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33011_QBooks_Ads_V5.indd 1 27/09/2016 10:23 AM march 2020 No. 564 Volume Lxiv, Number 3

letters 2 Dudley Horscroft, Martin Gordon, Christopher Heathcote, John Goodman, Ned Overton, Frank Upshire, Michael McAuley, Ian Bernadt, David Marlow editor’s column 6 The Crown Prosecutor’s Retraction Keith Windschuttle asperities 9 John O’Sullivan astringencies 12 Anthony Daniels fourth column 4 1 Closet Fliers Christopher Akehurst society 16 Status Seekers and the Quiet Australian Peter Murphy law 22 The Burden of Proof and the Pell Case Peter West tributes 26 The Texture of : Clive James, 1939–2019 David Free 35 Not Gold but It Stays Good: The Poetry of Clive James Stephen McInerney 42 The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton Mervyn F. Bendle education 49 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments Mark Latham dublin letter 58 How Sinn Fein Has Shattered Irish Politics Kevin Myers politics 64 The Trump Doctrine and the Return of Pax Americana Daryl McCann 68 Beware of Identity Politics Collin Jones sexual politics 70 The Strange Death of Woman Michael Giffin france 72 How Freedom Dies Michael Connor 76 Understanding and Misunderstanding China Wolfgang Kasper science 83 The Growing Support for Nuclear Power Tony Grey books 87 Bitter Harvest by Peter O’Brien Alistair Pope 88 Superpower by Ross Garnaut Michael Green 92 Violence in the Name of God by Joel Hodge Ivan Head 94 Free to Believe by Luke Goodrich Greg Walsh film 96 Ride Like a Girl: The Making of a Champion Joe Dolce architecture 100 Rethinking the Architecture of Bush Dwellings and Settlements Philip Drew stories 104 Train Tracks Louis Groarke 108 The Hard Blue Edge Barry Gillard sweetness & light 111 Tim Blair Poetry 11: Firework Night at the Hospital James Ackhurst; 25: Dancers Rowena Wiseman; 40: Dead Mother Joe Dolce; 41: Four poems in translation Ted Rule; 62: Butterfly Sleeps Perched on the Temple Bell Marilyn Peck; 63: Dove in a Squall J.S. Westbrook; 69: The Loss Alessio Zanelli; 74: Climber Derek Wright; 75: Four poems Jason Morgan; 82: Suburbia Jason Morgan; 86: Two poems John Ellison Davies; 99: All Our Good Morrows Derek Wright; 103: When Did the Ordinary Become Extraordinary? David Harrison; 107: 2020 Andrew Lee; 110: Keepsake James Ackhurst; Make Life an Art Rowena Wiseman L e t t e r s rises during the year.” Australian investors take this with a pinch of salt but many of them decide it is time to borrow and invest before Editor Faint Rays of Hope the rates go up. Banks put their Keith Windschuttle rates up, foreign investors decide [email protected] Sir: Andrew Stone (January- that Australia is a good place to Editor, International February 2020) paints a bleak pic- invest and money floods in—per- John O’Sullivan ture of the economic future of our haps only a trickle at first. Firms

Liter ary Editor country: “However, even if central start or expand and unemployment Barry Spurr bankers had a road-to-Damascus goes down—slowly, as more are [email protected] experience, it is too late now for attracted from among the under- anything to be done which is not employed. As money comes in to Deputy Editor & Fiction Editor going to result in considerable and Australia, the exchange rate goes George Thomas prolonged economic .” up, and more money comes in, [email protected] Take the RBA’s 2 to 3 per looking for a spot to make profit- Editor, Quadr ant Online cent range for “desired” inflation. able investments. More firms hire, Roger Franklin Inflation is still theft, even if it is unemployment falls again and [email protected] kept at 2 to 3 per cent. While this wages start going up, with negligi- Contributing Editors range may have been desirable ble effects on inflation. Theatre: Michael Connor when inflation was 15 per cent (in Can this be improved? Yes, the Television and Film: Joe Dolce the Whitlam days) and cash rates Super deduction is raised to 12.5 were 17.5 per cent (January 1990) per cent but all super deductions olumnists C it is totally inept when inflation is are made optional. Some will hap- Anthony Daniels about 1.5 per cent and the cash rate pily pay the 12.5 per cent, but most Tim Blair 0.75 per cent. Time for this desired of the working populace will opt Subscriptions range to be abolished or at least out, preferring to have the $5000 cut severely. John Stone comments or so (after tax) in their pockets, Phone: (03) 8317 8147 (also January-February 2020) on and spending it on what they really Fax: (03) 9320 9065 the “very silly talk” from the RBA want—to the joy of shopkeepers Post: Quadrant Magazine, suggesting that it could look at and retailers. The Treasurer will be Locked Bag 1235, negative cash rates and quantitative happy, getting the boost to income North Melbourne VIC 3051 easing—printing money! Time for tax from those who get the money Email: quadrantmagazine@ the Treasurer to step in and remove in hand rather than deferring it to data.com.au this power from the RBA. To the dim and distant future where, Publisher paraphrase Georges Clemenceau: with 3 per cent inflation, it would “Banking is too serious a matter to have lost half its value anyway! be left to central bankers.” Quadrant (ISSN 0033-5002) is Dudley Horscroft But what should be done? Tell published ten times a year by Banora Point, NSW Quadrant Magazine Limited, the RBA board members to keep Suite 2/5 Rosebery Place, quiet. Saying that the economy is Balmain NSW 2041, Australia bad and rates may have to be cut Misguided Mantra ACN 133 708 424 again is no way to improve the economy. It suggests to potential Sir: I do a lot of reading, Production investors that they should keep including Quadrant, the Economist Design Consultant: Reno Design their money in their pockets. and so on. I was impressed in Art Director: Graham Rendoth Andrew Stone shows why keeping particular with the article by interest rates at historically low lev- Aynsley Kellow (January-February Printer: Ligare Pty Ltd els is not working. 2020). Given Kellow’s experience 138–152 Bonds Road, Thought experiment: Treasurer it demolished the Left’s misguided Riverwood NSW 2210 takes control and writes the script and destructive hysteria and over- Cover: Colours of Australia for the RBA for their next meeting: reach about the environment pretty “Hamersley” “Conditions are not so bad as we effectively. We should recognise thought, the economy is improv- that there are real environmental www.quadrant.org.au ing and so the cash rate is raised problems (in particular climate to 1 per cent. We expect further change) and we need to deal with

2 Quadrant March 2020 Letters them more effectively than the a political debacle, demonstrating sedentary, with the industrial current or previous a total lack of political judgment. and cities. Medieval Labor administrations have. I understand how big the dollars and later Europe and America, for The article by Andrew Stone are and how diabolical the politics example, were places of perpetual (in the same issue) is also guilty are. A title like “Restoring Hope” movement along country paths of the error of over-reach. Over- (and its sweeping mantra-like rhe- and rivers, much of it colourful, reach is a recurring theme in his- torical message) gives me alarm. noisy and a source of legend: think tory. The Left has suffered reversals Reforms are entirely possible but Le retour Martin Guerre, any of in Britain and Australia in 2019, a good starting point of political Mark Twain or Wilhelm Meisters with “Big Target” unpopular and strategy is an acronym—DPPO, Wanderjahre, German folk songs divisive policy platforms. The “Don’t Piss People Off”. Creating and so on. Apprentices wandered Coalition suffered defeats in 1987 fear, enemies and fodder for fear not just to fulfil guild rules but to and 1993, the latter with Fightback campaigns (such as “Mediscare” gain expertise, solving any problem (and the ALP’s skilful riposte in its from 2016) is the surest way to their craft could throw up— book Poles Apart) and in the former see ideas that have not been “road Germans the most international with some diabolically unpopular tested” turned into “road kill” of all, and still over-represented policies including undoing much (along with their advocates!). in specialised engineering areas in of Medicare. There is never a shortage most countries. Stone’s professional experi- of political mantras backed by For those of us who are not ence is impressive. As an econo- overblown rhetoric and titles. Australian, “Waltzing Matilda” is mist I can also follow the “Restoring Hope” has that bad feel vastly and agreeably different from of the interaction of growth, age- about it. Europe and America. Pico Iyer ing, housing prices, immigration, may have put his finger on part of Martin Gordon productivity and so on perfectly it when he praised Australians for Dunlop, ACT well, but we also live in a demo- among other things that unique cratic system, not a Leninist one. “raffish nonchalance” which is A cross-Tasman example comes to Having It Both Ways not mere style but a sharp way of mind, as New Zealand’s Labour cutting below the surface of all that PM Jacinda Ardern will find that Sir: If Australia Day must go, is false, pompous and pretentious. cutting immigration will turn her surely NAIDOC Week ought to Plenty of countries do raffish or whole country into a nursing home, accompany it? nonchalance but arguably no other as will doing the same in Australia. All the talk for greater can carry off both at once. A final I see no likelihood of a dramatic inclusiveness used by Anti- plea, therefore: don’t stop the change in fertility rates either, and Australia Day activists equally music. if it does occur, they are likely to applies to NAIDOC Week, John Goodman fall, not rise. As for cutting spend- which celebrates the history of Auckland, New Zealand ing, good luck with that. I don’t one segment of our community know how much influence Stone and deliberately excludes all the had in the policy parameters of the rest. Take the NAIDOC Week Banjo and Berlioz 2014 Abbott budget, but as he was awards. Unlike the Australia Day the “Chief Economist and senior awards, which are entirely non- Sir: We are most grateful to Diana policy adviser to ” he discriminatory, only those of Figgis for sharing her extensive might not have a lot of plausible Aboriginal descent are eligible for scholarship about “Waltzing deniability there. NAIDOC awards. Matilda”, both its breadth and Whereas proved You can’t have it both ways. depth. However, I searched in to have learnt political lessons (for vain for any mention of the first Christopher Heathcote instance becoming “the best friend movement of Hector Berlioz’s Keilor, Vic Medicare ever had”) which served symphony Harold en Italie (Opus him well (at least until 2007 and 16) as a unifying factor in the WorkChoices), the same could Raffish Nonchalance fascination the French had/have not be said of Tony Abbott, who for the musical accompaniment of claimed his government’s 2014 Sir: A warm appreciation for our famous poem. There’s quite a budget was the “gold standard” for Diane Figgis’s fascinating article lot involved in this story, including budget repair. Pretty much every on “Waltzing Matilda” (January- Paganini and a Stradivari viola. wildly unpopular idea that could February 2020), which recalls I was particularly interested be pursued was and it turned into just how recently life has become in Ms Figgis’s reference to Banjo

Quadrant March 2020 3 Letters

Paterson’s maternal grandmother, majority. Yet, as noted at the time outrage or disgust, or to make some Emily Barton, living in Boulogne by Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s allegation. I cannot do so in respect from 1831 to 1839. Since Berlioz population was still 75 per cent of Gary Furnell’s “Personalism and composed his symphony in 1834, Anglo-Celtic and 94 per cent Human Rights” (January-February it may have had a significant (as European in 1988, two centuries 2020). I have only praise for it. yet unacknowledged) influence on after the First Fleet arrived. Even Gary Furnell argues his thesis Yves Montand and other French today, Australians of Anglo-Celtic for a vocational understanding of musicians, well before Banjo’s time. descent still form a majority, albeit personalism providing an answer Should Ms Figgis listen to one in rapid decline. to the degradation of rights talk, Berlioz’s haunting bars, she It is also not always appreciated with references to many of the may perhaps be moved to add a that the post-war European great thinkers of our civilisation, postscript to her article, which is immigrants were encouraged to not least , who said undoubtedly a tale of fundamental assimilate and, by and large, did that when a cobbler makes a good importance to Australia’s cultural so well. They became a part of pair of shoes he glorifies God. history, to explain more fully the the existing majority through When someone welcomes interdependence of Banjo and intermarriage. a newborn, makes sacrifices in French musical heritage. Tragically, Australian nation- raising a child, helps a family in building efforts have been need, helps a disabled person, Ned Overton undone by nearly two decades assists a newcomer to the country, via email of incautious mass immigration. gives friendly counsel, admits one An unprecedentedly colossal has done wrong, forgives an injury, The Crimson Thread immigration wave—largely from bears patiently with an irritating culturally-distant countries— person or situation, remedies an Sir: Salvatore Babones (January- is rapidly sweeping away the injustice, gives up time to promote February 2020) makes the argument Australia that had evolved by the common good, or simply that Australia has essentially the end of the twentieth century. stands up in a train to give another become a state without a nation. Without any consultation, a seat, that person is an exemplar He asserts that the “crimson thread Australia’s political class have flung of personalism. So personalism of kinship” referred to by Henry open our borders and embarked on has its adherents who live decent Parkes no longer exists, if indeed a radical demographic and cultural lives, caring for their spouses and it ever existed. He also asserts experiment. With the highest per children, and others who cross that the Australia of today is far capita immigration rate and the their paths, without fanfare, in one removed from traditional concepts highest proportion of foreign-born way or another. of nationhood. residents in the developed world, Gary Furnell provides an Prominent twentieth-century Australia is fast being reduced to intellectual outline of personalism. Australian leaders certainly an international boarding house Really, there is not one personalism, believed in the “crimson thread for an assortment of people with but many “personalisms”, reflecting of kinship” based on an Anglo- no attachments to each other. different personalities and history Celtic heritage. Billy Hughes Unless mass dissimilar and culture. proclaimed that Australians were immigration ceases, the main Common-law legal systems “more British than the people of question for legacy Australians have many principles which are Great Britain”. In rallying the who value tradition, rootedness and personalistic—not least that only nation during the dark days of the a place to call home will be what, the guilty should be punished, Second World War, John Curtin if anything, can be done to retain that guilt be established beyond regularly invoked kinship, stating meaningful cultural residues and reasonable doubt, that those that “Australia is a British people” any remnants of the old Australian accused have the right to a fair trial, and that Australians had inherited nation. that trials proceed on the basis of “the ties of blood and grace and evidence, that the prosecution must Frank Upshire tongue that have joined British establish both a guilty mind and a WA people together for centuries”. guilty act and so on. The notion of expressed similar natural justice, sometimes called sentiments. Personalism procedural fairness—that hearings It is often claimed that the post- be conducted fairly, the concept of war wave of non-British European Sir: I gather it is the custom when equity, in the Aristotelian sense, immigration meant the end of writing to the editor of many pub- that sometimes justice requires the country’s Anglo-Celtic core lications to express complaint or more than strict application of the

4 Quadrant March 2020 Letters letter of the law—is personalistic. granted. One simply opens any covering his progress from realism There are decisions of the courts newspaper to find innumerable though cubism to constructivism which are “personalistic”: Somerset examples of behaviour inconsistent and final wretched socialist realism. v Stewart (1772), declaring slavery with personalism. Indeed we all Stalin is estimated to have in England unlawful; Donoghue v have to struggle against ourselves imprisoned and executed over 5000 Stevenson (1932), which established to act in accordance with the writers, poets, playwrights, artists, liability for breach of duty of care; demands of personalism, and none actors, conductors and musicians. Tuckiar v R (1934), a decision of the of us always so acts. Ian Bernadt , which Personalism requires a constant Swanbourne, WA considered the right to a fair trial, daily struggle with oneself. It will and the duty of the trial judge, and be found in the life well-led—and of the barrister representing an the most improbable of persons Samedi Sordide accused; Brown v Board of Education may demonstrate a practical (1954), which effectively abolished personalism. Sir: “Samedi Sordide” indeed! segregation in US schools; Mabo Thanks to Stuart Lindsay (January- Michael McAuley (1992), which recognised the land February 2020) for his thoughtful Beecroft, NSW rights of Aborigines and Torres and timely wake-up call. Strait Islanders. For too long Christians have As Gary Furnell explains, The Power of Poetry been silent on these issues. Whilst there have been many exponents we have been taught that “silence of personalism, from Antigone in Sir: Rohan Buettel’s sparse and is golden”, there is also a time to Sophocles’s play, to elegant poem “House Under speak, and clearly, in accord with to Martin Luther King (Letter from Construction” (November 2019) the protest in the article, it is now. Birmingham Jail), each providing precisely reflected the astonishing For those of us who have their own perspective. What they painting by Kazimir Malevich in enjoyed the wonder and the free- have in common is a distinction our Australian National Gallery dom of a society where ideals were between a person and a thing, with and referred to the Constructivist firmly based upon biblical princi- a person to be respected, cherished, and Suprematist art movements ples, the sad erosion of morals and indeed loved, no matter what that that flourished in Russia before, truth is heart-breaking. person’s characteristics. during and after the Russian Let us unite in the crusade to Implicit in Gary Furnell’s Revolution, an artistic renaissance inform our society of the need to account is a recognition of the associated with the production of seek again the pursuit of probity important role of Jewish thought those famous propaganda posters, and wholesome living. That is not in personalism. So when Ruth revolutionary both in design and to suggest we engage in vocifer- the Moabite (the Moabites being content. The poem also alluded to ous protest, but in the calm and traditional enemies of the Israelites, Stalin’s crackdown on “bourgeois” assured manner of quiet resolution. hated and despised) marries Boaz, non-representational art in the late As Jesus was reported as saying in an observant Jew, eventually 1920s and the arrest of Malevich Matthew 7:6, “Do not give what becoming the great-grandmother in October 1930, charged with is holy to dogs, and do not throw of King David, we have an espionage and imprisoned in your pearls before swine, lest they account illustrative of personalism. Leningrad for two months. trample them under their feet, and Similarly in the Deuteronomistic Thereafter, suitably chastised, he turn and tear you to pieces.” admonition to care for the widow painted sad and sloppy pastiches But speak we must, or else lose and orphan, and for the stranger. of Soviet workers, peasants and all! Similarly in Nathan’s reprimand of athletes. He died in 1935. David Marlow David for his abuse of Bathsheba In 1996 the Art Gallery of Exeter, NSW and murder of her spouse, Uriah New South Wales curated a small the Hittite. but extraordinary exhibition of Gary Furnell provides a Russian art from this period titled theoretical explanation for what “Kandinsky and the Russian Avant Quadrant welcomes letters is simply living one’s life as well Garde”, which included hitherto to the editor. Letters are subject as one can. Hence his vocational unseen works by, among others, (or maybe virtue-oriented) Kandinsky, Alexandra Exter, to editing unless writers personalism, which he contrasts Natalie Goncharova, Lyobov stipulate otherwise. with degraded rights talk. Popova, Alexander Rodchenko None of this can be taken for and nine paintings by Malevich

Quadrant March 2020 5 T he crown prosecutor’s retraction

Keith Windschuttle

ardinal George Pell’s appeal against his was nobody else but him and the boys in the room conviction of historical sexual abuse of two for the next five or six minutes while the alleged choirboys will be heard before the full High abuse occurred. CourtC of Australia on March 11. His conviction in The defence argument was that this scenario a Melbourne county court in December 2018 was never took place. At the time the choirboys suppos- affirmed by the Victorian Court of Appeal in August edly arrived at the sacristy it would have been already 2019. The conviction was for two incidents of abuse occupied by the altar servers, who were ahead of the that allegedly occurred in St Patrick’s Cathedral, choirboys in the post-Mass exit procession. The altar Melbourne, in December 1996 and February 1997. servers included the crucifer carrying the cross at As several writers in Quadrant have recorded over the head of the procession, the censer bearer with the past twelve months, the conviction of Pell is one incense, and other acolytes assisting the service. They of the worst miscarriages of justice in Australian his- would then assist the sacristan to remove other litur- tory. This is not just because of his status at the time as gical objects from the cathedral sanctuary to the sac- the most senior figure in the Catholic Church in this risty, clean them, and store them properly there. The country, but also because it breached the fundamen- objects included the wine chalice and cruets, bread tal legal principle that an accused person is innocent patens, altar cloths, water jugs and flowers. The cru- until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That cifer left the cross on display in the priests’ sacristy, is not how George Pell was treated either at his trial and protocol demanded those who followed him bow or in his first appeal. The jurors did not make their to it before starting their duties in the room. decision on the weight of evidence by more than The timing of these activities was crucial. The twenty witnesses, who demonstrated that Pell could defence argued there was a “hive of activity” at the not possibly have done what the complainant said. time, with between six and twelve people coming Instead, the jurors accepted the sole evidence of the and going from the sacristy for a period of ten to fif- accuser, given in camera, with his identity shielded, teen minutes after the altar servers first arrived. The and without corroboration of any kind. A two-to- room was never empty for Pell to assault the boys, or one majority of judges in the Victorian Court of indeed for the boys to even go there. Appeal confirmed both the process and the decision. However, the Crown prosecutor, Mark Gibson, The first of the two incidents supposedly took argued that as soon as the altar servers arrived at the place shortly after a Sunday Solemn Mass on either sacristy they bowed to the cross and then left the December 15 or December 22, 1996, in the priests’ room and went elsewhere. For the next five or six sacristy of the cathedral. This was a room in which minutes, the sacristan Max Potter waited for cathe- then Archbishop Pell was assisted by the cathedral’s dral worshippers to have a “private time” of prayer master of ceremonies, Charles Portelli, to robe before near the sanctuary. At the end of this time gap or the Mass, and to disrobe afterwards. It was the room hiatus, Potter would give the altar servers the “green to which altar servers returned sacred objects used in light” to come and perform their duties. It was dur- the Mass and in its exit procession. What remained ing this five-minute hiatus, which Gibson called an of the sacramental wine was returned there, and the “interval of decorum” in the cathedral, that the boys cash from the worshippers’ collection was deposited supposedly entered the sacristy, where Pell found in its vault. It was out of bounds for choirboys. them. The sole choirboy complainant said he and his So where did the altar servers go while all this companion (who died of a drug overdose in 2014) had was happening? Where was the “elsewhere” they broken all the rules and ventured into the unlocked went to? priests’ sacristy shortly after their post-Mass proces- During the trial on December 3, 2018, this ques- sion had ended. They found some wine and started tion produced a genuine courtroom drama. In his drinking it, when Pell suddenly appeared. The fully- final address to the jury, Crown prosecutor Gibson robed Archbishop was unaccompanied and there tried to argue that during the “interval of decorum”,

6 Quadrant March 2020 the crown prosecutor’s retraction the altar servers went to a place he called “their The prosecutor made this retraction in his final worker sacristy”. But Ruth Shann for the defence address to the jury: protested to Judge Peter Kidd that Gibson was not sticking to the trial evidence; he was making it up. Mr Foreman and members of the jury, before Kidd obviously agreed because later that day Gibson lunch I had spoken about there being this retracted his earlier version of events. The scene reads period of time after the altar servers had like something from the script of a good television bowed to the crucifix in the priests’ sacristy series. Here is an edited version of the transcript: and before Mr Potter had started ferrying The prosecutor initially told the jury in his final items from the sanctuary to the priests’ address (at 1446): sacristy. I think I might have said that the altar servers were in their workers’ sacristy Altar servers, according to McGlone [an altar during this five to six minute time period. server in December 1996], go in to priest sacristy, There is, of course, no evidence of that, and bow to the crucifix to end the mass, according there’s no evidence of where they were. There to McGlone, before returning to their worker is evidence of where they weren’t from J and sacristy awaiting the interval of decorum, that that is that they weren’t in the priests’ sacristy, Potter and Portelli spoke about, that must elapse so I was inviting you to conclude that it was before clearing duties can begin. Poking around during this period waiting for the green light the corridor, priest sacristy door unlocked and from Mr Potter that, wherever the altar servers opened, altar boys [altar servers] go in, bow to were, it was not in the priests’ sacristy. I just the crucifix before returning to their worker wanted to make that clear. sacristy awaiting this interval of decorum before people can attend the sanctuary to start their Now, Gibson must be a Crown prosecutor with clearing duties. a short memory. He seems to have forgotten all about this retraction. Because on January 31, 2020, The prosecutor went on to say (at 1461): the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions, Kerri Judd, submitted a response to the appeal to So I’m just doing it frame by frame if you like to the High Court by Pell’s lawyers, Bret Walker and give you an idea of what the Crown is submitting Ruth Shann. One of the four signatories to the DPP occurred on this occasion, the subject of the first submission was Mark Gibson, signing himself as incident. Then the altar servers enter and bow Victoria’s Senior Crown Prosecutor. In paragraphs to the crucifix before leaving the priest sacristy 59 and 60 of this submission there is a version of and awaiting the green light from Max Potter. what the altar servers supposedly did after they It is then another five to six minutes, whilst entered the priests’ sacristy. It is written as if the parishioners were walking up to the sanctuary rebuke from the defence at the trial never happened, and kneeling, according to Potter, where Potter as if Judge Kidd had not told Gibson to retract what would give parishioners their private time. he said, and as if his retraction had never been made to the jury. This is how the DPP describes events in Ms Shann for the defence put this to the judge: its latest submission:

Can we just raise one issue in particular which The altar servers would have entered the is really with the hope that our learned friend Priests’ Sacristy and bowed to the crucifix, might take the opportunity to either tell us where marking the end of the formal part of the we’ve got this wrong or fix it up with the jury. Mass. The altar servers would then have left the The submission was put that the altar servers Sacristy—either for the workers’ room, where would go into the priests’ sacristy to bow to the they disrobed, or for the sanctuary to assist crucifix, and then go and wait in the workers’ Potter. The Priests’ Sacristy would be unlocked sacristy for the interval of decorum to pass. That and open. is not a concept which we can find anywhere in The Crown’s case was that A and B [the the evidence, nor was it put to McGlone who choirboys] then entered the Priests’ Sacristy. said, “We bow to the cross and then start going They were shortly followed by the applicant back and forth between the priests’ sacristy and [Pell]. The offending occurred for 5–6 minutes. sanctuary”, that’s at 981 to 982, or Mr Connor It was only after A and B left the Priests’ who says, “We bow to the cross and then start Sacristy after the first incident that Potter and/ clearing in and out of the priests’ sacristy for the or altar servers first returned to the Priests’ next ten minutes”, 1039 to 1040. Sacristy with items from the sanctuary.

