Celebrating Quadrant

 Keith Windschuttle: To Those Who Have Made Quadrant Possible

Prime Minister Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister John Howard, chair of the Quadrant board, Elizabeth Prior Jonson, ladies, gentlemen and friends: It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome you all to this function to celebrate the 500th edition of Quadrant. And I’m sure I speak for everyone here tonight when I say it is a particular pleasure just to be able to say the words “Prime Minister Tony Abbott”. What a great campaign and what a great victory!

We chose this venue tonight partly because it’s such a beautiful site but also because it is right in the middle of Sydney Harbour, which has long been Australia’s main connector to the rest of the world and hence to the global free trade in both goods and ideas that has made our country what it is. Quadrant’s first office in 1956 was at Circular Quay and today we are still on the harbour at White Bay, an entirely fitting location for a magazine with our point of view.

Quadrant editors are like the fathers in the ads for Swiss watches—you never really own anything, you just nurture it for a while before passing it on to the next generation. And tonight we have some people here who have done a lot of the nurturing of many of the 500 editions in our past. I’d like to particularly acknowledge Sam Lipski, who was editor in 1976. Also Lee Shrubb, who was co-editor from 1978 to 1981. The longest-standing editor is of course Peter Coleman, who apart from the periods when Sam and Lee took over the helm, was editor or co-editor from 1967 to 1989. Peter’s long editorship even included part of the time when he was leader of the opposition in the New South Wales parliament, and the member for Wentworth in the Australian parliament. Across this period, Peter shouldered most of the responsibility for keeping the magazine alive. Without him, it would not be here today.

Quadrant is not just a magazine. It has become over the course of its 500 editions one of Australia’s important cultural institutions, an essential part of the cultural infrastructure that defends political and cultural freedom. We are far from being alone in this, of course, and I’m very pleased that tonight we have a number of people from organisations with similar aims among our guests. I’d especially like to welcome Greg and Jenny Lindsay from the Centre for Independent Studies, Gerard and Anne Henderson from the Sydney Institute and John Roskam, James Paterson and Alan Moran from that great Melbourne organisation, the Institute of Public Affairs.

I’d also like to acknowledge the presence tonight of members of the Quadrant staff who’ve been contributing to the magazine a lot longer than I have. Les Murray has been the literary editor since 1990, which means he’s been involved in 240 of the magazine’s 500 editions. Over all that time, Les has been responsible for the one quarter of the magazine devoted to poetry, short fiction and literary criticism, which amounts to a total of around 6000 pages of copy, some of his own but mostly the writings of other people. It is widely acknowledged today that Les is Australia’s greatest living poet but what we should also recognise is that, through his work for Quadrant, he is probably Australia’s most prolific poetry anthologist as well.

Our deputy editor, George Thomas, has been with the magazine since 1992. Over his twenty years with the magazine, he has copy-edited and done the layout for more than 20,000 pages, another truly monumental effort. The high quality of his sub-editing—measured best by the very few complaints we ever get about typos, grammatical infelicities and factual howlers—shows George is a true master of the art.

In 2008 we started Quadrant Online to provide not merely an online version of the magazine, but a site for news and commentary on a daily basis. Its first editor Michael Connor put the site on the map by generating traffic of 1.5 million page views a year. Twelve months ago Roger Franklin took over the job and has boosted it even further. For the twelve months to September 2013, we recorded 1.9 million page views, from no less than 354,000 unique visitors. In other words, Quadrant Online has greatly expanded the people we reach. Each month we print 8000 copies of the magazine and sell between 5500 and 7500 copies per month, giving us a readership of about 15,000 to 20,000 people. So the internet, which attracts more than ten times that number of unique readers, has been very good for us. I’m not one of those who think that print publishing is on its last legs and I’m sure that the printed version of Quadrant will outlast my lifetime, but the success of the online version means that, as long as there are people prepared to edit and write for it, Quadrant can survive as far as anyone can see—I hope until at least the 1000th edition.

