November 2023 Volume LXVII Number 11, No. 601
The House That, Always Falling, Never Falls
William Sharp in Australia
Stanley Melbourne Bruce: In Australia’s Service
Who Owns the Earth?
Isaiah Berlin and the Meaning of Life
Edmond Halley and the Ginger Jar
Contents
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"The weather has become attuned to our states of mind -- or vice versa -- and we forget everything very fast. We understand that every experience is momentary. Have you noticed? You can’t hold onto anything in a climate like this: it very quickly becomes debris and rubble, whether it is a moveable asset or a feeling"July 28, 2024
11 mins
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In compiling an anthology of Gippsland poetry, I came across a number of impressive poems by a William Sharp. All I knew about him at the time was that he was a late-nineteenth-century London literary figure who had visited Victoria. As it turned out, there was much more to learn of this leading figure in the Celtic Twilight movementFebruary 2, 2024
13 mins
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Wounded twice, first at Gallipoli and later on the Western Front, the man who is perhaps our most overlooked Prime Minister confided the thought he had been spared for a reason. That purpose, as Paul Hasluck noted upon his death in 1967, was to serve Australia. In that cause, at home and abroad, he admirably succeededJanuary 30, 2024
29 mins
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All living humans are descendants of the same ancestors and thus entitled to partake in the earliest possible claim of ownership. Consequently, the argument of original ownership is at best moot, trivially applicable to all of humanity and in relation to every place. Rather than division, let reason unite usJanuary 11, 2024
8 mins
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Churchill asked his guest what he felt was the most important thing he had ever written. 'White Christmas,' was the reply. Churchill, perplexed, gave up and turned to someone else. It was only later that he was told that through a mix-up it was the composer Irving Berlin who had been invited to enjoy lunch and the wartime Prime Minister's companyNovember 28, 2023
27 mins
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A chance find in a bush op shop proved not only a bargain but an irresistible invitation to ponder the life and achievements of the scientific genius who gave our planet's regular visitor its name. In some ways that is a pity, as the comet is where, for most of us moderns, knowledge of the astronomer and polymath begins and ends. There was much to the man than thatNovember 27, 2023
8 mins
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This remarkable, if slightly flawed, ticking-timebomb of movie by John Frankenheimer, one of Hollywood’s finest old-school directors and a pioneer of the modern-day political thriller, wasn't well received when released in 1977. At a distance of decades, and especially after the 9/11 massacres, its prescience in foreseeing a painstakingly orchestrated terror attack on American soil is, like the film itself, much easier to appreciateNovember 26, 2023
19 mins
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In his latest book, Fact and Fiction, Nicholas Hasluck draws upon the diaries he kept while serving as a judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia. These provide not only a picture of judicial life but also an account of writing Dismissal, his novel about the final days of the Whitlam government. What follows are thoughts and recollectionss on the events of and before November 11, 1975November 25, 2023
34 mins
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To qualify as art, it must be government funded -- but it must not express any gratitude for that funding by delivering anything able to impress or delight a normal Australian taxpayer. Instead, proper tax-funded art should challenge and provoke middle-class normies, preferably to the point of making them feel sickNovember 24, 2023
8 mins
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Constitutionalising your favoured political program, as Albanese & Co. attempted with the Voice, runs into the difficulty that it’s a high-profile public activity difficult to conceal and, when revealed, forcing its proponents into all kinds of undignified postures of denial and casuistry. To avoid those risks, Left progressives have come up with a more subtle and discreet method of evading democracy: namely, 'sortition'November 23, 2023
8 mins
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If China takes Taiwan in a fait accompli, US credibility in Asia would be shattered. To prevent such an epoch-changing shift, former CIA hand Elbridge Colby argues in an important new book that Beijing must be forced assume the burden of any offensive it undertakes while standing condemned before the altar of world opinion,. In other words, to replay Athens at Syracuse, Germany in the Battle of Britain, and Argentina in the FalklandsNovember 22, 2023
32 mins
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Not long ago there was a rat problem in Paris, where the resurgent rodents found champions on the city council: they -- the rats, not the councillors -- were said to be intelligent creatures capable of love, fear and with the same right to exist as we humans. Now that a bedbug plague is the latest pestilence to sweep the city, I look forward to aldermanic defenders arguing for 'biodiversity'. For deserving humans, however, not a word of sympathyNovember 20, 2023
8 mins
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Given that he was excoriated by Joseph Goebbels as an 'atonal musician' whose work debased German womanhood, it is hardly surprising the noted composer and violinist found the general artistic climate in the Third Reich increasingly uncongenial. While his talents were greatly appreciated during the resulting sojourn in Turkey, where he was Kemal Atatürk's chosen instrument to modernise Turkish music, his was hardly an uneventful lifeNovember 18, 2023
15 mins
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What is our nation? After the Voice referendum's crudely manipulated emotionalism and cynical use of bad history, racial hatred and lies in an attempt to break us apart, that is a question the young will need to answer before the haters destroy our good country. I was an adult influenced by one bad short book. My individual recovery was painful but simple; their path is much more difficultNovember 17, 2023
11 mins
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The legal challenge to Woodside's geological survey off the WA coast hangs on claims of 'whale songlines' and an island of fecund turtles. The first instinct is to laugh that someone would file such a preposterous claim and, less funny, that a court might take it seriously. That's when the giggling stops because here we have yet another warning of the threat to development and national wealth posed by activists, not least those on the benchNovember 15, 2023
17 mins