Quadrant March 2020 7 the crown prosecutor’s retraction

Although the defence protested at the trial that 5 The altar servers would bow to the cross, and this version of events had no evidence to support it, what would happen in the new DPP submission there is a footnote to 6 then? — They would go into the workshops the claim that “the altar servers would then have left or the the Sacristy—either for the workers’ room, where 7 sacristies and disrobe. they disrobed, or for the sanctuary to assist Potter”. Footnote 224 references two passages of the trial’s Potter seems to have misunderstood the ques- transcript where it records questions put to the sac- tion because his answer was not about what hap- ristan, Max Potter. pened “then”, that is, next, but what happened when Anyone who compares the trial transcript in their duties were all done and they could disrobe in these passages with the claims made by Gibson in the “workshop” or utility room. But, in any case, the new DPP submission will be puzzled, to say the Potter cleared up the issue shortly afterwards when least, because they don’t support his case. The actual answering the following questions from Richter pieces of the transcript the DPP cites are lines 8 to (paragraph 518, lines 23 to 31): 25 in paragraph 496, where Gibson questions Potter about where the altar servers disrobed after finish- 23 And the other altar servers would then go ing their sacristy duties. They did not disrobe in the into the priest’s sacristy themselves, Potter said, but in a room they 24 sacristy? — Sacristy. called the “candle room”, which he clarified for his 25 And in the priest’s sacristy they would do questioner as the “altar servers utility room” (a room their bows? — Bow, opposite the priests’ sacristy, called “utility” in the 26 yes. court’s floorplan of the cathedral—also known as 27 Then they would go and follow directions as “workers’ room” and “workshop”). There is nothing to what they should in lines 8 to 25 about the altar servers retreating to 28 do with the various vessels and—? — Yes, this room for a five-minute hiatus, and no men- yes. tion of a “green light” telling them when they could 29 All right. So at that stage you’re at the resume their tasks in the sacristy. priest’s sacristy, But then in lines 26 to 28 of the same paragraph 30 is that right? — Yes. 496—lines which are not cited in the DPP’s footnote 31 When they do that, when they arrive? but which anyone checking the transcript can readily — Yes. see—Gibson’s questioning continues: Needless to say, the DPP submission does not 26 You say that they derobe in the altar servers cite these lines in its footnote. They make it clear room or the that when the altar servers first arrive in the sacristy 27 utility room after they had assisted you in they bow to the cross, and then immediately turn clearing the to Potter and follow his instructions about what to 28 sanctuary? — Correct, yes. do with the various items from the Mass. The altar servers did not retreat to the utility room until after In other words, Potter’s full examination not they had assisted Potter to clear the sanctuary of only fails to support the DPP’s submission, it says its “various vessels” and stored them safely in the the opposite of what the DPP claims in its text. The priests’ sacristy. altar servers only went to the utility room after they Hence, there is no hiatus when the choirboys or had performed their duties moving things from the Pell were in the priests’ sacristy on their own. From sanctuary to the sacristy, not before. This confirms the moment the altar servers entered the room it that in the original trial, both Ruth Shann and Judge was plainly a “hive of activity”. The altar servers Kidd were correct to call for Gibson to retract his did not have to wait five or six minutes for Potter’s assertion, since it ran counter to the evidence. “green light” (a concept completely absent from any The second citation in the footnotes to the DPP of the evidence) to tell them to come and start their text is to the transcript’s paragraph 518, lines 5 to 7, duties. They began their work as soon as they had when Pell’s defence counsel Robert Richter is ques- arrived and bowed. tioning Potter. In these lines, also, Potter provides no In short, the footnote references to Potter’s support for the DPP’s claims. Potter does not men- answers to Gibson and Richter do not support the tion any altar servers leaving the sacristy and waiting prosecution’s formerly retracted, but now newly in the “workers’ room” for the interval of decorum revived, case. Instead, they refute it. Such are the to pass. Lines 5 to 7 in paragraph 518 record Richter standards of legal argument that now prevail within questioning Potter as follows: the Victorian Department of Public Prosecutions.

8 Quadrant March 2020 a s p e r i t i e s

John O’Sullivan

distinguished journalist once confided to me AP’s rival UPI), I was reassured to see that even if what he admitted was a worrying thought: the AP goes “woke” some day, it will still get the whenever he had appeared in a newspaper names right and the quotes accurate. Good habits Areport as opposed to writing one, at least one fact die hard. in how he was reported turned out to be wrong. He Another explanation for this accuracy may be didn’t think it was bias, since the errors were mostly that if you are reporting an , it helps to be about such pedestrian matters as his name or age. there. Anyone searching for anti-Semitism, for He had decided it was simply carelessness: standards instance, would have been surprised to see the Star were slipping. Maybe, though (he concluded sadly), of David alongside Hebrew script on the screen it was just that he was getting older and grouchier. behind the speakers. They’re clearly visible to the In the last week I’ve had proof that my late friend right of Kawczynski’s head in the press photographs was onto something, but something more compli- of his interview. They are the symbol of the Herzl cated than carelessness. For I too was mentioned in Institute, one of the seven conference sponsors (my the newspapers, this time as attending a conference own Danube Institute was another). Not only that, in Rome at which “far right”, “hard right”, “anti- but the Herzl Institute’s president, Yoram Hazony, Semitic” and “homophobic” figures in European is the author of the well-reviewed book The Virtue politics were speaking. And that came as a surprise. of Nationalism, which roots nationalism in religion, The story began when published a especially in the English-speaking world, and which piece warning that a Tory MP, Daniel Kawczynski, was—so to speak—the bible of the conference. He was planning to attend a conference on National was also the presiding director of the event. at which the leading speakers would So much for anti-Semitism. Homophobia, then? include hard-right and anti-immigration figures Two of the conference speakers were gay men, such as the Hungarian prime minister “and a niece including Kawczynski himself, and I heard no of Marine Le Pen”. objection to their presence but many expressions of Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of admiration for their remarks. Deputies of British Jews, condemned Kawczynski And what of the general run of “far-rightists” for consorting with “some of Europe’s most notori- with “unacceptable” views? They turned out to be ous far-right politicians” and called on the Tories the prime minister of a friendly government; lead- to suspend him. The BBC’s World at One repeated ers of major parties in the Italian, Polish and other the “far right” slur. Labour front-bencher Andrew parliaments; former US ambassadors; veterans of Gwynne said that Kawczynski would be sharing the Reagan and Bush administrations; senior fel- “a platform with anti-Semites, Islamophobes, and lows in major Washington think-tanks; a distin- homophobes”. guished theologian; and two especially dangerous The Rome conference took place despite this dis- suspects—the niece of Marine Le Pen, who has approval, and the Associated Press reported it under changed both her name and her politics to embrace the following headline: “Nationalists in Rome cheer an unthreatening conservatism based on cultural Brexit, honour Pope John Paul II”. That headline was sympathy between Latin-language countries, and a good summary of the report, which was accurate a great-grand-daughter of Mussolini, who wasn’t about the facts, and not uncritical but fair-minded present or invited or on anyone’s radar except that of in its account of different speeches and opinions. the Guardian which cited her as a friend of the ris- It described the participants as “right-wing” and ing and respectable Italian centre-Right politician, “conservative”, concluding with the information Giorgia Meloni, who had sometimes invited her to that “the conference was organised by the Edmund party events. It’s hard to describe such linkages as Burke Foundation based in the United States and guilt by association; they’re far too remote for that. other conservative intellectual and political groups”. The National Conservatism website has a long As a former wire-service hand myself (with the list of reports, op-eds and commentaries, some quite

