Living the Anschluss
This extraordinary and inventive novel opens with a letter, written at Christmas 1954, from a middle-aged Australian woman resident in Vienna to her much younger half-brother, Roderick Raye, still a schoolboy in suburban Sydney. The writer, who styles herself as Phoebe Raye Krizman, has married an Austrian and has clearly come to identify herself with her husband’s nation, fully aware of the disastrous consequences of its dalliance with Nazism, yet scornful of its treatment by the Great Powers after the First World War, a repression that at least contributed to the bitter circumstances in which political extremism could thrive. Quaintly, she describes their family home in Stanmore as a “southern outpost” of Austria, a little “Liechstenstein”, a tiny state still loyal to the best values of Germanic culture. No one is ever surprised to encounter a Francophile or Italophile in one’s reading, but a Germanophile is sufficiently unusual in itself to merit the epithet…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins