Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
There Must Be More to Life
Belvedere Woman
by Ian Callinan
Arcadia, 2016, 212 pages, $29.95
The year is 1975 and Sandra Rentle, the subject of Belvedere Woman, Ian Callinan’s tenth novel, is facing her fiftieth birthday. Claire, the local dress-shop owner, probably sums her up best: “there was still something disarmingly young about Mrs Rentle … poor, spoilt, slightly stupid, slightly rich, snobbish Mrs Rentle, a nice woman, adrift, victim of her upbringing, struggling to get away from it all”.
And what she wants to flee is five decades in Thirlmere Street in Belvedere—at the centre of an enclave of twenty or thirty blocks, north of the Brisbane River, where the brilliance of the purple jacarandas, the red poincianas, and the red and purple bougainvilleas lining the streets almost distracted one from the grand houses that stood behind them—all within walking distance of the best churches (preferably Anglican), the best schools (predominantly Protestant), “and axiomatically, the best…
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
