Music from the Heart

Madam: Simon Kennedy (“From Budapest with Love: Fixing Fertility”, June 2024) makes the case for urgent new policies to raise Australia’s fertility rate, which is below the rate needed for the native-born Australian population to replace itself.

Rather than make it easier for Australians to form families and have children, federal governments have instead attempted to use large-scale immigration as a fix for low fertility and associated population ageing. Yet this policy rests on a fallacy. A certain level of immigration (between 50,000 and 80,000 per annum) can affect the age structure by helping to stabilise the population, but high immigration has almost no long-run effect besides dramatically increasing the total population size.

As population researcher Dr Katharine Betts has put it: “Frantic efforts to make Australia younger by making it bigger are no more rational than a middle-aged person trying to look younger by gaining 40 kilos. It might smooth out some wrinkles but the behaviour would be bizarre, the cost would be high, and the effects would not last.”

The grim irony is that high immigration is touted as a solution to low birth rates when it is in fact exacerbating the problem. Extremely high immigration—presently running at around 500,000 a year—has placed down­ward pressure on wages and pushed up housing costs, thereby making home ownership increasingly unattainable for younger Australians. Scarce and unaffordable housing means delayed or disrupted family formation and fewer children.

It will take bold leadership to tackle Australia’s interlinked immigration, housing, and fertility crises.

Alex Walsh

 

Signs of Lunacy

Madam: Our university has placed a wall-size sign at the main library’s entrance.  It warns all at the institution that looking at or watching others is harassment, while staring is potentially sexual abuse. Students and staff are therefore advised not to look at others more than briefly, and to report anyone on campus looking at others with more than a quick glance.

Where will this bureaucratic silliness end?

Christopher Heathcote

 

The Heart of Arnold Bax

Madam: In Alexander Voltz and Barry Spurr’s excellent article, “The Pagan Ecstatic: Arnold Bax” (July-August 2024) they touch expertly on many of the established facts about Sir Arnold’s life, music and poetry. I write to draw your attention to one further key fact which should help bring his life, actions and behaviour into clearer focus.

Throughout the literature around Bax’s life there is vague mention of a “heart condition” which is often dismissed as playing only a peripheral role in his life. The truth is starker and central to the man Bax was and the way he lived. A key document preserved in the British Library by Harriet Cohen (Bax’s mistress) shifts this chronic heart condition to centre stage and should make us rethink every aspect of the composer’s life.

Bax did not go to war in the First World War. He was categorically unable to meet the physical demands of combat, a fact established by the doyen of cardiology, Sir James Mackenzie. Mackenzie examined Bax on September 13, 1916, diagnosing a fully established syndrome of right heart enlargement and strain due to a hole in the wall between the main pumping chambers of the heart.

At the time of this examination, Bax was thirty-three. He already had severely limited exercise capacity. Hiding his limitations from his own circle and the wider world, he developed coping mechanisms which included maintaining a quiet, steady existence, as well as reducing strenuous physical effort to a minimum. This would have been on the direct advice of Sir James, who at the time was the world expert on the impact of exertion on cardiac disease.

Bax would have been compelled to pursue more sedentary pursuits by necessity. Externally, he may have appeared standoffish to the point of reclusiveness, secretive to the point of aloofness and self-contained to the point of disengagement as he trudged relentlessly within the narrow tram lines offered by his cardiac disease.

He wrote his First Symphony just after the point in his life when his exercise capacity was really impacted. The really fascinating question for me is would he ever have written his symphonies without his ventricular-septal defect: is this the factor that forced him into a more sedentary life with only his mind and music for self-expression?

I think Bax’s cardiac diagnosis is writ large through every fact I read about his life and is to me the missing link to his character and actions. Cohen’s document has led me to deeply understand and admire the man: a brilliant spark­ling mind caged within a failing body and a lifelong battle fought in silence and isolation.

My findings have been published by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and have been supported by the newly established Sir Arnold Bax Society. I would encourage anyone who admires Sir Arnold and his music to join; the more members the society has, the more power it has to create a lasting improvement in the legacy of this quietly determined “pagan ecstatic”.

Claire Colebourn
(Immediate Past President, British Society of Echocardiography)

 

Telling the Truth

Madam: While reading “Telling the Truth about Pre-Contact Aboriginal Society” by William D. Rubinstein (September 2024), I couldn’t help but compare current Australian society with pre-contact Aboriginal society and find it not much better when looked at in terms of infanticide, cannibalism and the mistreatment of women (in some respects), namely:

Infanticide: The percentage of Australian pregnancies aborted is about 25 per cent.

A kind of cannibalism: The abortion industry’s participation in organ harvesting and the trade in baby body parts.

The mistreatment of women: Trans ideology and the subjugation and dehumanisation of women.

Dermott Kelly

 

Auteur Theory

Madam: In Barry Spurr’s article on “auteur theory” (September 2024) he rightly refutes the commonly accepted creed that “the director is the sole author of a motion picture”.

A Time critic praised John Ford for using a narrative technique in How Green Was My Valley (1941). Philip Dunne, who wrote the script, states this decision was made by himself and okayed by Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, a year and a half before Ford was assigned to direct. The director William Wyler also worked on the script over this period. Three directors, two of them also writers, were on one motion picture under Zanuck. Who is the sole author?

Pinky (1949) is often touted as “a film by Elia Kazan”. Not so. John Ford was assigned to direct by Zanuck. Ford fell ill. Kazan flew from New York on Saturday and went over the script with Dunne and Zanuck on Sunday. He took the final script that Zanuck had approved—not one word was changed. On Monday morning Kazan went to work with John Ford’s entire staff, on his sets, with over 100 people, all employed by Ford. Who is the sole author?

“Auteur theory” has no relevance in the study of English literature or film. The entire premise of the theory is false.

Bryan Niland

 

Clarification: The Australian Bureau of Statistics has contacted us to point out with respect to the article “The Resurgence of Faith” by Nigel Davies in the July-August issue that the questions for the 2026 Census have not yet been decided. As noted on their website, the ABS is considering several changes such as, “Would it be better to ask the question ‘Does the person have a religion?’ rather than ‘What is the person’s religion?’ This is because 9.8 million people (over 40% of responses) indicated in the 2021 Census that they had no religion. The ‘Does the person have a religion?’ question would have a mark box for both ‘No’ and ‘Yes (specify religion)’.” Contrary to recent reporting, the ABS is not proposing to exclude a mark box for “Yes”.