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We’ll Pay in Pain When the Bill Comes Due
I was born in the Great Depression. “Depression Babies” they called us. Our parents were so proud. At the price of their own deprivations, they managed to rear us as healthy young Australians in a time of terrible hardship. I remember almost nothing. But as a toddler I saw able-bodied men, reduced to begging swaggies, coming to our door to ask for food. I found them frightening, but what really was frightening was invisible: they had lost control of their lives.
It is a great surprise to find that nearly 90 years later, I may well depart, not in the comfortable dotage I had saved all my life for, but in the next Depression. Unlike the ’30s, this one has been engineered by a government that succumbed to a panicky fear of death. It has sub-contracted its decision-making to panels of unelected doctors who have abandoned common sense in subservience to the cult of “modelling”. In short, the 21st century’s looming Depression has been artificially induced, not inherited….
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