Boyd’s ‘Brides’ and other matters

Apolitical Brides

SIR: I am grateful to Christopher Heathcote for his thorough dismissal (March 2016) of attempts by feminist academics and curators to reinterpret and politicise Arthur Boyd’s Bride series.

The Angry Penguins painters believed in artistic autonomy. They were deliberately apolitical, partly because they believed that art transcended politics and partly because of their bitter fight and narrow victory over the communist Realists in the Contemporary Art Society who demanded social, as opposed to individual and personal, “responsibility”.

Attempts to politicise the Bride series serve only to diminish the original vision of Arthur Boyd, whose creative force came out of personal experience, including literature, the old masters and the Bible.

Felicity St John Moore
South Yarra, Vic

A New Crusade

SIR: Sometimes as Christians, in certain exceptional cases, we have to go to war. A crusade is such a war, when we are not defending our borders against an invasion of the normal kind, but are faced with a system of such malignity that we cannot let it flourish anywhere. Things have, I believe, in our modern world, now come to such a head that it is time to go on a crusade.

For half a century now our leaders in Australia have exercised their duty of care mainly towards a few minority groups. We, the common people, have been steadily deprived of work, adequate salaries, housing, proper health care and education.

This game of Strip Jack Naked has been played using a number of victim cards. Now, however, one “victim” group has appeared with devastating speed and it is anything but a victim. It is Islam and it is steadily gaining control of the West. Speed on the part of Islam, and of its allies on the Left, is necessary, because ordinary people are also waking up with astonishing speed themselves. This, I would say, is why Muslim migrants are being poured into our countries with such urgency.

We are therefore faced with a simple choice. We can either let things take their course and cease to be Christians, can become effectively slaves in our own lands, or we can fight. And if we choose to fight, we must throw everything we have into our effort and support parties who oppose Islam and the Left, and if we fail to win elections, we can fight in the inevitable civil war against the Left and Islam. Either we saddle up and go on a crusade, or Christian civilisation will go under and we will become slaves in a giant new caliphate.

Peter Gilet
via e-mail

Correction

Sir: May I make a small correction to my piece carried in the July-August issue, “A Forensic Footnote to the Forrest River Affair”? In it I mistakenly named the legal counsel for the two police officers implicated in the 1926 Forrest River murder allegations as William Nairn. In fact, it was Walter Nairn.

Nairn was an interesting fellow. He had a legal career in Perth before entering politics, serving in the Commonwealth parliament with both the Nationalist and United Australia parties, rising to be Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1940 to 1943.

Rod Moran
Yanchep, WA