![mag court](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/mag-court-1.png)
An Ordinary Australian Family
Lee Sam, dead on Friday, was buried on a fine Monday in August just days before the Great War began. I notice the event wandering through the pages of the Melbourne Argus looking for shadows of my family story, in a handful of days that marked our history. The eighty-eight-year-old Grand Master of Gee Hing, a Chinese Masonic Society, had lived over fifty years in Australia. More than a thousand people gathered outside the Lonsdale Street headquarters of the society, which was also his home, on the day of his funeral, and groups gathered along the way to watch as the funeral procession made its way to Kew Cemetery. At the head of the cortege a band playing the “Dead March” was followed by 150 of the society’s country members marching ahead of a long procession of a hundred cabs carrying more society members. At the graveside, with five or six hundred mourners gathered about, the religious ceremony was performed by two Methodist ministers. Selina, my grandmother, brought the…
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