Quadrant March 2020 9 asperities critical of the conference aims and debates, which to find phrases, links and extended associations show that it was a serious intellectual event with real between people unknown to each other that might differences of opinion between participants but no be knitted together to imply racism, anti-Semitism explosions of extremism. My own guess is that the and so on where none existed are, of course, the furthest-Right view with wide support in the room original initiating villains. But such people exist was that other European countries should follow the to do such things, and there is no use complaining UK out of the EU. about the weather. Such subtleties did not influence the Tory party, It’s the Tories who deserve the most obloquy, however. As the conference wound down, an anony- therefore. They had a duty to examine a serious alle- mous press spokesman for Conservative HQ , bat- gation against one of their colleagues before doing tered by the Left press and Twitter, issued a statement anything. They should have learned that necessity condemning Kawczynski for nothing in particular: both from liberal theory and from common decency, not to mention their own recent experience. After Daniel Kawczynski has been formally warned all, this imbroglio is the third such artificial scandal that his attendance at this event was not launched against them in the last year. acceptable, particularly in light of the views of First, the New Statesman levelled false charges some of those in attendance, which we utterly of racism against the distinguished Tory philoso- condemn, and that he is expected to hold pher Sir Roger Scruton (who, incidentally, spoke himself to higher standards. Daniel has accepted at last year’s National Conservatism conference in this and apologised. London). These charges eventually had to be with- drawn because they rested on fraudulent editing of Which views by which speakers does the party an interview transcript—but not before the govern- spokesman utterly condemn? He can’t risk saying, ment had removed him as its adviser on policies that because he has no idea of who said what. If the would incorporate beauty in architecture, design and spokesman had done even a little homework, he planning. The New Statesman apologised, the gov- would have noticed that among the main speakers ernment restored Sir Roger to his position, but the at the event was Ryszard Legutko, a distinguished minister responsible for sacking him could manage Polish philosopher, a dissident under , only a non-apology. That was the shabby treatment and a minister in several Polish governments. that the Tory party gave to one of its most distin- Because the Guardian had identified him as doubt- guished and loyal academic supporters in response ing if “homophobia” had any precise meaning—and to the fearsome threat of a Twitter storm. it is an extraordinarily slippery concept that any phi- Another Twitter storm aimed at getting Boris losopher might doubt—that was probably enough Johnson, then a backbench rebel over Brexit, con- to bring him under suspicion. Among the many demned for writing a Daily Telegraph article that impressive positions that Legutko has held, how- made a liberal case against “banning the burka” but ever, is the leadership of the parliamentary group nonetheless contained a joke comparing Muslim in the European Parliament to which the Tories women wearing the full burka to letterboxes. The belonged until January 31. On what grounds can joke was judged a good one by no less an authority they complain about Kawczynski hobnobbing with than Rowan Atkinson, but the Tory party solemnly him that don’t condemn themselves more severely? referred it to an internal committee as a possible case of Islamophobia. It’s hard to recall exactly t’s plain that an injustice has been done to what happened to this investigation. Maybe they Kawczynski, with only slightly less nasty insults sent it to Professor Legutko for a second opinion on Iscattered at anyone attending the conference. Islamophobia. Anyway, the matter quietly evapo- Apologies are certainly called for (however vainly). rated, and so did the Twitter storms. My sense of the matter is that the least guilty is the Both these cases should have taught the party Board of Deputies of British Jews. Having main- not to yield to these fake scandals generated by the tained a principled critical stance towards anti- Left. But the Tories panicked, decided that the Semitism in the Labour Party over the last few easiest way out of the situation—perhaps one that years, the board as a Left-leaning organisation must would protect their advantage over Labour in the have been relieved to be able to condemn this lone anti-Semitism stakes—was to sacrifice Kawczynski instance of Tory anti-Semitism presented to them to the mob, throw out a few mysteriously vague by reporters from the Guardian and Buzzfeed. It charges at unknown people abroad, and “move on”. must have seemed “too good to check”, in the old In reality they will only be allowed to move on to Fleet Street phrase. the next scandal concocted by guerrilla journalists Those journalists who ransacked the internet of the far Left playing to internet mobs.

10 Quadrant March 2020 Firework Night in the Hospital

Down at the end of the surgical ward a crowd is gathering for the show. For once, something’s more interesting than puzzles or the newspaper, something that draws us from our rooms, where watchful screens still flicker, wanly. Chairs are turned round carefully to face the glass end of the hall. It’s Fawkes Night in the hospital, and these, the best seats in the house.

This floor-to-ceiling window marks the end-point of my daily quest. Each day I rally from my rest and, at the nurses’ urging, trek along the whitewashed corridor to where a single, sharp incision has detached the clinical from the everyday. And reattached: so that we gather here to view It’s not that we aren’t taking part— familiar fireworks, alien rites. I’ve never seen such reverent witness to the singeing of the sky. The fireworks look so small from here Insistently we observe these rites— it’s like some dwarf artillery few, persecuted celebrants— is weakly challenging the stars in parallel, not parody. with shells stuffed with confetti; yet Despite this, or because of it, they bring with them a quiet wonder, something has distanced them from us, and we watch with silent joy, enabled, we alone, to cull the way you watch a tiny fire the mute bravura of this festival. on winter evenings when the light has died. Though here, we’re on the other side For, dampened though the explosions are of some division, separated. by distance and linoleum, their elvish flares are not snuffed out— but brought to a new focus by the hallway’s off-white telescope, warmth’s tiny but effective dose reduced to salving purity: down at the end of the surgical ward, unlisted access-point to gladness.

James Ackhurst

Quadrant March 2020 11 astringencies

Anthon y Daniels

ast year at my house towards the South of on frosty mornings, was character-building. France was the hottest year since we bought Was camping sauvage prohibited because it was the property some fifteen years ago. The realised that some campers were careless or psycho- temperatureL rose sometimes to forty-four degrees pathic, or was it a precautionary measure as more (111 degrees Fahrenheit; I am old enough still not and more people displayed psychopathic traits? I do to be able to think instinctively of ambient tem- not have the definitive answer. Suffice it to say that peratures on the Celsius scale). bonfires even in the midst of winter, when there is There were three fires in the year, all of them no risk of them spreading, are now forbidden. They small, fortunately, and all quickly extinguished use up the world’s oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. by fire-fighting aircraft. In the 1920s the primary The origin of fires in Australia, so at any rate I forest of oak and chestnut was largely replaced by read, is the same as in France. They are more cer- pines planted by the coalmine-owners for pit-props tainly man-made than is global warming, but of for their mines some miles away, and pines are per- course that does not in any way contradict climatic fect for spreading fires, unlike the original decidu- conditions as a cause of catastrophic fires. Even the ous forest. Pinecones, which we use in winter as most determined arsonist would have difficulty in fire-lighters, catch alight very easily, explode and setting fire to an igloo. shoot across a hundred yards, spreading fire as if While carelessness is easy to understand, delib- they were evangelists for combustion. erate fire-setting is not. The other day I was reading The three fires were evidently the work of an André Gide’s short memoir of his time on a jury in arsonist, that much was obvious. The mayor of our France in 1913, and one of the cases on which he , who also runs the local septic-tank- was called to pronounce was that of an arsonist. emptying business, told us years ago that there was Gide was sufficiently up with the latest criminol- a local arsonist about, but that, despite the fact that ogy and forensic psychology to wonder whether the in such a small commune such as ours everyone fire-setter’s motive was sexual in , though in knows everyone else’s business, no one knew who fact there is more than one motive for arson, what he was. He tries every year to set a real fire, that is we doctors call a final common pathway of multi- to say one that will make the news, but fortunately ple and diverse causes. I have known arsonists for the fire surveillance has (so far) been equal to his pleasure, arsonists for revenge, arsonists for insur- efforts and efficient enough to halt the fires before ance, arsonists from compulsion. As for revenge, they spread far. it may be against particular persons, usually a Ninety per cent of fires in the region, the mayor lover who has spurned them, or it may be against said, were started either carelessly or by accident, the world in general, a desire to express a grudge not by spontaneous combustion. No doubt that is against Being itself, as it were. Then, of course, why the camping sauvage—pitching your tent wher- there is the pyromaniac fireman, the fireman who ever it pleases you in the countryside to do so—is sets a fire in order to be the hero of his own mise- no longer permitted. Nowadays, camping must be en-scène. He becomes a hero, rather like the nurse done at designated sites, which resemble refugee who poisons her patients and is then the heroine of camps for the well-heeled. Tents are not what they their rescue. Such people crave the attention that were in my days of camping, when pebbles and they are otherwise unable to attract. They are even- stones under the groundsheet bored into your back tually caught because the penny finally drops that and made sleeping difficult, and if you touched the they are too often at the scene of a crisis for it to inside of the canvas when it rained you were sure to be explained by chance. Indeed, if I had but world be dripped on all night. The discomfort, like rugby enough and time, I should write an essay proving

12 Quadrant March 2020 astringencieschronicle that both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were The second is that, if arson played a part, ordinary serial killers, for murder followed them wherever people—ordinary in the sense of not being power- they went and Ockham’s razor would suggest that ful or in authority—have contributed to the situa- they themselves were the killers. tion, thus complicating the Manichean account in which the forces of good are set against the forces of f course, the knowledge that the majority of evil. As the editor of a newspaper for which I once fires, even if they take on a life of their own, are wrote told me, “We don’t want any nuance.” This setO by persons (men, I think, far more than women; is all the more so when the political and adminis- perhaps this is an imbalance that could be redressed trative ineptitude of certain figures in authority is by a little official encouragement of females), is of plain to see. They become the lightning rods of our limited value, or at least will be so long as arsonists distress. If at a time of national emergency they are cannot be recognised in advance and prevented from observed eating a meal, they stand accused of cal- acting, which in my opinion will be lous indifference, even if we con- never. Fire will continue to exert tinue to eat meals ourselves. But I its fascination for man, and I doubt uriously enough, don’t feel all that sorry for them; there is anyone who has not been so C they have, after all, chosen their mesmerised by flames that he has the possibility of metier themselves. He who lives not spent time observing them for arson as a causative by exposure to the public dies by no other reason than the pleasure exposure to the public. of doing so; and since destructive factor, even if not a I like to read on-line commen- resentment is likely to remain in remediable one, is not tary by ordinary people—that is to the repertoire of human motiva- mentioned in most say, non-professional commenta- tion, the combination of fascination tors. How representative of pub- and resentment (together with the accounts that I have lic feeling they are is a matter of strong chance of getting away with read of the recent conjecture. But in the British com- whatever action it leads to) will con- mentary, apart from outrage that tinue as a potential threat to society. fires. You would Britain has done nothing to help Since it has been found in the past think it might be Australia (by sending its rain, per- that 87 per cent of fires in Australia worth a mention. haps), sorrow for the half-billion are caused by either carelessness wild animals killed in the fires is or malice, the expression “the fire very prominent. By wild animals, season”, which has the ring of an inevitable natu- of course, they don’t mean flies and snakes, they ral phenomenon, is an implicit recognition of the mean koalas and kangaroos. No one says, “Pity the intractability of human nature. poor insects”, though in fact they are animals and As I have mentioned, the action of arsonists is must number vastly, incalculably more than half a not in the least in contradiction to the effect of cli- billion. No, it is the koalas that we worry about, matic conditions, however they might have been stuck up their gum trees. At least the kangaroos caused, man-made or not. But curiously enough, have a chance of fleeing before the flames. the possibility of arson as a causative factor, even If I were a betting man, I should liquidate my if not a remediable one, is not mentioned in most assets and place the money in the shares of compa- accounts that I have read of the recent fires, for nies that make koala stuffed toys. I think there is example in a very recent one (as I write this) in about to be a worldwide boom in them. Along with . You would think it might be worth the wickedness of man, we must always remember a mention, if only en passant: for if the truth won’t his shallowness. necessarily set you free, avoiding it certainly won’t do so either. Among Anthony Daniels’s recent books is False Why is no mention made of it? I think it is for Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political two related reasons. The first is that arson in such Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine circumstances confronts us with the wickedness of (Encounter Books, 2019), published under his pen- man, the frivolous wickedness if I may so put it. name, Theodore Dalrymple.