I want to particularly thank the many people, and many of you here tonight, who donated the funds in 2008 to allow us to set up Quadrant Online. We have spent the last twelve months on a project not only to restructure the website to extend its reach further by making it more usable by portable media such as iPad and iPhone, but also to merge it with another project that we’ve been working on since 2008, that is, to electronically scan the entire 500 back editions and put them online. A few months ago we set a firm deadline to finish both projects in time for tonight, and I’m pleased to be able to announce here that we did it—yesterday. When you go home tonight, please log onto Quadrant Online. If you are a subscriber, either a regular, an online only or a Premium subscriber, you will be able to access free any of the editions in our archive, all the way back to 1956. This was such a big job that when our tech people uploaded the archive onto the website a week ago, it took their computers more than three days, uploading twenty-four hours a day, to complete. Anyway, it is now done. You will probably find a few glitches in the new site here and there, but I can assure you they are only temporary. We now have a platform that allows Quadrant to survive virtually forever.

When I became editor in 2008 I commissioned a number of people to write a series of articles called “How Good was Howard?” They were a series of evaluations of the government led by John Howard from 1996 to 2007, and of its place in Australian history. Our intention was to eventually collate the articles and publish them as a book, which we did in 2010 under the title The Howard Era. I asked John Stone to write the first article and to give a general assessment of the Prime Minister’s overall track record. John did this, and he included a sentence that generated the main headline of our edition for March 2008: “Howard: Australia’s Greatest Prime Minister”. Those who know John Stone will know that this was not a phrase written lightly. He compared John Howard to the other main contender for the title, Robert Menzies, and said the comparison was very difficult to make but, despite the different circumstances faced by each man, there it was. Being John Stone, up to half the article was a list of Mr Howard’s flaws and failings—but the other half was fulsome praise. He concluded by saying “The overall verdict is in, my opinion, undeniable … Having come to office at a time when Australians were consumed by false debates about ‘national identity’ and two ill-informed High Court judges had spoken about our ‘history of undeniable shame’, Howard, like Thatcher and Reagan, gave us back our sense of pride in being Australian.”

Mr Howard is a long-standing contributor to Quadrant magazine. The earliest one I’ve been able to find was in 1984. It was the lead article in our April edition and was a long review of Paul Kelly’s book The Hawke Ascendancy. His most recent article was a trenchant, well argued case that the Gillard government’s national curriculum slanders our history, which appeared in our December 2012 edition. In 2010 I also persuaded him to write a review of Paul Kelly’s book The March of the Patriots, which he generously agreed to do, despite the fact it interrupted the writing of his autobiography, Lazarus Rising, which has subsequently sold more than 100,000 copies, making it the best-selling political autobiography in Australian history. Mr Howard is now writing another book on Australian history but once again has generously taken time out from his labours to come to this function to address us tonight.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming John Howard.

 

John Howard: The Importance of the Contest for Ideas

Thank you very much, Keith.

Prime Minister! There is a certain spon­taneity about that utterance that has been absent when I politely but properly used it over the last six years.

It is a real delight to share this very important occasion with a lot of good friends who’ve fought the good fight in the cause of freedom and the defence of the true history of this country, and very importantly have fought the good fight for the preservation of the great values of Western civilisation.

Quadrant was launched, if I recall correctly, in 1956. That was the year that I did the Leaving Certificate—for the younger people in the audience, that was the forerunner of the Higher School Certificate in New South Wales. I remember doing the Leaving under the shadow of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which was a brutal illustration of the tyranny of Soviet imperialism, and of course Quadrant was founded more than anything else to fight the cause of Western democracy against Soviet imperialism. As someone who was only seventeen at the time it was founded, I want to pay tribute to the contribution of the people who put that magazine together.

We owe an enormous debt to the people who played in their own ways a major role in the destruction of Soviet communism and the ultimate triumph in 1989 of Western liberal democracy against the command-economy philosophy of the Soviet Union. It remains the single most transforming event of the world in political terms since the Second World War. One of the most remarkable things about it, and something that should never be forgotten, is that it was only at the end that a lot of people, who now look back with pride and talk about their role in bringing about the end of communism, finally climbed on board. You can all remember the moral equivalence of many people as late as the 1980s.

