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Dear Stan, I hope you’re glad to hear from me.
I’ve read your latest on the ABC.
You wrote you’ve suffered from asphyxiation
In witnessing the Queen’s commemoration.
The notion that the populace should mourn
Is, by your telling, too much to be borne!
Enraged, you’ve felt a catalogue of pains,
Foremost, a strange ‘constriction in your veins’,
But also, dizzy spells and laboured breath.
(Old mate, be careful not catch your death!)
In terms of your paroxysms of rage,
Whose fits and throes you’ve struggled to assuage,
I must confess I found them odd at first,
Even as someone intimately versed
In how obsessions of identity
Can rob the kindest soul of empathy.
Regardless, I’m determined to extract
The core contentions of your latest tract.
Could there be something pertinent to glean?
Or is it just a cataract of spleen?
To start, let’s deconstruct your anecdote—
A stage on which you hector and emote.
It takes us back to nineteen-fifty-four,
A year you’re not reluctant to deplore.
It finds your mother in a tin-roofed humpy,
‘Dirt-poor’, unprivileged and, worse yet, jumpy,
For Queen Elizabeth, but newly crowned,
Was, to the joy of many, Dubbo-bound.
Students were urged to join the greeting flocks
But only if they owned a pair of socks,
Which posed a stark dilemma for your mother.
(She settled for the cast-offs of her brother.)
Your op-ed urges readers to compassion,
So while bigheartedness is back in fashion
Perhaps it’s time that someone let you know
That every family has tales of woe.
And since you like your characters unshod
I’ll try to give your preferences a nod
And offer something from the Great Depression.
(Few of my grandma’s friends could claim possession
Of socks or footwear in those dreadful years.)
With rental payments six weeks in arrears,
Wally, her elder brother, aged thirteen,
Dropped out of high school, thenceforth to be seen
Hoeing and weeding in a market garden.
Sure, he was ‘white’ but lest your feelings harden,
Let me assure you of his shoeless state;
It proved determinative of his fate.
For Wally trod upon a rusty nail,
Bringing on spasms nothing could curtail.
Aghast, his parents viewed the baleful scene,
Waiting for gracious death to intervene.
Poverty, shoelessness and tribulation
Were, I’ll agree, the much too common station
Of people from the years before TV.
But let me state my viewpoint candidly:
None of these problems had a single cause.
To blame the Crown, which didn’t write the laws,
Would strike me as a hare-brained contribution.
Hadn’t I ever browsed the Constitution?
Class would be relevant in Wally’s case,
In Betty Grant’s, you’d have to look at race,
Yet race and class were surely intertwined,
A fact your ‘think piece’ should’ve underlined.
And let’s add something further to the blender:
I’m mad at you for skimming over gender.
As someone versed in feminist critique,
You ought to spot the lapse whereof I speak:
I think we’re owed a better explanation
Of why your uncle made the sock-donation.
If gender, race and class are interlocking,
My theory should be anything but shocking:
The matter smacks of women’s subjugation,
A blatant case of sex discrimination.
I’ll plainly state the thought you’ve found unnerving:
Your grandfolks thought that boys were more deserving.
Well, aren’t the hermeneutics of suspicion
The go-to method of your coalition?
I know you’re fond of personal vignettes,
But I’m suspicious of how far one gets
By primping grievances for mass consumption.
Instead, let’s push on to your main presumption—
The Queen was guilty of imperialism,
The ‘queenpin’ of a bloody cataclysm.
Herein, we find your special seasoning:
A dash of motivated reasoning!
For when the queen ascended to the throne,
The colonies were striking out alone.
India’s flag, in orange, white and green,
Was, on the flagpole of the Red Fort, seen.
Likewise, in Pakistan the Star and Crescent
Was getting very close to omnipresent.
More to the point, from Accra to KL,
Self-rule was coming like a rising swell,
And by the monarch’s Silver Jubilee
Empire was ceded to a large degree.
A fair assessment of Elizabeth’s reign
Would’ve addressed this de-colonial strain.
Instead, you didn’t have a word to say
About new nations, forging their own way;
Gullible readers could be led to think
The map remained the deepest shade of pink.
By making this behemoth-sized omission
You wound up in the dubious position
Of either seeming not to care or know
About the victories our archives show.
