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First Person

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First Person

Thursday Island and the Quetta Survivors

  • Debra Kuss
  • 22nd February 2023
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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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First Person

A Packet of Cornflakes: Childhood in Wartime Brisbane

  • Ian Callinan
  • 5th January 2023
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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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First Person

Devoured by Weaklings: The Chosen Fate of the West

  • Harry Cummins
  • 23rd August 2022
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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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First Person

Freedom and the Great Man of Dubai

  • James Ackhurst
  • 29th June 2022
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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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First Person

A Bible Story: A Geneva in the Family

  • Chritopher Akehurst
  • 27th December 2021
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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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First Person

Everything to Learn

  • Giles Auty
  • 28th November 2020
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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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First Person

Learning to Be a Painter

  • Giles Auty
  • 2nd October 2020
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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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First Person

The Great Escape

  • Michael Connor
  • 22nd August 2020
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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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First Person

My Pioneering Role in Sino-Australian Relations

  • David Barnett
  • 6th August 2020
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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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First Person

The Trials of a Junior Diplomat in 1970s Beijing

  • Ted Rule
  • 14th July 2020
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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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