I’ve never forgotten a wonderful passage in that great book written by John O’Sullivan called The Pope, the President and the Prime Minister, which was written about those three remarkable people, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. What O’Sullivan said was that at one stage, each of them in their own domains was out of favour: Margaret Thatcher was regarded as too conservative, Ronald Reagan was regarded as too American, and Wojtyla, later to become Pope John Paul II, was regarded, believe it or not, as too Catholic. Of course, in the fullness of time, these three remarkable people played a major role in bringing about the end of Soviet communism and Soviet imperialism. They not only helped liberate millions of people but also played a major role in laying the foundations for a better world.

Quadrant reminds all of us that at the end of the day the most important contest in politics is the contest of ideas. The reason why Tony Abbott is now Prime Minister of Australia is that he challenged for the leadership of our party, the Liberal Party—and I speak of “our” in the sense of mine and his and any others who are members here but don’t apply it collectively to the whole audience—he challenged because of his belief in an idea. He disagreed with the policy the party was pursuing at the time and he had the courage to nail his colours to the mast and seek the leadership of the party.

In the end, politics is not a public relations contest, it is a contest of ideas. And in the realm of ideas there has been no better publication in Australia over the last fifty years than Quadrant magazine. I would want to pay a special tribute to the role that Peter Coleman has played. There is no finer writer of the conservative cause in Australia than Peter Coleman, and his remarkable stewardship of Quadrant over such a long time is something for which we owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. I want to thank Keith Windschuttle for what he’s done as the editor since 2008. I want to thank him for asking me to come along tonight and to be part of this very special occasion.

I remember having the privilege as Prime Minister in 2006 of addressing the dinner that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication. That was a wonderful gathering of sound people. It was a wonderful gathering of people who believed in freedom and it was a wonderful gathering of people who in different ways played a role in bringing about the end of the influence of communism around the world.

I only have one qualification, though, about the success of that great enterprise. Now that communism is no longer a threat to the world and now that the command economies are not seen as a threat to the world, those who oppose liberal thought and free thought have preoccupied themselves with other causes: the causes of radical environmentalism, the radicalisation of gender politics, the radicalisation of all forms of politically correct thought. So whilst I welcome the fact that Soviet communism is no longer a challenge to us, it remains the case that people of unsound thought and philosophy have other preoccupations. So perhaps that gives us some pause for thought.

But this is a wonderful night, and without presuming for a moment that everybody in this room agrees with everything that the Abbott government is now doing, and is going to do in the future, I think all of us can rejoice—to use a Thatcherism, rejoice was one of Margaret Thatcher’s great words—we should rejoice in the triumph of sound political judgment on September 7. We should rejoice in the fact that we have now as Prime Minister of this country a person who is of compassion, a person who understands what motivates the average Australian, a man who is intelligent, with a common touch, a man who shares with so many of us those fundamental values and beliefs—the importance of the individual, the paramount place of the family as the most cohering social unit in our community, a belief in the importance of small business in our society, and a fundamental commitment to the preservation of Australia’s national security, and above all an immense pride in what our nation has achieved.

 

Keith Windschuttle: Introduction to Prime Minister Tony Abbott

On December 4, 2009, we held a Quadrant dinner at the Union Club in Sydney to launch the book I mentioned earlier, The Howard Era. I remember the night very well. All but one of the various authors who had contributed to the book attended. There was a palpable sense of excitement in the air. The excitement, however, centred on the one author who was not there. Three days before, our author had been elected by a margin of one vote the Leader of the Federal Opposition. Our dinner guests all shared the view that the Liberal parliamentary caucus had made the right decision. They had elected a man who had the right stuff to lead them to victory. It took a little longer to happen than most of us had hoped but we all knew in our hearts it was only a matter of time before Tony Abbott became Prime Minister.