But let’s pretend the clichés you enlist
(Who could forgive your use of ‘iron fist’?)
Really do prove that murderous oppression
Was, for the Queen, a singular obsession.
Moreover, let me sign on to your rightness
In claiming history’s ‘a hymn to whiteness’.
Further, I’ll swear you never shot a dud
And thus agree: ‘the past was penned in blood.’
Can we now get to reconciliation?
Might we conceive of broad cooperation?
You’ve made it amply clear your answer’s, ‘No,
The road to peace has countless miles to go.’
The tenor of your comments on The Voice
Suggest you’d find no reason to rejoice
Should referendum voters plump for ‘Yes’.
The reasons why aren’t difficult to guess:
Each step, while vital, doesn’t do the job,
So something extra’s owing to your mob.
The Voice to Parliament falls ‘short of justice’,
But why it disappoints, you won’t instruct us;
Or rather, you never lay it out forthrightly.
Yet I surmise that something most unsightly
Lurks in the background of your jeremiad:
The second letter of the D-E-I triad.
Based on your scribblings, it appears to me
You’ve joined the peevish cult of ‘equity’,
Whose converts cannot glance at a statistic
Without becoming staunchly moralistic,
Whose knee-jerk to the slightest differential
Is to pronounce it highly consequential.
Disparate rates of poverty and wealth
(And every metric known to public health)
Are prima facie an abomination,
Within the ranks of your denomination.
You mention inmates ‘languishing in cells’
And spell it out they’re Aboriginals,
As if the cause of their incarceration
Was indisputably discrimination.
For ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ are academic
To those who think of outcomes as systemic.
The state which generates inequities
Is, come what may, the villain of the piece.
That’s why you make no effort to explore
Figures about your people and the law.
Yet I found stats in writing this epistle,
Which, let me warn you, made my arm hairs bristle.
I thought I’d take a look at homicide,
An act whose weight can hardly be denied,
And found a criminology report
Whose findings won’t be easy to distort.
Though constituting only three percent
Of those inhabiting this continent,
First Nations people currently comprise
Fifteen percent of those who take a life.
Their victims, just in case you’re curious,
Are overwhelmingly Indigenous.
So when you suffer from more dizzy spells
While contemplating ‘languishers in cells’,
Consider, many of them killed their wives,
With fully half the crimes involving knives.
But I suspect there’s nothing I could say
To make you see the world a different way.
To you, it’s more or less foundational
That trauma’s intergenerational,
Meaning these killings have their truest cause
In bygone policies and long-junked laws.
The one whose fist delivers the assault
Is, to your way of thinking, not at fault.
Wherever passions have become vehement,
We see declining prospects for agreement,
So let’s move on from victimised offenders
And all the anguish that the past engenders.
I note that in your op-ed you impeach
The forces that have circumscribed your speech.
‘Everyone from the PM down’, you claim,
Has eyed your right to speak and taken aim.
Your piece implies you’re strong in the belief
That free speech shouldn’t ever come to grief—
A view with which I fervently agree.
Are we now closing in on harmony?
Though doubts remain, I’m hoping to conclude
We share a kernel of similitude,
As, now and then, you’ve seemed intent to fight
For free speech as a fundamental right.
When Caitlin Moran strutted onto Twitter,
Determined to be a most obnoxious critter,
Saying that Friday was a ‘good fkn day’
Because she’d heard the Queen had passed away,
Calling the head of state a ‘dumb dog’ too,
As if half-hearted vileness wouldn’t do,
You championed her right to give offense,
From which I’d love to take the inference
That you believe that everyone enjoys
The right to speech which needles and annoys.
Were it the case, I’d have to change my mind
And call you a liberal of the steadfast kind,
The shield of free speech, howsoever vile
Or mean or odd or hard to reconcile.
We’d listen while you took a solemn vow
To guard the rights of Evans and Folau,
Although you felt disgusted by their views.
Further, you wouldn’t be afraid to schmooze
With paleopathologist, Stephen Webb,
(Despite the fact your high esteem would ebb
With many members of the right-on mob.)
You’d let them caterwaul and do your job—
Edging us closer to the honest truth.
