December 2008 Volume LII, No. 12
Wadeye: Failed State as Cultural Triumph
On Being a Co-Author
Why We Need to Revive Federalism
Chairman Rudd’s Education Revolution
Clunes 1873 – The Uprising That Wasn’t
Of the Fist
Contents
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There is no greater example of Aboriginal policy failures, from bilingual education to the deliberate fostering of a victimhood mentality, than the disgrace that is Wadeye, a town where violence and anarchy prevail. Haven't heard of the war within this NT community? No surprise, really, as the narrative of black victimhood and white guilt is such a media staple that reporting its consequences would be embarrassing
July 1, 2022
50 mins
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When Rossini died some 140 years ago, Verdi decided that […]
March 9, 2009
8 mins
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Australian federalism is unusual in being both so successful and […]
March 9, 2009
23 mins
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The Rudd Government is committed to creating an education revolution […]
February 28, 2009
25 mins
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In December 1873 the Victorian goldmining town of Clunes, about […]
February 19, 2009
42 mins
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“Let’s go,” growled Comrade Hondo, shouldering his battered AK 47 […]
December 11, 2008
8 mins
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Half asleep, she reached up and touched a chin, her […]
December 11, 2008
10 mins
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Achondroplastic They call me brave but to be brave one […]
December 10, 2008
1 mins
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Stained glass, high in the clerestory at York, or all […]
December 10, 2008
1 mins
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I They are trimming the English elm at the farm, […]
December 10, 2008
3 mins
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Don’t write. Don’t phone. Don’t wait outside my door in […]
December 10, 2008
1 mins
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Primary school, in summer lining up at the classroom door […]
December 10, 2008
2 mins
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The Housekeeper Nobody seemed to hold it against him The […]
December 10, 2008
3 mins
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Is this one Wagner’s Ring? There’s a cycle in it […]
December 10, 2008
1 mins
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Though I’m not one for dogs myself I like to […]
December 10, 2008
2 mins
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We pass the cave-glow of a hundred front rooms, to […]
December 10, 2008
1 mins
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It’s a jungle out there, Frank. I know, Henri. […]
December 10, 2008
1 mins
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The gaze of dogs who don’t understand and who don’t know that they might be right not to understand.
—Italo Calvino
A few days ago, while I was out strolling harmlessly near home, a savagely snarling cattle-dog sprang at my hand. His mistress had him on a short, stout lead, and no harm was done.
December 10, 2008
9 mins
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When my wife and I married eleven years ago, the priest who celebrated our nuptial mass caused scandal by requesting (it being a Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal) that communicants knelt and received the host on the tongue. Benedict XVI’s insistence on the same at the recent World Youth Day Mass is, therefore, a subtle but significant shift.
December 10, 2008
5 mins
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The biggest enemy of truth isn’t the lie, it’s the myth!
—The West Wing
The writing of Tasmania’s history has now deteriorated into a formula not dissimilar to Midsomer Murders. Scholarship has been replaced by scriptwriters locked into the same old cast of characters, the same old set-piece plots, the same old locations and the same old ideology-driven notions of an island steeped in murder, massacres and genocide. Indeed the latest three episodes of Midsomer Murders almost sum up the present academic mindset on Tasmanian history—Episode 57, A Picture of Innocence; Episode 55, The Axeman Cometh; Episode 56, Death and Dust.
December 10, 2008
13 mins
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To be conceited is permissible only for personages with a substantial amount of truth behind their conceits, and Robert Murray Helpmann (born in 1909 with just one final n, to which he added a second one around 1933, presumably to suggest a touch of internationality) is unquestionably one of them. This book about this distinguished multi-artist born in Mount Gambier traces his phenomenal rise on various steps of the cultural ladder. It outlines these steps pragmatically after the comprehensive research which gained Anna Bemrose her PhD in 2003.
December 10, 2008
4 mins
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Following the recent screening of Keating! The Musical on ABC2, David Barnett wondered in the Canberra Times at the production’s sheer “malevolence, and the hatred from which it arises”. The eponymous hero of the show is portrayed as a wronged and tragic figure who saved Australia from an evil gnome called Bob Hawke. Now, in the Keating version of history as brought to us by David Love, we go one better. Here the principal anti-hero to emerge is not Bob Hawke (who in Love’s book is made to disappear pretty much altogether), but Bernie Fraser, the former Treasury official who Keating appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank.
December 10, 2008
6 mins
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When someone challenges the radical orthodoxy that dominates the intellectual […]
December 8, 2008
37 mins
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Most people express themselves better in writing than in speech. […]
December 7, 2008
26 mins
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Robert Gordon Menzies matters as much today as he did […]
December 7, 2008
42 mins
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Brideshead Revisited is the most dishonest film I have seen […]
December 7, 2008
6 mins
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How does a poet like John Eppel survive in Zimbabwe? […]
December 7, 2008
9 mins
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Over more than 100 years, the Commonwealth Public Service has […]
December 7, 2008
11 mins
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On November 2 the Australian carried a report by Patrick […]
December 7, 2008
14 mins
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Helen Trinca, editor of the Australian’s weekend magazine, made the […]
December 7, 2008
13 mins
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Davenport Jones, an expert on twentieth-century art, who made his debut in Ian Callinan’s novel The Missing Masterpiece, reappears in this new novel, once again to be battered about by the rapacity and philistinism of the art world as well as the ambitions of a number of assertive women.
December 1, 2008
4 mins
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A normally businesslike acquaintance asked about my topic [Brideshead Revisited]; in return I asked whether she had read the novel. Uneasy silence followed. Then, with unbusinesslike shyness she replied: “Thirty-seven times. I was an alcoholic, and I feel so close to Sebastian that I can’t stop reading the book.”
December 1, 2008
19 mins
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Controversy does not sell theatre tickets, or books. Affirmation does. […]
December 1, 2008
13 mins
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In Buenos Aires the Crime Museum has a room of glass boxes of decapitated heads preserved in formalin. And dotted around the globe are other museums whose musty rooms hold jar after jar of miniature horrors: body parts of forgotten races, condemned characters and unrecognisable organs.
December 1, 2008
9 mins
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In some respects Denial: History Betrayed by Tony Taylor, an […]
December 1, 2008
8 mins
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Hirst’s is an unusual case in that his art’s origins lie properly in the left-wing anti-art movements of the late 1960s yet his art has largely been embraced by private buyers, at least, by those plying trades among the less acceptable faces of capitalism, such as money traders and ad-men.
December 1, 2008
11 mins
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It is a matter for extreme regret that nothing good or positive came out of the controversy arising from the recent publication of a photograph of a nude thirteen-year-old girl by Bill Henson. The Australian art world missed a golden opportunity to explain to an obviously compliant public what art is and how it can be distinguished from pornography.
December 1, 2008
11 mins