Beaten   It seems I have beaten The horrible bowed […]

The poobahs of pedagogy demand that high school English students seek enlightenment in all manner of different "texts", not just those old-fashioned books. A pair of high-fliers from the Detroit ghetto would urge Big Chalk to review that policy

New Matilda has published a review of Quadrant contributor Hal Colebatch's "Australia’s Secret War: How unionists sabotaged our troops in World War II". It won't tell you much about the book, but you will be in no doubt about the author, Adam Brereton

“There on the pavement these inexpert children of a pacific […]

Strange you are remembered mostly, if at all, for half-a-dozen […]

Peter Kocan’s The Fable of all Our Lives is certainly the most important and powerful Australian novel I have read this year and further confirms Kocan’s position at the forefront of Australia’s writers.

What Should I Believe? by Dorothy Rowe; Routledge, 2009, $34.95.

The author of this book was, according to Radio National, voted one of the fifty wisest people in the UK by Saga magazine in 2004 and was recently picked in another British poll as number seventy-two among the top 100 living geniuses in the world (Osama bin Laden came somewhat higher at forty-three).

Invaders of the Heart by Lee Knowles Interactive Press, 2008, $25.

From the late 1960s Australian poetry became dominated by a group that Mark O’Connor has described as “The Bubble”, and Richard Packer as “The Epigones”. One of their leading lights stated they specifically rejected poetry dealing with: “ethics, morality, religion and mythology”. This, while possibly in some cases simply sour grapes, was good news for ethics, morality, religion and mythology.

Had they gone off to play with their own trivial conceits, little harm might have been done. However, tightly organised mutual promotion was accompanied by an equally intense if generally unspoken campaign to exclude and silence all those not in the group. The reading and book-buying public had its own opinion, and tended to simply turn away from poetry altogether. The good suffered along with the bad.

Hal Colebatch shows how a superannuated defender of mass murder has been wheeled out to applaud - Kevin Rudd.