May 2022 Volume Volume LXVI, Number 5, No. 586
Broadening the Higher Education Conversation
Desperately Seeking Susan Sontag
Oysterminds and Whingers
The Divided Brain and the Divided Culture
Globalising Elites and the Withering of Democracy
They Won’t Glow … or Seek to Know
Contents
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The main factor behind the groupthink that prevails amongst public university academics is not self-interest but an ignorance of the world outside their institutions. We need new thinking about the future of Australian higher education if the general public, perhaps even governments, is to be re-engaged in the needed reshaping and reform of our tertiary sectorMarch 13, 2024
7 mins
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'The next day I heard that Sontag had had cancer and had both breasts removed. I felt guilty—here I was pursuing a writer who was possibly dying. Needless to say, however, guilt was overtaken by a writerly curiosity.'November 18, 2022
18 mins
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The UK and the EU are close to embarking on […]June 29, 2022
15 mins
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The general culture is suffering from highly-focused, over-specialised idiocy — and along with this is the cringe-worthy loss of its sense of humour, in particular a sense of the ridiculous. This is understandable, as its luminaries regularly retail the most ludicrous propositions with a straight face and the admonishment of a wagging fingerMay 31, 2022
31 mins
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Marx wrongly assumed the bourgeoisie would be more invested in nationalism than the proletariat. Instead, the global economy has produced a new and well-heeled transnational class boasting more in common with each other — regardless of national, racial or religious identities — than with everybody else. Behold, a new realpolitik revokes the hubristic assumptions of the progressive WestMay 30, 2022
24 mins
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The Left’s complexity fetish infects all social and political realms. To test this, mention nuclear power to one of your bolshie friends and brace for a blizzard of convoluted objections that can claim no more than a nodding acquaintance with logic or fact. After that aural ordeal, eyes glazed and verging on narcolepsy, you won't dare ask when it became official than men can have babiesMay 29, 2022
8 mins
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There are various parallels in the lives, careers and artistic achievements of Spain's Joaquin Sorolla and Australia's H. Septimus Power, both of whom rose to recognised distinction, each in his own country as well as internationally. More than mere 'national painters', they shine amongst post-impressionists who never abandoned their traditional training and methodsMay 28, 2022
21 mins
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There is no compelling reason why an Australian political leader should be able to reflect with a longer, informed historical perspective on the spirit of the age, or reflect on the rise and fall of peoples. Who is to say any of our leaders will be educated in a history of what has happened, what it was like to be alive in those times, let alone to avoid the pitfalls of the past? One doubts our national curriculum.May 27, 2022
18 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 remainsMay 21, 2022
19 mins
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Pen the sort of work of which the academic Left approves and, especially if your surname is Clark, all the usual suspects will sing your praises. The fact that your book is superficial, misleading, unfair, selective in quoting sources and both shamefully and glaringly inaccurate will matter not at all. You're saying the correct things, and that is how history is done these daysMay 19, 2022
21 mins
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The most alarming aspect of the distortion of the nature of Aboriginal culture is that it is widely accepted in the curricula of schools and even universities, despite the self-evident balderdash merchandised by the likes of 'Dark Emu' charlatan Bruce Pascoe. Truth demands these claims need to be loudly disputed, rather than their promoters being both lionised and richly rewardedMay 18, 2022
15 mins
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Given the capacity of the brain to both heal and grow, known as 'plasticity', even intense challenges such as a natural disaster or by a death in the family may be 'tolerated' by children without lasting damage. But sometimes intensity and duration may intersect, with sustained toxic effect. This what we are seeing in far too many young AustraliansMay 17, 2022
14 mins
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Before the troubled illustrator produced his thousands of anthropomorphised felines, cats weren't generally regarded as respectable pets. His images of moggies smoking pipes, pushing wheelbarrows, parading on their hind legs and reading newspapers changed all thatMay 15, 2022
12 mins
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Wars occur, as with the First and Second World Wars, when national leaders perceive themselves to be in a superior position. Watching the US demean itself before the Iranian regime, the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the Middle east, might have told Putin all he thought he needed to know about Joe Biden and his administrationMay 13, 2022
21 mins
