![mountain man II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/mountain-man-II.png)
Of Skinks, Skunks and Doing a Bunk
It was a beautiful spring day, such as to make one almost glad to be alive, and my wife and I walked up to the top of The Rock, a 330-foot sandstone bluff above the river which runs through our town. Amazingly in these accident-conscious times, when safety is next to godliness, if not the whole of godliness itself, there were no railings and no warnings that falling from such a height was not good for the health.
Whenever I go up there, I think of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Of course, the English countryside is very tame by comparison with the Australian, and the sense of space is very different. On this occasion, reaching the top, we found two youths drinking beer from cans and playing rap music loud enough to drown out the song of the spring-awakened birds. How much I would have preferred to find the muslin-clad girls of Picnic, or even Miss McCraw, the angular teacher of mathematics who, like the three girls, went missing on the St Valentine’s Day expedition to Hanging Rock…
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