Review
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Fortunately, Opera Australia’s 'diversity and inclusion' statement 'celebrate[s] different perspectives' and will therefore accept my musings in the spirit intended
September 1, 2024
21 mins
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Australia’s 'educated classes', asserts William J Lines in Romancing the Primitive, have lost faith in the virtues of Western civilisation. Trapped in a zero-sum paradigm, social justice warriors view the past as a purely moral drama of villains and victims and have, accordingly, 'idealised Aboriginal life beyond recognition'. We have come a long way from the liberalism of First Fleet observer Watkin Tench
December 21, 2023
17 mins
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Unless you are emotionally invested in the contest for control of Kashmir, there is every chance you have never heard of 'The Kashmir Files'. Yet the film -- a jingoistic, nationalist, anti-Muslim, anti-intellectual version of Indian history -- was recently Australia's fifth-ranked box office attraction. Those of us who must read the subtitles have the most to learn
April 15, 2022
6 mins
The latest
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John McWhorter's 'Woke Racism' is a much needed rallying cry to push back against 'The Elect' whose refusal to recognise any factor other than racism has added to the many existing ills of black communities. His solution: reject the idea that being sensible about race is 'blaming the victim' and never forget that 'a lot of today’s victimhood claims on race are fake'
April 2, 2022
10 mins
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Richard Alston's new book on the candidate and president who tore up the rule book reverses that old saw about loving the sinner while hating the sin. In this instance, Trump's personal behaviour appalls him but, unlike many conservative critics of the White House maverick, he can look beyond the absence of statesmanlike couth to recognise the man's genuine achievements
January 13, 2022
5 mins
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Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe in 'Farmers or Hunter/Gatherers?' take up where I began with 'Bitter Harvest' and leave no cover for diehard believers hailing Bruce Pascoe for his 'truer history'. Where these leftist academics fall short is in failing to acknowledge Pascoe's compendium of lies underwrites a contemporary political agenda, one they happen to share
July 22, 2021
17 mins
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Alan Reed, now 87, retired in 1990, but in 1967 he was training USAF pilots in Phantom fighter-bomber reconnaissance tactics. He felt inadequate without Vietnam experience but the Pentagon couldn’t order a foreign national to go. Hence the 'invitation' to which Reed responded, 'Yes, please'
May 9, 2021
6 mins
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George Pell's 'Prison Journal' puts pay to the years of media depictions of the Cardinal as a beast with ice in his veins and a steel pump for a heart. If there is a blessing in even the worst and most shameful episodes, his unjust incarceration provided an opportunity to produce this warm, often funny and always insightful account of a good man's faith in the face of adversity
March 18, 2021
13 mins
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A self-proclaimed 'survivor' and architect behind the campaign for same-sex marriage has written a book recounting how the coup was achieved. The very mistress of intersectional windbaggery, we can assume she has, alas, a bright future in this age of politics underwritten by the Left's preference for insult, slur, harassment and 'virtuous' intolerance
June 16, 2020
8 mins
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Were it not for Peter O’Brien’s comprehensive analysis of Dark Emu, this faux history would enter the mainstream uncontested. Now, with the whole cloth of Bruce Pascoe's fantasies being draped over the minds of schoolchildren and the ABC championing his compendium of nonsense, there is a refutation for those who still believe truth matters
January 22, 2020
6 mins
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As lawyer and author Luke Goodrich observes in his new book 'Free to Believe', rights are not gifts of the government to be granted or removed at the whim of politicians and judges. Rather, the State is morally obliged to defend them with vigour, rather than merely indulging them
December 8, 2019
5 mins
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British comedian Andrew Doyle's parodic creation, Titania McGrath, is so true to the addled, contradictory and ever-strident social-justice Left, one suspects he missed a more lucrative vocation. Armed with such insight, he would have made the perfect ABC producer
November 23, 2019
7 mins