Rogers; Aurum, 2006, $49.95. The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L. Carr, by Byron Rogers; Aurum, 2004, $24.95. R.S. THOMAS, by the time he died in 2000, was probably the pre-eminent poet in Britain. He ...
Roaring through life.
Nov 01, 2006; ... WE JOURNALISTS just have to face it: our place is well down upon the bottom rungs of the literary ladder. The dizzy higher levels belong to novelists, biographers, short-story writers, essayists, critics and makers of belles lettres--you know what I mean: serious writers. Opinion polls ...
Discretion.(Poem)
Nov 01, 2006; ... <Pre> DISCRETION In the morning, you said we'd have to forget it.I thought your repentance did you creditbut our sin felt so good, I couldn't regret it.Some things we never get to say. When, later, you'd bring your wife over and flirtIt felt like you ...