Quadrant March 2020 13 c l o s e t f l i e r s

Christopher Akehurst

or a smallish country, what a lot of dubi- referendum, Qantas is as impeccably “woke” as it’s ous blessings Sweden has bestowed on the possible to be. world. Free love, modernist architecture, the Except of course that it’s not. It’s über-unwoke Finterminably tedious films of Ingmar Bergman, because it’s an airline, flying around the world, the annoyingly thumpy songs of the chiasmically pumping out carbon like a Chinese steel mill on named Abba and more recently, little Greta, patron steroids. saint of the climate obsessives, with her trademark People who get into a state about climate change death-ray glare (does she practise in front of a mir- and carbon emissions are generally members of the ror or a picture of Donald Trump or both?) and her lumpen-Left and as such subscribe to the whole petulant and obstreperous tweets, written, it now package of leftist opinions on everything. They’re appears, by her father. the sort to whom you could say, “Tell me what Greta is not Sweden’s only contribution to our you think of Donald Trump and I’ll tell you what present epidemic of climate hysteria. We must now you think of Brexit, or the date of Australia Day acknowledge the enlightened Scandinavian king- or George Pell or Bruce Pascoe or same-sex mar- dom’s latest invention, flygskam, which roughly riage.” Being in favour of the last-named, they translates as “flight shame”. This is a moralistic are by extension (unless they are truly independ- movement a bit like the nineteenth-century tem- ent thinkers, a species in short supply on the Left) perance campaigns that used to get people to sign opposed to “climate polluters”, such as, especially, a pledge not to drink, except in this case it’s not airlines. to travel by air. It seems that flying is one of the most irresponsibly “carbon-emitting” things any- n Qantas we thus have the contradiction of an one can do. Each happy traveller on, say, a return international airline desperately trying to appeal flight between and London, whether lolling Ito the leftist PC establishment by sucking up to it in first or crammed into economy, is (shamelessly, on gay issues and yet, ontologically, by dint of what a “flight shamer” would say) blasting out six tons it is, bang in the category of leftist bêtes noires. How of carbon dioxide, which is about a third of the is the Joyce regime going to get out of that once amount the same individual emits with lighting, “flight shame” catches on here? heating, the car and so on at home in Australia in They can hardly market the airline—any air- a year. line—as “low-pollution”, like food manufacturers Well, we can’t have that, can we? But two ques- weaselly describing products as “low-fat” or “sugar- tions immediately arise. First, what about Qantas? free”, because if it were truly low-pollution its planes This privatised (but still seeing itself as national) would never get off the ground. Changing its name airline has shown itself under its present manage- to the initials only—the expedient resorted to by ment to be relentlessly right on message with just Kentucky Fried Chicken when it wanted to go about every silly fad that political correctness has on selling its deep-fried product without drawing come up with, especially in the world of “gender” attention to the frying, deemed unhealthy by the politics. What with dumping the salutation “ladies food police—would make no : there’s and gentlemen” in its announcements, ordering its nothing intrinsically anti-climate in the existing staff when talking to passengers to avoid “gender- name, it does have the benefit of “brand recogni- inappropriate” words such as mum, dad, husband, tion”, and “Q” by itself would make people think of wife (how does its irritating Irish boss, Alan Joyce, James Bond films, a series leftists would be bound refer to the same-sex partner he “married” last to regard as hopelessly “sexist” and “racist”, which year?) and—no coincidence here presumably— would defeat the purpose of the change. loudly campaigning for gay “marriage” in the 2017 Qantas is not the only one in a quandary. What

14 Quadrant March 2020 closet fliers are its best-heeled passengers to do? Greens voters, for being able to brag in its ads about how caring I read somewhere, are the largest single economic it is of the planet. “Build the high-speed rail link,” constituency among the holders of “Fly Buys” you might reply. Let’s be frank. That’s never going cards. How is the Greenish Australian traveller to happen, or not in the short time global-warm- taking the kids out of school to ski in Europe to ing prophets allow us before climate Armageddon. get there if “flight shame” becomes a factor in his It’s just something politicians like to talk about, so travel planning? everyone can see that with the rest of the advanced TheGuardian , which has pretty well replaced the world building and using high-speed rail, we’re not erstwhile Fairfax papers as the house organ for the in Hicksville down under, we have plans too. armchair leftist in Australia, was recently blathering on in its British edition about alternatives to flying ow leftists, in my experience, are not the kind for the climate-conscious holiday-maker. Invoking of people to allow themselves to be incon- the example of St Greta, who “went to New York on veniencedN by principles. They might pretend to be a zero-emissions sailing boat” (and had a yachtsman anti-car but they drive them nonetheless—look at cross the Atlantic by air to sail her back, something all those SUVs (greatly outnumbering the Prius) the Guardian forgot to mention), the paper’s heart with “Stop Adani” or “Independent Media? It’s as is gladdened by the “good news for easy as ABC” on the back wind- anyone who has resolved to give screen—and they are adept at mak- up flying … that we are entering a irates ing excuses for doing what they new golden age of rail travel, with P want, even when what they want expanding networks, a revival of permitting, the infringes leftist canons of conduct. sleeper trains … along with a grow- flight-shamed They resemble the pharisees in not ing number of companies replacing practising what they preach—how flights with train travel”. Well, talk traveller can still many air-conditioners are whirring about Eurocentricity, something theoretically voyage away in university environmental else leftists are supposed to dis- studies departments on a hot day, or like. What good are those sleeper from Australia in the Guardian’s offices? They will trains if you want to get from to Europe or therefore go on flying. My predic- Melbourne to London or Sydney America by a tion is that excuses for flying over- to Los Angeles? And probably even seas will be along the lines of those Greta would quail at the thought non-zero-emissions employed by Labor politicians for of making the trip all that way by cargo ship. sending their children to private sailing boat, risking Somali pirates schools: (1) the local government if she went via the Indian Ocean schools don’t have the resources for (although, like St Francis preaching before the a bright child (and all leftists’ children are bright) Sultan, that would give her an opportunity to show because (2) state education has been ruined by being her courage by lecturing the pirates on the virtues of starved of funds to pay for performing arts centres emissionless motor boats, or even more sustainably, in the private schools their children are attending. coracles, to chase the cruise liners with). With flying it will be (1) my trip is absolutely essen- Pirates permitting, the flight-shamed travel- tial; (2, with feigned regret) there is no other prac- ler can still theoretically voyage from Australia to tical way of making the journey; and (3) we’ll be Europe or America by a non-zero-emissions cargo going round Europe by bike, so that will cancel out ship. But you need plenty of leisure to do it in, and the carbon we’ve blown out the back of the Airbus. if you’ve got to be back at work at the TAFE or Such people will then happily go on The Drum the ABC in four weeks it’s clearly not the option to endorse the planet-saving capacities of sham- for you. ing other people out of air travel, while themselves “Flight shame” will possibly gain more adher- continuing to make long-distance overseas flights ents if brought to bear on travellers within Australia, in droves, even surreptitiously if it comes to that, where we do have what remains of a rail service. But putting on masks and false beards to avoid recog- compared with Europe it’s not much of a service, and nition by fellow climate-concerned fliers at the air- it’s unlikely business travellers, the principal cate- port. Qantas has no need to worry. gory of airline user in Australia, would elect to use it unless they worked for a super-woke company pre- Christopher Akehurst, a frequent contributor, lives in pared to allow them the extra travel time, in return Melbourne.