I would suggest to everybody here, especially the journalists who want a good insight into the style of leadership we can expect from our new Prime Minister, that they go back and read his piece in The Howard Era. For it is his reflection on how John Howard handled the job, especially how he managed government business and how he related to his colleagues. I would suggest there are some very strong pointers there to the style of government we can expect over the coming years.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

 

Tony Abbott: The Civilisation and Culture that Nurture Us

Thank you so much, Keith, and thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. It is an extraordinary honour to be here tonight. This is a night of triumph. It is a night of celebration. But I must say I also feel, as I talk to the people here and look at the faces around me, a sense of humility amidst the excitement and the exhilaration because I am in the presence of my betters and my mentors. We are here to celebrate something which is bigger than any of us, that is to say the civilisation and the culture which have nurtured us and which Quadrant celebrates in every one of its issues.

I’m conscious of the fact that many of the people in this room have been an important part of my life, in some cases for many, many years, in some cases for just a few years, but nevertheless an important part of my life, and can take considerable credit in what has recently happened. I see Trevor Sykes, my first editor. I see Nick Cater and Rebecca Weisser, my subsequent editors. I see Peter Coleman, along with B.A. Santamaria my earliest significant political mentor. And of course John Winston Howard, my greatest political mentor, the man in whose shoes it is my honour to follow.

We are here tonight to celebrate Quadrant, but we are here to do more than that. We are here to celebrate and to honour everything that Quadrant represents, everything that Quadrant argues for and fights for, a civilisation based on the great Christian insight that every human being is a person of equal worth and dignity, created in the image and likeness of God, and a justice based on the biblical injunction to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

So it is an honour to be amongst the staff, the writers, the readers and the friends of Quadrant magazine to mark its 500th issue and to celebrate this fabulous publication that has done more than any other in this country to nurture the high culture of Western civilisation.

I hope you’ll allow me to begin with a sentence from Genesis: “On the seventh day of creation, God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good.” God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good. Now, here on Sydney Harbour, from this vantage point we can look out on what we think is the most beautiful city in the most marvellous country. We can see the bushy headlands, protected from development. We can see the pristine waters, cleaned up over the past generation or so. We can see the Opera House, one of the built wonders of the modern world. We can see the naval base, from which our ships deploy to protect our interests and uphold our values. We can see the glittering towers where our business is transacted. We can see the merchant ships that carry our commerce. We can see the factories and the warehouses that supply our needs. We can see the yachts that manifest our sense of adventure. We can see the garden suburbs and the gleaming units where our people live.

Of course, Sydney Harbour and its environs is not the totality of the Australia story but it is an iconic part. We are not gods—these days hardly Christians, sadly. Still, we can see everything that we have made and, indeed, it is very good. As a people we can love what we have made and we can love what has made us, not without qualification perhaps, but wholeheartedly. Or we can feel ambivalent about these things and be forever torn. I’m pleased to say that what characterises this gathering, this Quadrant dinner, is respect for what this country, this culture and this civilisation have achieved. We are not resentful at what was, we are not embarrassed at what is, and we are not fearful at what will be. We are grateful to our families, to our communities, to our country, and to our culture for what we have been given. We honour the institutions that have shaped our society and the values that have underpinned our country, a country as free, as fair, and as prosperous as any on Earth. Of course we can be better. We will be better. We must be better. But we will build on our strengths, not tear it all down and start again from scratch.

So, my friends, just as every faith requires a sacred text, and every culture requires a canon, every way of thinking requires a publication to sustain it. There are plenty of journals for those who dwell on Australia’s failures and are convinced that things will only get worse, especially under a conservative government, but if I may say so, Quadrant is intellectual nourishment for everyone who thinks that this country and this civilisation have largely got it right and is optimistic about our capacity to do even better.

Quadrant is Australia’s best antidote to intellectual pessimism and cultural despair. Certainly if the Australian newspaper is a liberal conservative’s daily consumption, and if the marvellous Spectator magazine is our weekly tonic, Quadrant nourishes the insights, the arguments and the historical depth needed to be truly confident about our country and its future. As James McAuley, along with Les Murray our greatest poet and Quadrant’s first editor, said in Quadrant’s first issue: “In spite of all that can be said against our age, what a moment it is to be alive in.”

