Just why Western Australia's highly influential EPA wants to cap annual prescriptive burning at 200,000ha on the basis of no science and no supporting data is a mystery. If the government sides with those who seek to make firefighting more dangerous, costly and less effective, then the politicians who go along to get along must expect to be held rudely accountable when things go off the rails.  

With the exception of Western Australia, where good sense and sound bushfire science prevail, Australia is floundering in the depths of an era of incompetent and deluded bushfire management. The approach of governments and land and fire agencies, especially in NSW and Victoria, is deeply and tragically influenced by typically addled green 'thinking'. As just seen in fire-ravaged Canada, such an approach will always mean unstoppable infernos

Ugly scenes this week at Lord's are yet another reminder that cricket and its code of gentlemanly behaviour are honoured often in the breach. So it has always been, as Roger Underwood reminded Quadrant readers in 2011. Today, as the Long Room's chinless Poms sustain their apoplexy with choruses of 'Cheat!' and 'Shame!', it's worth revisiting England's original crimes against sportsmanship, 'the spirit of the game' and, ultimately, one of their own, Harold Larwood

Assembled by children, laden with bombs and set free to drift across the Pacific, Imperial Japan's armada of Fugo fire balloons were an ingenious, desperate bid to set the United States ablaze. Brilliantly executed but prey from the start to a surfeit of optimism, those behind the offensive somehow managed to overlook their plan's glaring and fatal flaw

Jack Kramer revolutionised the presentation and organisation of tennis, undermining the dominance of the old blimps of the amateur associations who for so many years had decided who played and who didn’t. That he was a marvellous player and a gentleman should nopt be forgotten either

The same academics who claim fuel-reduction burning makes the forest more flammable also advocate that, if burning is to be done at all, it should be adjacent to towns and residential settlements.  Urging more of what the 'experts' insist will increase the fire risk of residential areas seems to me verging on the certifiably insane

'There will always be an Australian people,' John Curtin told the nation in March 1942, when Darwin was rubble and Broome strewn with corpses. In a remote WA farmhouse my father heard that broadcast and watched an old cocky rise from his chair to clean his rifle. These days, according to a recent poll, more Australians would flee than fight. Where and why has that old spirit gone?

Australian journalist Robert Haupt took a boat down the Volga as the Soviet Union crumbled and wrote a book about what he saw: an empire falling headlong into senescence, chaos and decay. While more than 20 years have passed since its publication, 'Last Boat to Astrakhan' frames the motives and nationalist shame that have driven Putin's war in Ukraine

As the Australian Open gets underway in Melbourne and the grunters, marvels, racquet-smashers, wouldbes and wonder kids take their shots at grand slam greatness, thoughts of the great Frank Sedgman and the year he carried all before him come flooding back