Quadrant March 2020 15 Peter Murphy

Status Seekers and the Quiet Australian

Living without pretension to that. When Robert Menzies in 1942 invoked “”, the modest diligent vast middle he hunger for recognition is a modern phe- of Australian society, he offered the rhetorical nomenon. In pre-modern societies, the rec- equivalent of a Vermeer painting. This was a way ognition due to a person was a function of of describing in short-hand the vast anonymous Ttheir social rank. High ranks had a high level of rec- conscientious mass of a modern functional society. ognition because this was built into their position. A Menzies’s words belong to their time. But their rank once it was attained virtually could not be lost. spirit persists. They evoke the quiet pleasures of A lord could fall into penury and still possess a high persons living in a prosperous society who draw status. Consequently, those who had a high social their enjoyments from carrying out their functions status tended to take it for granted. They didn’t have with unpretentious skills and capacities. They are to work at it to keep it. Low ranks (most people) on rewarded not with plaudits but with a general the other hand had virtually no recognition. social prosperity that everyone shares in. Their life A person could not be dissatisfied with this is good. Their sense of living a good life comes because they were born into a status and there they not from rank and social esteem but from their stayed. Upward mobility through the ranks was place in an intricate social web, a great division possible and occurred more often than we think. of labour, that requires them to do their bit in the But irrespective of ambition or personal desire, expectation that others will do their bit as well. This there was only ever going to be a modest recognition arrangement is not something to which glory, and granted to a journeyman and almost no recognition certainly not vainglory, attaches. It is not showy or accorded to a swineherd. That is, a person either flashy. Yet in its own way it is remarkable. People had recognition or they didn’t. There was sometimes see their lives improve. Through all of this, there bloody ambition to obtain status and sometimes are backward steps and forward ones. Life is not bloody efforts to strip troublesome individuals linear. Nonetheless the great middle, in a successful of their rank. But there was little anxiety about modern nation like Australia, enjoys the fruits of a communicating one’s status. There was no urgent society that has learnt how to set in motion a mostly need to signal it in order to prove it. Merit, such anonymous system of markets, industries and cities, as it was, was an expression of rank rather than the detailed beyond description, which does not require other way round. much esteem to run. Part of the story of modern life has been the Many are happy with this felicitous arrangement. pressure to replace rank with function. Typically But not everyone. Consider the case of Australia’s the more accomplished a modern society is, the various elites. All countries have elites. How those more that rank and esteem for rank give way to elites are constituted varies. Some of them are functional behaviour and the self-satisfaction functional. Others are status-driven. Australia that is derived from able performance. People get began, and prospered, with a distinctly modern a sense of accomplishment by carrying out tasks functional kind of elite—one that was not obsessed competently without fuss or attention. This is a with status distinctions. It was a society forged by kind of functional pride. We see it immortalised emancipists and free settlers for whom opportunity in the paintings of Vermeer, where anonymous and achievement, not rank and status, were the people carry out functions conscientiously and key criteria. The consequence of this was palpable. thoughtfully, the focus of their attention on the task Australia was the Singapore of the nineteenth at hand. Modern societies do best when they stick century. Alone among nations it enjoyed six decades

16 Quadrant March 2020 Status Seekers and the Quiet Australian of super-growth of its GDP per capita between 1820 have no compelling reason to have acquired it. They and 1880. No other country, not the United States, typically lack any great talent, achievement, contri- not the United Kingdom, had anything like that bution, or socially admirable trait. A celebrity is a record. Australia was an urbanised society that paid person who is famous for being famous—in short relatively little attention to the nuances of grade, a “nobody” who is a “somebody”. People “identify” position, level or category. Instead energy, effort, with celebrities because, with a certain knack, they vigour, self-reliance and initiative were the keys. have managed to parlay their very lack of quality into a reason to be esteemed. They are banal yet per- versely they radiate charisma for that very reason. The status shortage The proliferation of celebrity is the result of ustralia’s elites are an interesting case study in modern societies that undermine status systems how this has changed over time. From 1900 by democratising them while encouraging ever- toA 1970, their members on the whole were quiet escalating demands for personalities to be accorded achievers, not loud table-thumping personalities. increasingly higher status. We downgrade the sali- They performed their functions quietly. They had ence of social ranks yet we increase demand for a station or position in society that was signified them at the same time. We democratise access to by owning a modestly larger, tasteful residence universities, as Australia began to do in the 1970s, in a leafy suburb and an automobile. Maybe they by forcing half of our nineteen-year-olds to go to sent their children to a private school. One of the university, irrespective of whether they learn any- major effects of modern societies thing or not. Then we devise glo- was to democratise markets. Or bal ranking systems to distinguish perhaps more precisely: for markets s the general between high-status and low-status to democratise society. Currently A universities. The effects of this are it takes about eight years for newly standard of living in fractal in nature. So that even if a fashionable dishes in haute cuisine Australia has grown, person gets into a notionally high- restaurants to make their appear- status university, because the world ance in family restaurant chains. older status symbols is awash with degree-holders, the Today a luxury vehicle like one of have declined in qualifications that once bestowed the BMW series is within reach status become a kind of debased of a sizeable number of Australian power and salience. coinage. Enrolment in a handful consumers. The average successful So what to replace of really demanding disciplines in plumber’s McMansion in one of the them with? The a handful of serious universities affluent outer suburbs exceeds the still means something in functional standard floor space in the old mid- answer, in short: terms but only because this leads to century genteel leafy suburbs. What loud moralising. the kinds of vocations that very few this means is that status is now in people can undertake because of short supply. their peculiarly demanding nature. To overcome the supply shortage, a number of In any event that is not enough to overcome common strategies are deployed. One is to pur- the status shortage created by the democratisa- chase mega-dwellings with ever-larger floor-plans tion of degrees. So the degree-holders who have commanding ever-grander views. But as the scale strong status appetites or who intuit that they can grows, the status returns that are achieved diminish progress in society only by climbing a status ladder accordingly. So how does one communicate one’s (because they are not functionally talented) have to status—which means being seen in some way to try another approach. Those Australians who end be better than others—when markets democratise up in some kind of traditional professional or mana- everything? For the great functional middle of soci- gerial job, in other words who are part of modern ety this is rarely an issue. If they have stronger than society’s ruling elites broadly defined, once could average status desires, they purchase McMansions. rely on a combination of degree, suburb, house and Problem solved. There is a market for almost every- car to signal their higher status. That social signal- thing in contemporary societies. ling system no longer works for them. Some don’t Others, often those with less spare change, try care about this. Their aspirations are functional. to do it virtually, by identifying with celebrities. We They are driven to achieve. But others see them- can’t all be celebrities but anyone can “follow” a celeb- selves as climbing a status ladder—or realise that rity just as older generations followed Hollywood they will get nowhere unless they do because they film stars in the 1940s and 1950s. Celebrity is a weird have no outstanding functional ability. One way or status. It is a kind of fame acquired by people who another, “who they are” not “what they do” is the

Quadrant March 2020 17 Status Seekers and the Quiet Australian key to their psyche. This is reinforced because the the Wentworth by-election in Sydney. This elector- psychological demands for recognition have grown ate is awash with advertising executives and pro- rather than shrunk over time in inverse proportion fessionals. Once its constituents would have been to the nation’s democratisation of itself via markets, predominantly Liberal Party loyalists. They would technology and voting. Some of these psyches, hun- have voted for the party irrespective of whether they gry for recognition, have grown rampant. were unhappy with one or other of its policies or its member of parliament. However, in 2018 this cohort voiced its unhappiness loudly and voted en Grandiloquence masse for an independent candidate who represented s conventional opportunities for status classic virtue-signalling causes (climate-change recognition in Australia have declined, the catastrophism among them). They did so out of a demandA for it has increased. One result, mostly sense of disenchantment with the loss of the prime since 1970, has been the growth of the phenomenon ministership that had been suffered by one of their of virtue-signalling. Virtue-signalling is a form of own—Malcolm Turnbull—a seasoned high-status status-signalling. As the general standard of living virtue-signaller who had become a talisman for per- in Australia has grown, older status symbols have sons for whom big houses and luxury cars no longer declined in power and salience. So what to replace can satisfy their craving for status. them with? The answer, in short: loud moralising. The Wentworth by-election encapsulates the Since the turning point of 1970, attaching one’s peculiar mentality of the 2010s. The era presented psyche to moral “causes” has become an increasingly a strange mix of fragile self-esteem (individual and common way for would-be high-status persons to collective) and boastful pride. Cringe-worthy claims communicate their claim to status recognition—in to moral superiority masked deep underlying status other words that, in some significant way, they are anxieties. The classic Australian mentality of quiet better than other people. achievement was premised on not making a great In the most adept contemporary societies, an fuss. Australians could genuinely admire a person inverse relationship exists between honorifics and who was good at doing what they did and single functionality. It is almost a law of modern society out those who were in some way exceptional. But that the more an industry or institution hands out the converse of this was not overstating abilities or awards, the less well it functions. That is true of the pretending that individuals had capacities that they entertainment industry, universities, corporations didn’t have. Cutting pretentious tall poppies down to and charities. A functional society addresses prob- size was a national art. In the era after 1970 a gradual lems practically—that is, matter-of-factly, adaptively shift occurred. The self-image of Australian elites and incrementally. It is experimental, empirical, began to change as an almost unconscious response unromantic and sensible. Adaptation leans towards to the generic Australian indifference to status. quietness and silence rather than garrulous or windy Grandiloquence began to creep into the national speech. Its fruits are exhibited in practical social self-understanding in place of matter-of-factness. patterns conducive to high levels of human happi- The first sign of this was the language used by ness rather than symbols of status. Significance lies organisational elites. This language became increas- in the reality of quiet achievement, which on the ingly artificial. Directness and plain-speaking began whole is indifferent to or at least not especially inter- to be replaced by awkward locutions and stilted, ested in honorifics. mealy-mouthed phrases. An unprecedented degree However, a problem exists. If you are no good of fawning appeared. Organisational courtiers at quiet achievement then you look hopefully at the bowed and scraped to one another. They feigned status ladders that do exist, and you ask yourself: praise for their colleagues and suspended their own how do I climb up them? What signals will lift me disbelief in order to play a game of mutual ritualised up? You worry if those ladders start to get out of inauthenticity. But phoney praise by courtiers can reach. Those who are not confident quiet achievers go only so far, as it has limited appeal among the love to receive awards and titles. The labels assure general population. So began an avid search by post- them—and others—that they are important and 1970s Australian elites for “causes” to champion and that they matter. The postmodern short-cut to get- lower-status groups to patronise. The same vapid ting awards and titles is to adopt “causes”. This is a grandiloquence that elites applied to their peers was form of status branding. These “brands” are signals applied to a proliferating series of status out-groups generated by high-status (or would-be high-status) and ritualised moral dogmas. What followed was a persons and organisations in order to shore up their complex status game: in-groups patronised outlier standing. status groups in order to burnish their own social We saw a good example of this in 2018 during standing. Insiders used their own outlier stories (real

