Short takes XXII
20/5/06 The very joy
I’ve now appraised nearly all the dossiers I must read for our June Literature Board session. This will be my seventeenth meeting and penultimate appearance for the appointment which I reckon to have been a fair call on my time, where I have been able to give back to my patrons some public service for the enabling they have provided for my own compositions over the years.
There are 105 applications, fewer than sometimes, and I have read these over four days at the rate of twenty-five per eight-hour day. They leave me with these reactions.
1. Most contemporary Australian literature gives me complex displeasure. Why so much urgency to prove and so little wish to please?
2. Acquaintance with the diverse wiles by which authors try to establish salient presence around the Lit-Board honey pot has taken me too far into a view of the beggarliness of this, my writer’s profession, with the result that I could easily lose interest in it. Why must the opportunity…
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