Thursday Island is the setting for a story of courage and survival, of coming of age, of sadness and loss and renewal, of identity formation and reformation. It was my Great-Gran’s story. I’ve been hearing about it in family circles all my life, so now, indirectly, it is mine

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The sense of war was omnipresent in those years, the city a sea of variegated uniforms and badges: US and Australian nurses, Australian soldiers, seamen and airmen, Women’s Auxiliary Service, US airmen, soldiers, sailors and marines, occasionally English officers, and Indian soldiers of the Dutch East Indian Army were all represented

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The West’s ruling ideology has been drawn up by self-appointed elites and imposed without debate or consent -- a judicial and political construct and a captious religion. Like Islam, when it first appeared in the seventh century, it deifies what was previously regarded as evil, and demonises what had been regarded regarded as good

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The first time I came to Dubai—on one of my brief stopovers between the Anglophone mother-country and its remotest offshoot—I went to the beach. After a jetlag-induced slumber on the sunbed I woke to see: a couple getting off a pair of camels after a trek; a woman falling off an inflatable obstacle course into […]

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'The Akehurst family had veered from Non­conformity to Anglicanism but by then the Bible was less an adjunct to piety than a family heirloom. In my own childhood it was lodged in a strongbox at the bank and only rarely taken out for family inspection or to show a curious friend. And so, wrapped in brown paper, it came down to me'

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Giles Auty died in September, just short of his eighty-sixth birthday. He had been a valued friend and contributor to Quadrant ever since he arrived in Australia in the 1990s to write for The Australian. This memoir is the last in a series of three he wrote in the months leading up to his death

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It is with a heavy heart that Quadrant mourns the sudden passing of friend and contributor Giles Auty, whose last essay appeared in our pages only three months ago. 'I believe that the greatest harm wrought to art in my lifetime,' he wrote, 'has been the steady intrusion of public funding into the realm of all of the arts.'

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'Have you turned conservative?' It was the early 1980s, I was back in Australia, and the speaker was a friend I had made during the campaign for Whitlam in London. It was the last time I saw her. Those on the Left are very aware that something is wrong with us even before we are. They are a sensitive lot, ever ready to scent dissent

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You met Chou, asked the president of the Chinese national federation? I was visiting Beijing many years later and replied that not only had I met him but he had shaken my hand, which I held up. The president took the honoured hand in her own and held it with the greatest reverence

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Such was Beijing's adherence to protocol that my table companions through two years of interminable Great Hall dinners never varied. There was the Greek who heroically tried to keep conversation going -- a daunting task given that two of our companions were Africans who did not appear to speak any known language

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