From that time on, for more than half a century, Quadrant has consistently displayed a scepticism of new paradigms and panaceas, a willingness to put forward a rational counterpoint to the breathless enthusiasm of the next big thing, an empirical philosophy that judges ideas not by their source or popularity but by the strength of the evidence and argument, and above all else a deep regard for the lessons of the past and the institutions and the traditions and the intuitions that build and protect our society. This, says Keith Windschuttle, our current editor, is the source of Quadrant’s predisposition to get things right.

So, yes indeed, we have seen everything that Quadrant has wrought and it is very good, very good indeed.

My friends, let us charge our glasses, rise to our feet, and propose a toast and drink the health of Quadrant.

 

Peter Coleman: Dodging the Jungle’s Poisoned Arrows

Quadrant was born—at roughly the same time as the new Prime Minister—in three unlikely places. The first was in the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan. The second was in the Melbourne Club. The third was in a run-down Sydney wool store. The godfather in each case was the determined and irrepressible Richard Krygier. Let me take them in turn.

When Krygier (who was then secretary of an obscure sect which grandly called itself the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom) met Irving Kristol, the illustrious editor of the London literary-political Encounter, in the Russian Tea Room, he was burning to unload the heavy burden of Australian intellectual life. This was 1955, the epoch of the Petrovs’ defection and the Labor Party Split.

Yet, Krygier complained to Kristol, the Left saw the Petrovs’ defection as a put-up job masterminded by the sinister Bob Menzies, and the Labor Split as a pre-emptive coup by Dr H.V. Evatt to save the Labor Party from the clerical fascists of the Catholic Church. These fanatics control the intellectual magazines. What would you do, Krygier asked Kristol impatiently? Easy, said Kristol, start a magazine of your own! He added: Maybe the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris would help. Kristol immediately forgot his off-the-cuff advice. When years later I asked him about it, he had no recollection at all of having made it. But Krygier did not forget it. He took it up and called on the Paris office of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The response there was cautious.

But as it happened, Malcolm Muggeridge was about to set off for a speaking tour of Australia. They asked him to look into the Australian situation and report back. He did. He confirmed Krygier’s assessment in spades and urged Paris to help him start a magazine.

But who would actually create and edit it? Here we come to the Melbourne Club. Krygier’s Committee asked him to sound out some poets or literary journalists and recommend one. One poet stood out—Jim McAuley.

He was the creator of the immortal Ern Malley. He took a comprehensive view of “literature” to include Adam Smith as well as, say, John Dryden. And he agreed that the totalitarian temptation was the major threat to freedom in our era. No magazine he edited would, McAuley said, “exemplify or promote that ideal of a completely colourless, odourless, tasteless, inert and neutral mind on all fundamental issues which some people mistake for liberalism”.

The problem was, as several observers were quick to point out, McAuley was a Catholic. You couldn’t possibly have such a fellow as the editor of a cultural magazine—could you? So Krygier took McAuley to Melbourne to meet the Committee’s chairman, the formidable Sir John Latham, at his club—the Melbourne Club. An unlikely trio, you might think: the old Tory and committed atheist, Sir John; the Polish Jewish refugee, Krygier; and the Catholic convert and aesthete, Jim McAuley.

But after some initial skirmishing (and an exchange of anti-clerical jokes), the three clicked. They would make a dent in the history of Australia. They would start a magazine! With McAuley as editor.

Let us now skip forward to Quadrant’s third birthplace—the old wool store near Circular Quay where Krygier found a cheap editorial office on the fourth floor. You got there in a creaking lift. The furniture—throwaway stuff donated by friends—was spare. The editor’s desk was a kitchen table under a dangling, naked light bulb. But most nights in the winter of 1956—after he had finished his day job at the School of Pacific Administration in Balmoral—Jim would be there subbing contributions or drafting that famous editorial of the first issue: Scientists are synthesising life itself; modernism in the arts is exhausted; communism threatens the world. Yet: “In spite of all that can be said against our age, what a moment it is to be alive in!” An exhilarating time—provided we have “principles worth living and dying for”.