Hearing Professor Webb, who’s quite the sleuth,
You’d learn of evils done by First Nations men
(For ‘trauma’ meant a fractured skull back then),
With women being made to bear the brunt
Of cranial wounds, from weapons sharp and blunt.
The subject of deliberate attack,
With many blows inflicted from the back,
These women carry fissures on their skulls
Whose horror neither time nor bromide dulls.
But this is where my faith begins to waver,
For, more and more, free speech is out of favour,
As hissing hellcats labour to conflate
Divergent views with ‘phobias’ and Hate.
I worry that your principles will crumble
Once you’re confronted with the rough-and-tumble
Of blue-haired activists collecting scalps.
(Their stack, by now, looms taller than the Alps.)
These are the ones who’ll pressure you to serve
The Right-On Narrative and never swerve.
They’ll never rest until you take the knee
And hang your pronouns out for all to see.
They’ll claim to want to amplify your voice
But their opinions are the only choice.
Dear Stan, you’ve had your say about the Queen,
(A dummy spit unsettling to be seen)
But I’ll defend your right to give offense
To speak while making precious little sense.
But stay on guard around your PC chums
For they’ll abandon you when trouble comes,
Denouncing you without a second’s pause
If they perceive you’ve jeopardised the Cause.
And if, in time, you start to fear their rage,
That’s when they’ll really have you in a cage.
From there on, what is there to do but live
In faithful service of the Narrative?
In this dilemma, many think it shrewd
To shore up the buttresses of certitude,
Spending their time with fellow ‘true believers’
A mix of cranks and expert self-deceivers.
Thenceforth, they rush from diatribe to paean,
Aping the mindset of the Manichean.
But let me warn you of the hidden cost
Of thinking that your enemies lost
Or base or cracked or lacking in compassion,
A troglodyte that someone should refashion.
It taints the spirit with self-righteousness,
From where it plunges into spitefulness.
Incognizant that anything’s amiss,
You plummet further into the abyss.
Closing your eyes upon a world turned foul
You taunt the night with your demented howl.
Raymond, that is brilliant.
So many truths and messages,
Admired and laughed all the way, pure genius.
Wow! Nothing more needs to be said, even if I could find the words.
If you get darker as you get older, I must have been positively ghostly at birth.
Yes, it’s a real worry. I wonder if Stan has noticed it, or if any of his loved ones, or workmates, have told him? There are medical conditions, some pretty nasty, that can increase one’s skin pigmentation. Maybe Stan should see a doctor?
The north has Justin Trudeau, a juvenile dictator who once saw fit to don blackface. Here in the Antipodes, all seems reversed. Stan previously found it useful to wear whiteface – no more, apparently. It would be offensive, but he’s probably in his second childhood by now.
Peter, I noticed exactly the same thing. Amazing how the widespread deep poverty of ordinary people of all races and ethnic origin during the depression and post-World War II years seems never have registered on the likes of Grant. My own childhood was every bit as disadvantaged as his, and hand-me-down clothing was a working class norm. Neither the late Queen nor any of her ancestors had anything to do with it.
I had the first new set of clothes I had ever had, at 16 – brought with the wages from my first job, and the A.D.F. gave me the first new pair of shoes I ever owned, three years later.
I went barefoot to primary school most days 1969-1973 at Como State Primary. Not uncommon for boys in the West . Apparently some Dr had a theory it was good for our feet but I think mum and dad spared on four x two pairs of shoes sandals socks.
All was fine until I got a bit of coke bottle glass in my foot from the now evil P&C coke machine which was in the corridor.outside.
The older Stan gets the blacker he gets, at least in mind which is worse than dyed skin.
A fabulous piece of pithy poetry ringing true but full of inconvenient truths.
Like others first thing I noticed was Stan getting darker as he got older. Is it a reflection of his growing anger boiling up inside or is it frequent visits to the tanning machine to make him look more aboriginal and authentic.
The other thing I noticed is that he must have some Asian blood – no ear lobes and almond eyes and of course lots of white genes as well.
