The Society of Jesus mourns the death of Father Gerald (“Gerry”) O’Collins SJ AC. Fr O’Collins died in Melbourne on Thursday 22 August at the age of 93. He had been a Jesuit for 74 years and a priest for 61 years.

Altogether, auteur theory sounds fascinating and, no doubt, develops excellent skills of analysis for students of film, as they dissect and discuss this or that auteur director’s body of work. But what is it doing in an English course, in high school, in Year 10?

It is a strange irony that politicians and policy-makers of Labor orientation should think it necessary for working people who do not possess a university degree to have one as some kind of validation of their worth. Would I hold my electrician in higher regard if he had a degree? Would he have a higher regard of himself? The ideas are preposterous

The early seventeenth century was English poetry's golden age for the poetry of meditation, a more specialised and concentrated process than contemplation. Meditation seeks unity with the Godhead, and it is this particular genre which has given us some of the greatest poems in the language.

The Philistines remain with us as a permanent fixture of our culture and have always been a conspicuous element in society. For this reason, and bearing in mind the extraordinary and lamentable meltdown of our education systems, it is against considerable odds that poetry-writing continues to flourish in Australia.

Canberra in those far-off days was regarded as a joke by the rest of Australia. The essence of this ridicule was the notion of a 'Bush Capital' making even less impression on the visitor than such neighbouring country towns as Goulburn. compared to the great coastal cities, whence most of Canberra’s population was embarrassingly unimpressive

What should alarm anybody retaining a grain of respect for the life of the mind is what little remains of genuine education in our schools and universities. This particularly applies in the teaching and nurturing of an appreciation for literature's benefit to civilisation at large. If 'the common pursuit of true judgement', as T.S. Eliot put it, is to survive, where and how?

A personal anecdote, to begin. In a letter to the […]