May 2009 Volume LIII, No. 5
The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World, by Robert Kenny
The Bombing of Darwin
Pictorial Banquet
Melbourne Burning
Ten Haiku
Greaseproof Rose
Contents
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The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World,
by Robert Kenny;
Scribe, 2007, $39.95.
This book is a study of the early days of white grazing occupation in the Wimmera district of north-western Victoria, especially using the experience of Nathanael Pepper, one of the early Aboriginal converts to Christianity and a hope for the emergence of a “native church”.
In the mid-1840s, the pioneer squatter Horatio Ellerman had shot the mother of another future convert dead. The limited record suggests it was probably a retaliatory raid on the Aborigines for taking sheep, with angry, boisterous squatters firing off guns, intending to frighten. Ellerman, presumably contrite, later adopted the lad, found religion himself and eventually gave up the fleece for the cloth to become a Presbyterian minister in the district.
May 1, 2009
6 mins
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The darkest year in Australian history was 1942. For the […]
May 1, 2009
18 mins
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During some twenty years of writing regular art criticism largely […]
May 1, 2009
5 mins
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Melbourne burning in tempestuous, high flame Grim Saturday, mid-forties, loud […]
May 1, 2009
1 mins
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Greaseproof Rose Which produced more civilizations, yellow grass or green? […]
May 1, 2009
1 mins
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The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi. Virgin Books, 2008, $32.95. Six hundred years ago, a little Franciscan friar wrote a book which contained the only phrase for which he is remembered: numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
May 1, 2009
10 mins
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Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia by Ayesha Jalal. Harvard University Press, 2008, US$29.95.
Before killing thirteen Indian soldiers in his quest for eternal life, a young Islamic militant wrote:
We drink the wine of martyrdom, swaying in ecstasy;
This living is not living—we live by getting our heads cut off.
We love to receive the gifts of our religion;
When we bequeath gifts, it is of our lives.May 1, 2009
15 mins
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Conservatism in America: Making Sense
of the American Right,
by Paul Edward Gottfried;
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, US$39.95.
This book can be read as the tale of a tremendous irony—how a false notion that led a movement and a whole superpower astray became in the end the plain truth.
Author of many works on intellectual history, Professor Gottfried has taken part in the struggles he writes of here, and that fusion of scholarship and hard experience creates a compelling tone. He is a “paleo-conservative” but is far from pushing a mere factional line. Like most “paleos”, he is above all his own man.
May 1, 2009
12 mins
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If someone were to write a book about denials of […]
May 1, 2009
19 mins
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The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It by Tilar J. Mazzeo. In these days of global crisis and world change, what a good time to be reading about champagne, an industry which has weathered worse storms than this (heck, we’re not at war. Yet.)
May 1, 2009
6 mins
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Journey Without Arrival: The Life and Writing of Vincent Buckley by John McLaren. Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, $39.95. The Melbourne poet, critic and academic Vincent Buckley, who died in 1988, was a frequent contributor to Quadrant over the decades, with ten poems, fifteen articles (including one called “The Strange Personality of Christ”) and three book reviews.
May 1, 2009
11 mins
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When Bradson showed the taxi driver the address, the cabbie […]
May 1, 2009
21 mins
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In 2005, the Australian National University commemorated the centenary of […]
May 1, 2009
5 mins
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The degree of thought control, of limitations on freedom of […]
May 1, 2009
38 mins
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Geoffrey Robertson’s latest publication (The Statute of Liberty) might well […]
May 1, 2009
17 mins
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Reading Peter Singer’s new book I was reminded of the […]
May 1, 2009
13 mins
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When reports alleging that defence officials had been spying on […]
May 1, 2009
7 mins
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A Student’s Guide to Music History,
by R.J. Stove;
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007, US$8.
There ought to be a law against it: marketing a book titled Music History, with just 135 pages. Admittedly, that law could deferred, for the cover has the rest of the title in smaller print: A Student’s Guide to. Moreover, it is just one of fifteen tomes in a series issued by the resonantly named Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. And it is written by an Australian (born 1961 in Sydney) in Melbourne, R.J. Stove, who admits in a five-page preface that being invited to write it caused him “pleasure and terror indissolubly combined”.
April 30, 2009
3 mins
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I came here with my mother first. Later she bought […]
April 30, 2009
1 mins
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An Argentinian sings: “Although my life is filled with shadows […]
April 30, 2009
1 mins
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She’s borrowed someone’s hat or someone’s tied it on— its […]
April 30, 2009
1 mins
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It’s not really like Rosalie’s Good Eats Café, There are […]
April 30, 2009
3 mins
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Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,
by Margaret Atwood;
Bloomsbury, 2008, $29.95.
Margaret Atwood delivered the 2008 Massey Lectures last November, and they were published just as the current global financial crisis was unfolding, although her timely yet timeless subject would have been conceived long before the crisis.
Atwood has been at the vanguard for a long time now. She’s been writing since the 1950s. She’s always been good but the later part of her career has been dedicated to pushing the boundaries of her personal achievements. Once she got The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) out of her system, and put the female-as-victim theme behind her, she entered her literary maturity. Once she embraced the creative potential of the female-as-oppressor, with an equal claim on human evil as the male, she began turning out a body of fiction, coincident with her middle age, in which each new work was unlike any of its predecessors.
April 30, 2009
9 mins
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The Landscape of Humanity: Art, Culture and Society, by Anthony O’Hear, Imprint Academic, 2008, £17.95. The Landscape of Humanity is a philosopher’s response to the nonsense of the current world. It covers architecture, culture and politics. Anthony O’Hear is less bemused than the rest of us about a world in which, for example, gallery curators ask us to gaze in aesthetic wonder at discarded nappies, Chris Ofili’s Madonna surrounded with elephant dung, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, Robert Mapplethorpe’s remarkable excursions into the photographic iconography of gay life, and other such exhibits, as if these remarkable objects stood in some line of descent from Botticelli, Vermeer and Monet. Where, when you need him, is the impertinent child who could recognise nakedness when all the fools around him were nodding approvingly at imagined genius?
April 30, 2009
9 mins
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With fifteen to twenty minutes of advertisements every hour on […]
April 30, 2009
12 mins
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It is barely nine o’clock and already the Solomon Islands’ […]
April 29, 2009
13 mins
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7/5/77 Stamboul Prelude Our Belgrade train left the cavernous Sarajevo […]
April 29, 2009
20 mins
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The judges’ report for Helen Garner’s Melbourne Prize for Literature […]
April 29, 2009
8 mins
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In James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the following comment […]
April 29, 2009
16 mins
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Murray Bail gives us, after many years of further researches […]
April 28, 2009
9 mins
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Reports of the ravages of madness are found among the […]
April 28, 2009
21 mins
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In this third instalment of a series on the nature […]
April 26, 2009
15 mins
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One of my daughters recalled the other day a practical […]
April 24, 2009
13 mins
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In 1948 a young Vietnamese nobleman set off from Hanoi […]
April 24, 2009
17 mins
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Denis Dutton, an American, is Professor of the Philosophy of […]
April 23, 2009
17 mins
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I concluded my last book, Acting on Conscience, with a […]
April 23, 2009
34 mins
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Give Peace a Chance SIR: Former army officer Justin Kelly […]
April 23, 2009
15 mins