People lie by omission so Stan and his urban elite colleagues have been doing heaps. No acknowledgement of the hard times of white Australia during the Depression – no bushtucker for them. Nor the non aboriginal children who today don’t have the proper uniforms for school, nor the comfort of a good breakfast; nor the opportunity of going on school outings etc etc. These disadvantages are not suffered by indigenous households because they get extra allowances for being black. If their children want to go to University their fees are paid and accommodation as well plus a generous living allowance. Hmmm! maybe I’ll try and do a Bruce Pascoe.
In Sydney’s outer Western Suburbs Housing Commission estates in 1948 till 1955 where I grew up, and then on the rural backblocks of outer Mt. Druitt till 1960, many of the boys at my school winter and summer had bare feet at school and for doing farm work before school. I spent three years at high school between 1954 to 1956 before I left home at fourteen and got a job and till then never once had a pair of socks without holes in them. I wore cardboard in my shoes to cover the holes in those too, and renewed it regularly when it disintegrated in the rain. Socks as well as clothes were hand me downs. The levels of poverty in those times for white kids and our aboriginal friends and neighbours (some of the latter being better off than us) were at times extreme. Luxuries such as pencil cases with pens and pencils and rubbers to go in them were for ‘rich’ kids. My high school ‘Globite’ suitcase was falling apart when I left after third year: two better-off kids had used it before it came to me. Christmas stockings held a tin whistle, plus a few other similar bits and pieces with the foot part always producing an apple, an orange and a banana (these were rare treats).
Having been to South Korea recently, and looking over the DMZ to North Korea and knowing what kids there suffered and are still suffering, to say nothing of those children still living in the Ukraine, and countless other places in the word, Stan Grant and I should count ourselves very lucky to have the memories held by our Post-War generation of Aussie kids. It wasn’t all bad by any means in the grand scheme of things, no matter what ‘intersection’ of class, race and gender we experienced and managed to survive.
Thanks for the poetic read through all of Stan’s woes, Raymond. These all flow very nicely in verse.
Great message delivered brilliantly. Thanks. I dunno much about poetry, but i like Banjo and Henry and John and now Raymond.
Then there was Dorothea, back when we celebrated telling the truth instead of ‘truth-telling’. She was proud to call it ‘my country’. Now our political ‘leaders’ and bureaucrats immerse themselves in nice white smoke from fake ceremonies ‘welcoming’ them to country that should belong to all Australians.
But they Lock It Up and Let It Burn in unnecessary holocaust producing huge volumes of foul black smoke, death and destruction. They blame climate change to cover their derrieres. The ignorant arrogance is breathtaking.
Fairdinkum blackfellas with bare bums and feet managed the country through tens of thousands of years of sometimes extreme climate change.
Now we’re exhorted to save pristine wilderness.
The only true wilderness is between greenies ears. Unfortunately they dominate both sides of parliament.
Dorothea Mackellar celebrated our land “of droughts and flooding rains”: “For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold”
Now fairdinkum aussies, black white and brindle are paying threefold and more to the climate crazy rainbow watermelons who are destroying our society, our economy and our natural environment.
Great comment, Vic. I will take this opportunity to thank you for all your efforts over the years to call-out the self-serving liars who twist the truth in the service of their own self-aggrandisement, or by their promotion of phoney ideologies about the nature of Australia’s environment.
I am grateful to Connor Court for having published your books – two of which I have – and value greatly – because they are academically rigorous in their exposition of the truth about the actual ecology of Australia. Both Ian Plimer and yourself have been indefatigable in promoting our understanding of Australia’s real physical environment, and by standing up to the politically powerful Juggernaut of ideological deception that seeks to distort our grasp of reality. The carefully constructed public persona of Stan Grant is but one example of that distortion. Well done!
Clearly the Burns blood flows well in your veins!
I was born just after HMQ’s viist to Dubbo. Except for school uniforms and one ‘good’ pair of shorts and a shirt, all my clothes were hand made by my mother. We had one kerosene heater and our open wood fire for special occasions in winter, happily the local treed-over paddocks produced the wood at no cost but labour. My mother in law was a depression child. Her one toy was an old useless hammer wrapped in old cloth. That was her ‘doll’. They all lived in a couple of tents on a vacant block. So poverty, or straitened circs are not the exclusive preserve of Aborigines. Nor is education and attainment as Stan is testimony to.
You are a class act Raymond, absolutely superb.
All you guys n girls here at the rant are a breath of fresh air, and I mean everyone.