The first issue in the summer of 1956 was an astonishing triumph with poems, essays and reviews by the major poets and critics. Something new and important had emerged in Australian culture. The usual suspects remained more than suspicious. There was no place, they said, in Australia for a literary-political magazine not on the Left. They defamed Quadrant and its associates for all they were worth.

Yet Quadrant survived, often by the skin of its teeth, thanks to patient donors, fund-raisers, advertisers, unpaid accountants and lawyers, as well as to its faithful readers, proofreaders, contributors and editors, including Sam Lipski and Lee Shrubb here tonight, through to the brilliant team now in charge: Keith Windschuttle, Les Murray, George Thomas, Roger Franklin, Neil McDonald and Michael Connor. We must also acknowledge and thank the board and its Chairman, Elizabeth Prior Jonson.

After its first twenty-five years the acclaimed Anglo-American writer Robert Conquest had this to say: “Quadrant has survived and flourished in a jungle full of pygmies with poisoned arrows. Australia is lucky to have it. So are we in the world at large.”

I have talked mainly about the creation of Quadrant and its first issue. We are now celebrating the 500th issue! A few years back at Quadrant’s fiftieth anniversary, Paddy Morgan of Gippsland produced a copy of that first issue, Vol. 1, No. 1. He suggested we auction it as a fund-raiser. The great auctioneer and journalist Trevor Sykes took on that duty. After a flurry of bids, it went down to Hugh Morgan for $5000! Hugh thereupon donated it to Quadrant for safe-keeping. Now Paddy Morgan has gone a step further. He has produced for tonight not only the precious first issue but the first four issues of Volume One. May I call on Trevor once again to conduct an auction? Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

[The successful bidder on October 16 was James Dixon, again for $5000. Bravo, Mr Dixon.]

 

Les Murray: Prose is Not Here to Stay

You’ll probably say at the end of this that I am a bit of a head swinger because I publish people who are not entirely of one political persuasion. I publish good artists, so far as I can obtain them.

I should have opened by saying Mister Prime Minister, Mister Former Prime Minister, distinguished guests, old colleagues—none of them as old as me. You notice when I got up here I wobbled. I was lifted up by George Thomas, who is the unwobbling pivot of the universe. He and I work together all the time on the back end of Quadrant, the literary end of Quadrant.

The thing I’m proudest of in my career in Quadrant was The Quadrant Book of Poetry. It came out a couple of years ago—about 484 poems by people over a period of ten years. I’m going to do another one next year. It was a wonderful read. There was almost no prose in it except for a bit of prose up the beginning—prose is not here to stay after all—and it still floats around. It is hideously expensive but it is a very good book—I do say that as its father, you know.

I’ll read you about four poems tonight. This one’s the longest. It’s about a page and a half. It comes from the year 1986. I’d just moved back to Bunyah, New South Wales, where I grew up—a place between Forster and Gloucester—centre of the universe but we don’t advertise that very much. The thing I gave myself when I got home was to write a calendar of the year, a cycle of the year at Bunyah, which doesn’t mean that every year is the same, it just means that particular year was a good way to do a sequence of poems. This is the July poem from that sequence, and it’s called “Mid-Winter Haircut”.

 

Now the world has stopped. Dead middle of the year.
Cloud all the colours of a worn-out dairy bucket
freeze-frames the whole sky. The only sun is down
intensely deep in the dam’s bewhiskered mirror
and the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear.

Now the world has stopped, doors could be left open.
Only one fly came awake to the kitchen heater
this breakfast time, and supped on a rice bubble sluggishly.
No more will come inside out of the frost-crimped grass now.
Crime, too, sits in faraway cars. Phone lines drop at the horizon.

Now the world has stopped, what do we feel like doing?
The district’s former haircutter, from the time before barbers, has shaved
and wants a haircut. So do I. No longer the munching hand clippers
with locks in their gears, nor the scissors more pointed than a beak
but the buzzing electric clipper, straight from its cardboard giftbox.