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Thirty years ago, activists captured the popular and political imagination with visions of a distant 'green future'. Now the economic costs are becoming increasingly evident to ordinary citizens. Unpleasant as it is, that pain in the hip-pocket nerve is laying bare the rent-seekers' green myths and liesNovember 14, 2023
6 mins
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The era of cancel culture may create an opening for the return of poetry. Say something controversial in prose, and the cancellation clock starts ticking in Twitter time. Convey the same message in poetry, and you could potentially fly beneath the cancellation radar. True, a politically incorrect poet risks not being understood at all in today’s prose society, but that may be a risk worth takingNovember 13, 2023
8 mins
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Leninism is about bringing together the wretched of the world, promising to make them a little less wretched, and then deploying them as cannon-fodder to batter the existing order to pieces. If you ever wonder how feminists can make common cause with ultra-patriarchal Muslims or bourgeois BLM kids with criminals, there's your answer. It's how the Left rollsNovember 12, 2023
19 mins
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Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s administration, so financially embattled during the pandemic, stood down its musicians in 2020 to avoid bankruptcy. The same orchestra now offers discount tickets for Aboriginal patrons, plus those of Iroquois, Itza, Inuit and any other what-have-you descent. It is a tokenistic, infantilising and totally reprehensible gestureNovember 11, 2023
12 mins
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The great ambition of post-Soviet Poles has been to put as much distance between themselves and all things Russia as possible. That grim history has emphasised the truth of the old maxim, 'If you want peace, prepare for war'. That’s why Warsaw is doubling defence spending, building Europe's most powerful armed forces and rejecting the EU demand that it accept massive immigrationNovember 10, 2023
20 mins
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In light of the war being waged against Western countries by Islamists intent on replacing the democratic secular state with a theocratic dictatorship, and the tacit support this receives from moderate Muslims, any claim that Islam is first and foremost a religion, rather than an ideology of political imperialism, is self-evidently wrong .November 2, 2023
13 mins
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Shuffle Shuffle starts off rather slow the limbs must learn […]October 31, 2023
2 mins
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The ancient blood libel is peddled by organisations claiming to uphold human rights, while undermining the universality of the principle at its very essence. They do this by applying one standard to the Israel, and another to all others, especially those groups with a postmodern moral badge of victimhood supposedly granting a waiver from moral imperativesOctober 31, 2023
9 mins
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Seasonal Rhetoric Why should my sleeve be wet with crying […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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slay none for me Driving the Hume on a hot […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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The Forecourt (at the National Gallery of Australia) a broad […]
October 31, 2023
2 mins
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Mercury The wise, ancient Romans Running in life’s hard marathon, […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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Northern Territory at Centenary from territory to an altered state […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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Drums ’n’ Guitar Tho’ right-handed instruments they play left-handed musicians […]
October 31, 2023
2 mins
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Birthdays A Tense Celebration Once I wished There were fewer […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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From The Cavafy Villanelles Fifty-nine Retired Fifty-nine retired he hated […]
October 31, 2023
3 mins
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despair at the typewriter a shuddering panache of clingy letters, […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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Wild Ducks God! Filter-feeding, whistle-wild ducks Take flight like trim-feathered […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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Our Dog A working dog, Chip drove the mob in […]
October 31, 2023
2 mins
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Home from Rookwood A twitch of fate, and there were […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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A Trip to Flanders In Flanders the poppies bloom blood-red, […]
October 31, 2023
2 mins
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Photo of a Boy in Flight He threw himself off […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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Grandfather “The suffering of wood,” you always sighed, Whenever someone […]
October 31, 2023
3 mins
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Wrens (For Luke) A relief against The heat-hammered afternoon: A […]
October 31, 2023
1 mins
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Slowly the cryptic webbing of mortality and matter is easing […]
October 30, 2023
11 mins
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Media bosses, like policemen, are not always loved but they […]
October 30, 2023
7 mins
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Lyn Ashcroft Polyphony of Life Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s perception […]
October 30, 2023
12 mins
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Roughly halfway through Eugene Vodolazkin’s A History of the Island, […]
October 30, 2023
11 mins
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I have created a calendar and listening guide for you, reader, to create your own AusMusic Month playlist. I have deliberately selected composers whose works are infrequently broadcast so that you either become acquainted or reacquainted with some truly wonderful Australian composers who are either lesser-known or forgotten by time. For ease of finding recordings and listening, all works mentioned on the calendar are available on YouTube. While I could have listed numerous works per composer, I have only listed one work for the sake of brevity and ease of publishing (though I would love to occupy the following twenty pages). Please do explore the composers further.October 30, 2023
7 mins
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It is very rare in Australian political history for the […]
October 30, 2023
12 mins
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Sir: “Drunk and disorderly” is no longer an offence in […]
October 30, 2023
4 mins