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There are kernels of insight in Harvard professor Caroline Elkins’s new book, 'Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire', but far too few to redeem what is otherwise a mess of hyperbole and problematic examples conscripted as illustrations of her argument. After her previous book on Kenya, colonists and empire, what we see in her latest work is a constancy of shoddy scholarshipMay 12, 2022
8 mins
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Perceptions distorted by the misreading and misrepresentation of Ukraine's history, of claimed Russian grievances and of Western Europe being unwilling to counter Moscow's aggression, all these factors set the stage for tanks to roll. Add to that mix a doddering US president and what Putin perceived was a moment of opportunity proved anything butMay 10, 2022
25 mins
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Putin’s calculation that the West would accept his Georgia victory and return to business-as-usual after a brief diplomatic resistance set the stage for his Ukraine offensive. Where he failed was in forgetting the limits of military power, believing his strategic instincts to be infallible and staking all on a blitzkrieg to seize KyivMay 7, 2022
13 mins
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While post-war Germany successfully integrated itself into the West by repudiating the dreams and delusions of the Nazi paradigm, the Russian power elite, in an act of tragic and bloody irony, has set out to subjugate Ukraine for much the same reasons that saw the Wehrmacht plunge across its own borders in 1941May 5, 2022
11 mins
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It is part of the pathology of power that people who have been legitimately elected without fraud and according to pre-existing rules come to think of themselves as popular. From there it is but a short step to the belief they are entitled to treat their town, city or country as a piece of laboratory apparatusMay 1, 2022
8 mins
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Ulysses for Bogans Most of all he liked grilled mutton […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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Walking with Words Solvitur ambulando —Attrib. Augustine of Hippo […]
April 29, 2022
3 mins
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Urban Blizzard: Québec Τὰ ψυχρὰ θέρεται, θερμὸν ψύχεται, ὑγρὸν αὐαίνεται, […]
April 29, 2022
3 mins
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Untitled God swore vengeance When I blasphemed Him, So […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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The Editing Protocol Somewhere north of the equator a researcher […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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Old Comms Melbourne, early 1970s All were fabrications, exaggerations or […]
April 29, 2022
3 mins
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Linguists as Lovers We go to tragedies because we are […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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Ulva off Mull Turning with a gristle snarl to a […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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Voyager On November 5, 2018, Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere […]
April 29, 2022
5 mins
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A Library of Sand Dunes This womb of words Pages […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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Once a day The dogs are restless, ready to have […]
April 29, 2022
2 mins
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Translators These shapely words we yearn to shapeshift, wordless, wordsmith-smitten, […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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An Open Balcony If I die, Leave the balcony open […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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Billy Never speaks Trapped within damaged brain Body twisted, […]
April 29, 2022
1 mins
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Poet, literary critic, academic and novelist, Adrian Caesar is probably […]
April 28, 2022
7 mins
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In his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth famously defined […]
April 28, 2022
7 mins
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In today’s British landscape of the arts, Alexander Adams stands […]
April 28, 2022
7 mins
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Part 1 of this series examined antipathy towards Anglos, who […]
April 28, 2022
43 mins
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While vaccination against COVID-19 confers obvious and substantial benefits in […]
April 28, 2022
11 mins
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Olga Svoboda, aged eighty-one, two years a widow, and her […]
April 28, 2022
15 mins
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Sir: Covid-induced school lockdowns were expected to have a negative effect […]
April 28, 2022
5 mins
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Following the revelation in Quadrant (“Compensation and Aboriginal Corruption”, March […]
April 28, 2022
8 mins
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Opera Australia's 'Butterfly' isn’t set in Japan, so why bother with an Asian lead? Don’t think too much. Just enjoy Koreans singing Italian in Japan in Australia and feel virtue fill your soul. Back in scorned, multi-ethnic Western Sydney, however, Puccini survives unadulterated, with Penrith’s Joan Sutherland Centre staging its 'La Bohème' set in Paris (of all places). That’s culture for you
April 28, 2022
8 mins
