![swift small](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/swift-small.png)
Taylor Swift and Oh So Sure
The singer-songwriter Paul McCartney (CH, MBE) recently toured Australia, stopping off in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney (two nights), Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and even Newcastle. Younger Quadrant readers may remember “Macca” (not to be confused with Macca’s) as a member of a long-haired skiffle band from Liverpool that enjoyed some passing success in the 1960s before its members went on to pursue even more successful solo careers. By all accounts, the eighty-one-year-old Macca is still sprightly (I think that’s the right word for an octogenarian rocker), still popular, and still magnificently long-maned. He ploughed through thirty-nine songs in his Sydney set, starting with “Can’t Buy Me Love” and ending with “The End”, a fifteen-word ditty that just pips William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” for teenage memorisability.
Sir Macca played to sold-out crowds numbering in the tens of thousands, then travelled onward to play even bigger…
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