June 2022 Volume Volume LXVI, Number 6, No. 588
The Invention of Indigenous Intergenerational Trauma
Illusions of Marginalisation in Young Adult Fiction
Viktor Orbán’s Popular Defiance
Media, Menses, Mental
Ulysses, a Century On
A New Vogue for Smoking in Manhattan
Contents
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The Healing Foundation has $632 million in programs, all funded by the Australian taxpayer. For such a sum you might expect a medical specialist in Aboriginal health on the board or in senior management, but you would disappointed. Instead there are weasel words, flurries of psychobabble and the exaltation of inherited victimhood
August 23, 2023
17 mins
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Claims of eternal victimisation and erasure are now the calling card of almost every woke artist of the black, indigenous, female or LGBT+ varieties. Ironically, it is progressive artists themselves who are inflicting erasure on previous generations of authors as they seek accolades for opening trails that have been blazed by many before them
August 25, 2022
16 mins
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Foreign journalists struggled to explain why the misguided Hungarians should not only have voted for Victor Orbán in a free election, but did so in record numbers. The reasons are there if -- and it is a big 'if' -- those observers cared to look beyond the left talking points and recognise his greatest achievement: the political feat of luring voters who cordially detest him
July 7, 2022
20 mins
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Even motherhood is now controversial. In Sydney this year, a number of pre-schools held 'parents’ day' parties instead of celebrating Mother’s Day. That’s where we are in 2022: motherhood is considered so divisive and offensive that it must not be mentioned.
July 5, 2022
8 mins
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As one of James Joyce's contemporary admirers notes, 'No other great writer is more commemorated and commodified, and no other great writer is less read and understood'. 'Ulysses', in all its sensual and cerebral, linguistic and musical variety -- its beauty, sordidness and wonder -- isn't for everyone but 'but it can be, and should be, for anyone'
July 2, 2022
12 mins
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The Big Apple has transformed itself from a place of jittery, brittle energies — a place for nicotine-fuelled go-getters and pushy type-A neurotics and in-your-face fuggeddaboutits — into a place where everyone just wants to kick back and, like, chill. Sniff the air, catch that ubiquitous pong of marijuana smoke and part of the reason for the change becomes immediately clear
June 30, 2022
9 mins
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More than a dozen democracies have identified the Chinese government as a notorious abuser of Interpol's red notices, which Beijing habitually employs to pursue, harass and repatriate critics, dissidents and political opponents. Bad as that is, it is but a small part of the misuse to which the UN and other bodies are put
June 28, 2022
9 mins
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The US Supreme Court's rejection of the notion that the Constitution guarantees a right to abortion has handed a lot of painful moral decisions to all the voters and legislators in fifty states. Many surprises lie ahead. But most Americans seem unlikely to endorse post- and partial-birth abortion with the nearly unanimous alacrity of the Senate Democrats
June 25, 2022
9 mins
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English has joined other subjects, such as Modern History, in servitude to the requirements of postmodern ideological correctitude with regard to race, gender and identity. This is what teachers learn at university and take to the classroom, where another generation is programmed to plumb even lower depths of an ever-descending spiral
June 23, 2022
22 mins
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Never heard of Equiterra, where streets paved with gender justice lead to the 'toxic masculinity recycling plant' and other woke destinations? Well that's no surprise as it exists only in the left-brained minds of those pushy gals from UN Women Australia, who might more accurately have titled their little map 'Here be dragons'
June 22, 2022
10 mins
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The Bromberg judgment against Andrew Bolt has been a fear-inducing disaster for free speech. In the evidence given by Larissa Behrendt, one of the 'white Aboriginal' plaintiffs, was the court hearing genuine ignorance of the family history of both her parents, or did perjury take place? The question deserves an answer
June 20, 2022
15 mins
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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
June 19, 2022
7 mins
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'Cornwall is different to anywhere else in the world and it’s that difference that I want to try to explain and tell you what Cornwall means to me,' declares TV chef Rick Stein, whose SBS series makes as fine a meal of the county's often curious history and characters as of langoustines, mussels and prime cuts of wooly pigs
June 18, 2022
15 mins
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We need only consult Rudd’s 'The Avoidable War' to understand the thinking of Team Albanese. There is, first, the acceptance Sino-US relations are in a phase of strategic competition. The second element holds that the guidance of experts fluent in English and Mandarin is essential -- the likes of Kevin Rudd, in other words
June 15, 2022
20 mins
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As in the US, liberal virtue-signalling is not a vote winner in the UK, least of all amongst the working-class. It’s not that the trend is to social conservativism -- though on some specific issues this is happening -- but that the leftist social agenda is caught in such a vortex of increasing radicalisation that ordinary people reject it as bordering on the insane
June 14, 2022
12 mins
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The Anglosphere is standing at the crossroads. The insistence that sex and gender are functionally independent from each other, and from evolutionary biology, has either failed or been pushed as far as it can without detonating
June 12, 2022
11 mins
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There is nothing quite like he word 'right' for causing a mind to fly into an ethereal world in which there are no distinctions and no qualifications necessary to be made. Thus does 'there is no law against it' become 'I have a right to do it', even if 'it' is bound to inspire dismay and antagonism in others
June 10, 2022
8 mins
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The ancient cache discovered in Qumran's caves consists of some 981 ancient Jewish religious manuscripts along with many thousands of fragments -- on that all who have been involved over more than seven decades of rivalries, secrecy, subterfuge and bitter theological dispute can agree. Beyond that, the fraught and fiercely contested question of their authorship remains
June 5, 2022
36 mins
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In 1839 an Old Bailey judge sentenced eleven-year-old Ellen Miles […]
June 4, 2022
6 mins
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Sydney may be a global city, but the great thing about New South Wales’ 120 local Aboriginal land councils is that they’re local. They’re also genuinely Aboriginal, which is more than you can say of the many advocates campaigning for what amounts to a race-based third house of Parliament
June 3, 2022
8 mins
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The last strawberry jam In reverence I spread it thin […]
May 31, 2022
2 mins
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Hostilities I worry about the ones who disbelieve in science, […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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The Half-light the Low Light The half-light the low light […]
May 31, 2022
2 mins
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Haibun: You just know The Gardens were our 100-acre wood, […]
May 31, 2022
2 mins
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The Kurilpa Bridge it takes a postmodern view to rate […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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Sestina for Hart Crane In the bay, the white bird […]
May 31, 2022
2 mins
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The Reunion The invitation came out of the blue. I […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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At Robert’s Shelves For all the applaudin’ Most live without […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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On seeing Mac Betts’ Abrolhos series in a Broken Hill […]
May 31, 2022
4 mins
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Mass in B Minor Bach’s summa, Majestic pillars of sound, […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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Demobilisation blues Of the squad, only one went mad, his […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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Hallucinations Cobwebs like fine electric cables, strung from tree to […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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The Poet Gets His Comeuppance The poet holds court in […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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Bourke Street: Noon Tram bells clang. Shoppers crowd the busy […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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For Bix Beiderbecke Hot, sweet melancholy swooned you, And darkened […]
May 31, 2022
1 mins
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In reading and reviewing these four books, I reverted to […]
May 31, 2022
17 mins
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As the German economic historian Karl Erich Born noted in […]
May 30, 2022
10 mins
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Six volunteers grapple with a burial casket which needs to […]
May 30, 2022
13 mins
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Parts 1 and 2 of this series began examining types […]
May 30, 2022
53 mins
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In 1974, Mao Tse-tung set out his vision of global […]
May 30, 2022
8 mins
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The Weasel “We” Sir: In their article “Anglophobia: The Unrecognised […]
May 30, 2022
7 mins