Having been shipped out of Britain as criminals, we were shipped back as cannon fodder, so that when peace came, the survivors could return to their real mission as Australians—growing cheap wool and wheat for England. —Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 1987 In our March edition, Peter Jonson heaped much deserved praise on the new […]

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The media doesn't need government-appointed oversees and regulators. What it lacks are editors who make it clear that it is not the business of journalists to lecture, insult and alienate better than half of any big city's potential audience

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Last month, despite plummeting government revenue, the Gillard government could still find an extra $10 million to give to the ABC. The sum did not emerge through the normal channels of government budget process. ABC managing director Mark Scott told a Senate Estimates Committee hearing on February 11 that it had been especially negotiated with […]

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Last month, the Literature Board of the Australia Council slashed its annual grant to Quadrant magazine by 50 per cent. The board reduced our funding from the $40,000 we received in 2012, to just $20,000 for 2013. This is a big chunk out of our modest operating budget. All our Australia Council grant goes to […]

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A panel chaired by former Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham has just halved Quadrant's annual grant, by no means large to begin with. Happily for her old publication and other leftist journals, they have done very well indeed

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A general hostility to irrationalism, superstition and customary practices reminiscent of the dark past, if not actually descended from it, made impassioned believers of the Enlightenment, such as liberals, socialists and communists, unreceptive to traditions, old or novel. Socialists … found themselves acquiring an annual May Day without quite knowing how; National Socialists exploited such […]

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The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm died on October 1, aged ninety-five. I was at a conference in England at the time and was surprised by the local response. The Guardian devoted its entire front page to the news, with more conservative newspapers and commentators not far behind. The London Times gave him both an […]

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Roger Sandall, the editor of Quadrant in 1988-89, died after a long illness on August 11, aged seventy-eight. He was one of Australia’s best essayists and most profound thinkers. What is largely unknown today is that he also had an early career in cinema and at the 1968 Venice Film Festival became one of the […]

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The spectre of decline and fall has long haunted the Western mind. For fifteen hundred years after the fall of Rome, the causes of its collapse were examined in almost every era. The most common lesson was that decline was integral to the system, just as death is integral to life: the responsibilities of a […]

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He is no constitutional authority. He is a law student, and a badly misinformed one at that.

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