September 2009 Volume LIII, No. 9
Driving Home
Duped and Self-Duped
Views of Darwin
Believing in Cliches
Woman of Letters
The Voice of the Living Light
Contents
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When we were lighter on our feet our evenings among […]
September 1, 2009
1 mins
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Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen; Melbourne University Press, 2008, $49.95.
The phenomenon of Soviet fellow travellers is well known—true believers from the West who travelled to the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1950s, many deliriously wanting to believe it was a burgeoning paradise. They were duchessed into believing their dreams were true. The exhaustive exposé on this topic is Paul Hollander’s book Political Pilgrims.
September 1, 2009
8 mins
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Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia, by Tom Frame; UNSW Press, 2009, $39.95.
As HMS Beagle approached Sydney in January 1836, four years out from England, the young Charles Darwin was looking forward to a break in a civilised country. “We all on board,” he wrote, “are looking forward to Sydney, as to a little England: it really will be very interesting to see the colony which must be the Empress of the South.” The reality was disappointing. Sydney in the middle of a drought-stricken summer was not a little England. The servant girls were vile-mouthed. The Aborigines “appear to me to stand some few degrees higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians”. There were no kangaroos to see.
September 1, 2009
6 mins
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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).
September 1, 2009
8 mins
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Frances Partridge: The Biography, by Anne Chisholm; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, $59.95.
Anne Chisholm has called this book “The biography”. No other has been written, or is likely to be, because Frances Partridge wrote no big books, and she is known mainly for being a friend of a number of people, most of whom were a generation older than herself, who lived in and around Bloomsbury in the years before the Second World War. But she is the author of diaries, which she kept most of her life. She published, during the 1980s and 1990s, edited diaries covering the years 1932 to 1975. I came upon one of these volumes by chance, and soon wanted to read more. Her attitude to her friends was deeply interested and affectionate, and she could describe them and their doings both objectively and sympathetically.
September 1, 2009
10 mins
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The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen, edited by Joseph Baird; Oxford University Press, 2006, $39.95.
During the last few decades, historians have translated primary sources which suggest something happened to the role of women during the Middle Ages, particularly during a period often referred to as the High Middle Ages (1000–1299 AD); a period of rapid population and economic growth, urbanisation, rise of centralised government, and struggle for control between church and state. The relative tolerance of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries gave way to increasing pressure for unity and conformity from all classes. For example, earlier on, some wives went into separate trades from their husbands and, in some towns, were treated as a single woman when involved in trade disputes. How much this independence characterised the role of medieval women generally, and how much that role changed, as the twin cults of Chivalry and the Virgin combined to influence the perception and position of women, are subjects of debate.
September 1, 2009
9 mins
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Just over a year ago, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs […]
September 1, 2009
8 mins
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Meritocracy The movie October Sky conveys it all, Serves either […]
September 1, 2009
3 mins
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Many for the very first time in their lives. I […]
September 1, 2009
1 mins
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Pink lake your sheared surface glistens slick as licked lip. […]
September 1, 2009
1 mins
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1 On my hospital window someone has painted a circle […]
September 1, 2009
2 mins
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Women are often silent about grave matters. They wait their […]
September 1, 2009
6 mins
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Rain in the Forest Every single spotted gum marks one […]
September 1, 2009
2 mins
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Jeogla Return 1 Half a daylight moon hung over […]
September 1, 2009
4 mins
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Masterclass, Vienna, 1784 Mozart’s starling could whistle the theme from […]
September 1, 2009
2 mins
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They fail at the very moment you’d swear They’d know […]
September 1, 2009
1 mins
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Everything you will ever see is in this room. The […]
September 1, 2009
2 mins
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Dog and Kangaroo The big Red, Dogged by yap And […]
September 1, 2009
2 mins
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One gleaming white camper-van I spotted was towing on a […]
September 1, 2009
1 mins
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With all the world clamouring in their ears That the […]
September 1, 2009
1 mins
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In Memoriam A.K. This is where the train stops the […]
September 1, 2009
1 mins
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The numbers do not look good for print-based media companies. […]
September 1, 2009
31 mins
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Frank Devine performed his last editorial duty from the hospital […]
September 1, 2009
9 mins
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A few weeks ago I was listening to the evening […]
September 1, 2009
21 mins
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The global financial crisis has restarted debates over economic policy […]
September 1, 2009
22 mins
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Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was an “ideal state”, though for […]
September 1, 2009
13 mins
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Some people find the growing requirements of modern bureaucracies to […]
September 1, 2009
19 mins
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Halfway through this new collection of essays, in a piece […]
September 1, 2009
33 mins
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In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, for the […]
September 1, 2009
34 mins
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We have gone through sixty years of global economic expansion, […]
September 1, 2009
33 mins
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What peaceful hours I once enjoyed! How sweet their memory […]
September 1, 2009
15 mins
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Europe has a set of primary interests which to us […]
September 1, 2009
25 mins
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The theatrically dramatic Sudds Thompson case is an opportunity for […]
September 1, 2009
13 mins
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You would expect a man who had been condemned to […]
September 1, 2009
11 mins
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Frank Devine SIR: The late Frank Devine fed the Harcourt […]
September 1, 2009
18 mins
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27/12/85 Gaze and Counter Gaze Some weeks ago gentlemanly Stewart […]
September 1, 2009
25 mins
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The Independent State of Papua New Guinea gained independence from […]
September 1, 2009
12 mins
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Leszek Kolakowski, the world-renowned Polish intellectual, died at the age […]
September 1, 2009
9 mins
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John Peter Maynes OAM, who died in April, was a […]
September 1, 2009
10 mins
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A postwar generation of art lovers more or less assumed […]
September 1, 2009
11 mins
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I hate Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. I don’t mean that […]
September 1, 2009
8 mins
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Boswell’s Life of Johnson is probably the most famous biography […]
September 1, 2009
6 mins
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It was a day when every book repels, when each […]
September 1, 2009
7 mins
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At the outset I believe should declare my own interest. […]
September 1, 2009
12 mins
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January, 1976 The minibus held eight, but the short man […]
September 1, 2009
12 mins
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We were living in a flat in Paddington, Sydney, and […]
September 1, 2009
5 mins