Brings back memories of doing sums and spelling on a slate with a damp rag to erase. Not to mention grandmother knitting bathers that filled with water so that you could barely walk out of the water.
Great poem and equally great comments. Apparently there is only one history now, and that is of Aborigines. I have many stories handed down about the Depressions in the 1930s and the 1890s both from the family and from others that would make Stan’s mother’s situation look comfortable. It was massively non- Aborigines who built Australia through hard physical work and at times social and economic suffering not seen in other colonial situations . It was we who dug the ditches, worked as housemaids, laid the railway lines, dug the cuttings for roads, worked as timber getters etc and the men fought for their country in New Guinea while the women at home juggled with ration cards and the possibility that their menfolk would not survive. Other parts of the Empire where the indigenous were in the majority had the bwana sitting back while the Africans did all the hard work, or the sahib supervising the various wallahs and so on. We built this country through blood, sweat and tears as they say, from the bottom up, and are very proud of our Australian identity that is now being trashed by some Aboriginal and migrant activists (politicians??), both of whom either don’t know the history of Australia or pretend not to know it.
Raymond Burns IMHO should be elevated to the status of Poet Lorikeet.
“It taints the spirit with self-righteousness,
From where it plunges into spitefulness.
Incognizant that anything’s amiss,
You plummet further into the abyss.
Closing your eyes upon a world turned foul
You taunt the night with your demented howl.”
To which I dare to add, with apologies to Burns:
To the bright side let us turn, and loudly cheer,
But for James Cook, you just would not be here!
Nor any of the rest of us, I’d add,
To feel indignant, cheerful, bad or sad.
So Stan, raise up a glass to Captain Cook,
Don’t mope about like some besodden chook.
Raymond, thank you for your post – both clever and entertaining. And then there’s poor Stan – it seems every time he opens his mouth these days, all he does is make a fool of himself – being either idiotic, nasty or both. More to be pitied than scorned. And a smoked salmon socialist to boot.
February 15, 2023
This piece makes some valid points, but the “poetry” itself is just plain doggerel–and I’ve read better doggerel than this. To compare it to Banjo Patterson and Robert Burns is laughable. The rhyming is often forced; some lines are too long; the type of poetic rhythm is impossible to decipher as it changes from one line to the next. Dean Alston, the political cartoonist in the West Australian, writes far better poetry.
One thing I will say is that this piece is at least identifiable as poetry, unlike the vast majority of what is published in Quadrant. I do not set myself up as a poet in the deepest sense of the word, and in the interests of full disclosure, I will add that I have had poetry rejected by Quadrant.
However, my opinion of its “poetry” was formed well before that. Why would a publication that seeks to preserve Western culture, and decries the dumbing-down and corruption of modern education, publish almost exclusively free verse–which Robert Frost (who was, himself, guilty of writing it) compared to playing tennis with the net down? And why would it sometimes publish poetry that is downright dirty? Surely, we could leave such “artistic expression” to the left-wing crowd.
Rebekah:
All art appreciation is subjective, IMHO. No doubt there are widely-read scholars in Mecca and Riyadh who would condemn The Bard for his Othello. (God damn their eyes.!)
In my student days, used to wile away time between lectures in pleasant conversation with such luminaries as Clive James and Les Murray. Neither of them ever did much for me as poets, though Les scored an awful lot of literary grants over the years with his (IMHO again) chopped-up prose and trivial profundities.
I have liked what I have liked, because I have liked it. Ever since The Cat Sat on the Mat.
Good stuff Ian. You got me over the last line.
But Rebekah did the darn gone honest truth resonate?
Was it music to your heart’s, content ?
Did it rhyme where it matters?
Raymond is just a man doing the best he can.
An afterthought.
Rebekah, just like Banjo , Raymond’s piece flowed from go to woe, if you like, just as a good wine – in this case, it was probably a decent red, full of histamine as they are.
February 17, 2023
I wasn’t criticizing the content; I was criticizing the poetry. I had a decent education and was taught what proper poetical form was. (In my personal opinion, the “flow” of this piece cannot hold a candle to “The Man from Snowy River.”) I’ve read a lot of “poetry” that had good sentiments and a good message, but was terrible artistically. In my opinion, poor form harms the good message being proclaimed.
