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A Lesson Mrs Pirate Never Absorbed
Recently, I recounted how, as a young journalist, I had been ordered to drive through a Category 4 cyclone to report for work by a boss I described as an addition to the Holy Trinity – God the Editor. Some Quadrant commenters suggested I could just have laughed down the phone and refused outright. But those were different times, Labor’s current controversial Closing the Loopholes Bill with its “right to disconnect” was as unimaginable as life on Mars. Simply put, with a mortgage and a pregnant young wife to care for, I would have been looking for a new career.
The God Editor was omnipotent, his commands to be obeyed at all costs, and I was but a mere junior reporter. But the Fourth Estate’s version of the Heavenly Trinity had some human frailties — a character flaw brought to mind by the legal imbroglio surrounding the aborted Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann trial and subsequent defamation cases. Even as a cadet journalist I knew better than Lisa ‘Mrs Pirate’ Wilkinson…
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