We’ll sit under that on the broad-bottomed stool that was
the seat for fifty years of the district’s only sit-down job,
the postmistress-telephonist’s seat, where our poor great-aunt
who trundled and spoke in sour verdicts sat to hand-crank
the tingling exchange, plugged us into each other’s lives

and tapped consolation from gossip’s cells as they unlidded.
From her shrewd kind successor who never tapped in, and planes
along below the eaves of our heads, we’ll hear a tapestry
of weddings funerals surgeries, and after our sittings
be given a jar of pickle. Hers won’t be like the house

a mile down the creek, where cards are cut and shuffled
in the middle of the day, and mortarbombs of beer
detonate the digestion, and they tell world-stopping yarns
like: I went to Sydney races. There along the rails,
all snap brims and cold eyes, flanked by senior police

and other, stony men with their eyes in a single crease
stood the entire Government of New South Wales
watching Darby ply the whip, all for show, over this fast colt.
It was young and naïve. It was heading for the post in a bolt
while the filly carrying his and all the inside money

strained to come level. Too quick for the stewards to note him
Darby slipped the colt a low lash to the scrotum.
It checked, shocked, stumbled—and the filly flashed by.
As he came from weighing in, I caught Darby’s eye
and he said Get out of it, mug, quite conversationally.

I’m very fond of animals. I grew up being an only child. Most of my relatives were actually members of other species. Never cross a man who can speak cat. One of the animals I am very fond of are bats, particularly the little bats who live in a world of radar sending out pulses of ultrasound, which we can’t hear. They probably don’t even know that we are here, and certainly don’t care. I wanted to get a sense of that strange world of bat language and so the last six lines of this poem are English, but they’re bat English. “Bats’ Ultrasound”:

 

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.

Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening’s a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:

ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O’er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Now since we’re on salt water and dining on it, I’ll read you a couple of very short poems, four liners. One is called “Jellyfish”.

 

Globe globe globe
soft glass bowls upside down
over serves of nutty udder and teats
under the surface of the sun.

And the other one is called “In a Time of Cuisine”:

A fact the gourmet
euphemism can’t silence:
vegetarians eat sex,
carnivores eat violence.

It’s not part of the politics, but you heard it here first.

This one is, I suppose, to do with foreign relations. Australian eucalypts grow all over the world—variously loved or hated in various countries like Ethiopia, India, South America, all sorts of places. This one is called “Eucalypts in Exile”.

 

They’ve had so many jobs:
boiling African porridge. Being printed on.
Paving Paris, flying in her revolutions.
Supporting a stork’s nest in Spain.

Their suits are neater abroad,
of denser drape, unnibbled:
they’ve left their parasites at home.

They flower out of bullets
and, without any taproot,
draw water from way deep.
When they blow over
they reveal the black sun of that trick.

Standing round among shed limbs
and loose slabbings of bark
is homeland stuff
but fire is ingrained.
They explode the mansions of Malibu
because to be eucalypts
they have to shower sometime in Hell.

Their humans, meeting them abroad,
often grab and sniff their hands.

Loveable singly or unmarshalled
they are merciless in a gang.

It only took me, what, sixty-five years to get to Pinchgut. No Australian poet dares to compete with Kenneth Slessor in writing about Sydney Harbour. Many regard his “Five Bells” as the great Australian poem. I certainly wouldn’t compete with him but a kind of intimation came to me once, a long time ago now, riding Stannard’s white ferries across from McMahons Point to Circular Quay. The poem is called “Port Jackson Greaseproof Rose”:

Which produced more civilizations,
yellow grass or green?

Who made poverty legal?
Who made poverty at all?

Eating a cold pork sandwich
out of greaseproof paper
as I cross to Circular Quay
looking down the last Harbour miles

the world-ships furrowed, bringing poverty,
dates this day to my midlife.

Out of the approaching then city
rise towers of two main kinds:
glass ones keyed high to catch money
and brown steeples to forgive the poor

who made poverty illegal,

and the first Jumbo jets descend
like Mates whose names you won’t recall,
going down behind the city.

This midlife white timber ferry
scatters curly Bohemian glass

one molecule thick, afloat on a
green dark of laws before poverty

and I hold aloft my greaseproof rose
for hand-to-mouth, great hoister of sails.

Thank you. God bless Quadrant and all who read in her.