And I repeat that Quadrant’s upholding of traditional Western civilization and criticism of modern education do not fit with its choice of poetry to publish.
Rebekah, with all the serious problems facing our country (Ukraine war, World War 3 ?, Chinas’ invasion of Taiwan etc etc) the best you can do is criticise the form of the poetry rather than applaud its content. I wish I had as little on my mind as you. “Poor forms harms the message”- really? You sound like a literary snob.
I applaud this work. I’m getting more incensed each day with the rise of lies of the urban aboriginal elite and Stan is just one of them One can lie by ommission and that’s the big thing coming out in all the rubbish said about the Voice and why we should vote for it.
You probably support the Yes vote
If you read all of Quadrant’s articles and their comments, you will know that I comment, though not frequently, on a few issues besides poetry. My original comment was motivated, not by the piece itself, but by comments that to me were giving it a status that simply was not true (and by the, in my opinion, poor state of Quadrant’s poetry in general). I was unaware that holding to certain standards made me a snob–although, I suppose, that would be one definition.
And as for the “Voice”–I stated clearly that this piece made some valid points, and that I was not criticizing the content. To jump to the nasty conclusion that you have, simply because you disagree with what I say, is hardly justified. I am completely against the “Voice,” and constitutional recognition of any particular group.
Rebekah: You say “I wasn’t criticizing the content; I was criticizing the poetry. I had a decent education and was taught what proper poetical form was.”
As in architecture, form follows function. Raymond Burns chose a metrical form and rhyming scheme appropriate to his purpose of gentle mockery of Stan Grant. In my subjective opinion, it is appropriate.
Had John Keats chosen say, to use Burns’ form of a series of rhyming couplets, or perhaps a series of limericks for his ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ it would have lost one helluva lot of its effect.
‘Proper poetical’ is as the occasion demands. IMHO.
Your ‘humble’ opinion, Ian, happens to be the well-informed, intelligent one. The greatest of English poets, wrote the greatest of English poems in free verse, as – as he points out – his new subject matter, ‘Of man’s first disobedience’, required a new form. Arguably the greatest (and certainly the most influential) of twentieth-century poets, and Nobel-Prize winner, and, by the way, a spirited defender of Western civilisation and the best in education, T.S. Eliot, also wrote in free verse. And numerous other poets, who – like Milton and Eliot – did and do, use a variety of forms and write in formal rhyme and rhythm when it suits them for their subject, and not, when it doesn’t. And so it is, in Quadrant, where a wide range of poetry, in free verse and in regular rhythm and rhyme, is published, and (as letters to me indicate) is widely appreciated, here and overseas. And this will continue.
A more suitable image would be the flag inverted with a large yellow $ in the centre.
Spot on the money, of course, Marxist capitalism the bankruptcy is going well.
Hey Ray, are you sure that your name is not Robbie instead of Ray? I’ve never read anything so praiseworthy about someone so underserving.
Thank you for the ‘Poet Lorikeet’. Brilliant!
This epistle struck a chord with me
So flowing, so witty
filled me with reverie
for humour
now so sadly missing
From all those intent on doing all the hissing
And how strongly I felt I must agree
With the lack of genuine empathy
By those so smug
on ABC TV
Who smirk at such as we and me
I don’t pretend that this is poetry …
Unlike the brilliance
shown here by RB
In saying something entertainingly
But also,
oh so clever and intelligently
And if it comes to personal vignettes
Of socks or –
torn mosquito nets?
They sometimes come
like an assault
As if my ancestors
weren’t worth their salt
Though my parents lived
through the Great Depression
And, through eviction, suffered dispossession
It hurts to hear my ancestors so offended
And their unique stories so totally upended
I would like to thank RB
For such delectable poetry
That made me laugh
spontaneously
Then pulled me up so sharp,
to serious be
When he hit the mark with such compelling accuracy
I hope there’s more to come
It’s so refreshing
And makes up for the daily diet of ‘depression ‘ –
Another omniscient present-day obsession!
Good on you Patricia. It sounds as though Raymond’s Epistle, was at least, a metaphorical, if not a Theo chin up.
Thank you to everyone who shared kind remarks about the poem. Greatly appreciated!