We are not to forget our war dead, nor those who serve today. On Anzac Day we are not Narcissus looking into a pool of war dead and seeing only our own reflection in some way. It is about them, the war dead and war injured, and about the tragedy and indelible losses of war, and of a commitment to the better world.

Upper Heights and Lower Depths is a supremely good book. Lovers of poetry would want to have it on their shelf to read and to own. It invites immersion. It invites the distinctive pleasure of returning to it and entering into what the four Tasmania poets have discovered and expressed. It exemplifies excellence

Australian Icon Grown men weep on cue to camera when […]

As James McAuley put it almost sixty years ago in A Primer of Australian Versification: 'What is the relation between poetry and personal experience; and in particular what are the ways in which a personal element enters poetry?' Two new volumes lend that question a fresh pertinence

The Elocution of Billy Graham The mesmeric Billy Graham pronounced […]

Many viewers of Her Majesty's funeral would not have known they were watching an ordinary, entirely normal service -- or, to be more correct, what was until recently the standard rite. Then liturgical re-inventors sacrificed the Book of Common Prayer on modernity's altar, replaced the King James Version and made even the simplest of clerical dress optional

What are we to make of the 96 per cent of Australian tertiary students who declined to take part in a survey of sexual harassment? To universities around Australia it meant nothing, as they immediately and on cue pumped out press releases insisting they were addressing the problem -- a 'problem' defined by the most dubious of sampling methods

In reading and reviewing these four books, I reverted to […]

There is no compelling reason why an Australian political leader should be able to reflect with a longer, informed historical perspective on the spirit of the age, or reflect on the rise and fall of peoples. Who is to say any of our leaders will be educated in a history of what has happened, what it was like to be alive in those times, let alone to avoid the pitfalls of the past? One doubts our national curriculum.