18 Quadrant March 2020 Status Seekers and the Quiet Australian or made-up) as trump cards to secure status promo- Human beings have natural sympathy for those who tion. Pretentious moral claims air-brushed stagnant are hurt or injured. But using trauma, whether it or declining performance by self-admiring organi- be small and large, to boost a person’s or a group’s sations and institutions. moral status is not only a false claim on sympathy The quiet Australians look askance at this. Their but a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature image of Australia is a society that is comfortable of human happiness—and, in virtue of that, a mis- and relaxed. They value proficient and pleasant understanding of the essential nature of Australian anonymity over grandstanding status-signalling. society. There are simple rules in Australia for a person to At its core Australia is a happy society, relaxed get to a comfortable place in society: form a dual- and comfortable. This doesn’t exempt it from headed household in your twenties, stick by it, be stresses and strains and miseries. But, in coping prepared to be mobile in the job market, be consci- with those, on balance it leans towards sanguine entious, give some thought to your duties both to and phlegmatic responses rather than choleric and yourself and to others, and apply yourself. For most melancholic ones. That said, social moods shift. We Australians a happy life is within reach even if a saw in Australia a drift in the 2010s towards choleric high-status life is not. Everyone suffers misfortunes and melancholic feelings. This was evident in poli- and setbacks. Everyone at times cries out in pain or tics. Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership had an anguish. Suffering is a normal part of the human aura of haughty melancholia about it. His opponent, condition. But suffering is not a sign of being mor- Labor leader Bill Shorten, was caught in a perpetual ally “special” or “important”. It is how we cope with stance of angry sneering. The Australian electorate suffering—our endurance—that is noteworthy. liked neither of these styles and voted accordingly. Australians cope in various ways with misery and This revealed a distinct divide. Today the higher disappointment. Among us there are fatalists, stoics, that one moves up the social ladder, away from humorous self-deprecators, maudlin personalities, Australia’s large middle class into its various elite melodramatic personas, pessimists and optimists. classes, the more likely one is to encounter choleric We interact with all manner of temperaments. and melancholic attitudes and styles of behaviour. There are angry choleric, optimistic sanguine, happy These are certainly not universal. Nonetheless they phlegmatic and anxious melancholic individuals. are widespread enough to have a peculiar distort- The classic social psychology of Australians leans ing effect on society. This is because political rheto- towards a mix of the sanguine and the phlegmatic. ric—as opposed to election voting—is dominated by But an undertow of choleric and melancholic person- elites. That dominance, in itself, is a mundane and ality types has always existed. Often in the past this uninteresting fact. What is surprising though is the has given inflection and colour to Australia’s domi- degree to which Australia’s political rhetoric, espe- nant sanguine-phlegmatic social type. However, in cially in the 2010s, has expressed itself in angry and the postmodern era, a discernible shift is evident. In mournful tones. It is striking that those with the the decades following 1970, choleric and melancholic least apparent reason to be acrimonious or funereal strands in the Australian national character became about the world are the ones most likely to engage more visible and more vocal. This was not uniform in this behaviour. It is a perverse and singular char- across the period. It rose and fell. The 1970s and the acteristic of our age that members of social classes 2010s in particular saw a notable spike in fractious who have no particular reason to feel desolated, and dysphoric attitudes and behaviours. The degree pensive and woeful—or furious, incandescent and of neuroticism in Australian society shot up. Other vexed—nevertheless project all of those emotions decades, though, were more relaxed. obsessively onto the world. Among certain sections of Australia’s elites, the older striving for quiet achievement has been dis- The politics of contempt placed by a need to loudly express bad-tempered n those times after 1970 marked by spikes in and splenetic ideas or display downcast and dole- melancholic dejection or sullen choleric acri- ful attitudes. They routinely trumpet mean-minded, Imony, we see a parallel shift in attitudes to suffer- condescending and sanctimonious views. But if you ing. Australia’s classic sanguine-phlegmatic social look at virtually any set of key Australian social sta- psychology regards suffering as a condition to be tistics, almost nothing in the real world justifies such endured with fortitude and where possible abated. moods. If we think of it as a long-term trend then, It abjures a world of obsessive “safety” or one of since 1970, the tone of Australia’s various elites has masochistic pain. In contrast, postmodern person- become subtly but increasingly despondent and self- alities—a distinct subset of contemporary society— flagellating. The downcast and disenchanted strains think of suffering as a prospective status signal. found amongst various professional and managerial

Quadrant March 2020 19 Status Seekers and the Quiet Australian cohorts have internalised a mix of penitence for a rather audiences of peers. Status is hierarchical. world that they think has gone wrong and disdain People like hierarchies not only because they get for anyone who disagrees with them. to feel that they stand above others but (just as This trend fortunately has neither been uni- much) because they get to enjoy a comforting versal nor linear. Periodically, if only temporarily, subordination. All superiors in a status tree are also the distemper hijacks the national mood. In other subordinates. Even kings kneel before God. Peers in periods, the reverse happens. In the 1970s, neuroti- contrast are the principal audience for status signals. cism rose. Then, from the mid-1980s to the mid- Peers confirm or deny the validity of a person’s 2000s, the powerful phlegmatic and genial nature status claims. That’s why “friends” and other peer of Australia’s culture pushed back against it. After networks are so common on the internet and social that yet another relapse into despondency occurred. media. They are not really friends. Rather they are It kidnapped the national mood between 2005 and members of a person’s approximate rank (or “tribe”). 2020. They can validate your view of who you are when you condescend to others or are contemptuous of them. Status tribes If you say “those people are evil, they are the low- he eras of peak elite dejection mirror eras of est of the low” and your “friends” agree with you (they relative economic and social stagnation. When “like” what you say) then you can tell yourself that Tmarket and industry innovation slackens, produc- you are virtuous and high-minded. Your “friends” tivity drops, procedural bureaucracy and statism (your peers, your “tribe”) smother your internal increase and the quality of schools and universities doubts that this is so. The smothering of doubts is declines, then elite cheerlessness grows. The ques- important. For under the surface today, status anxi- tion is: are these measurable phenomena the effect ety is massive. A balm for this is the “likes” that or are they the cause of the downcast mentalities persons receive for every narky, gloating “comment” of various elites? Possibly both. On the other hand, that they make. Today in the major electoral democ- they may indicate a deep contrary fact. It is often racies like Australia, fealty and superiority (the stuff observed that higher income does not make peo- of hierarchy) are not reflected much in actual social ple happier. What is less observed though may be structures. The principal hierarchies that exist are equally true: happiness makes people more prosper- organisational ones—procedural bureaucracies. As ous. Phlegmatic, calm and impassive mentalities are hierarchies go, they are significant but much less much more conducive to achieving the human good so than those found in feudal, patrimonial or des- than neurotic ones are. The same is true of sanguine, potic societies. As a consequence, in Australia as in upbeat and confident feelings. other comparable nations, hierarchical feelings and The 2010s, like the 1970s, were broadly uninvit- dispositions have become increasingly virtual. They ing economic periods characterised by a crescendo exist as entertainment, ideological and online fanta- of peevish and despondent feelings. It is an inter- sies. These are a psychological echo of a now largely esting but irresolvable question of what causes lost world—a mental nostalgia for something that what. Nonetheless, what is clear is that mirthless functional reality doesn’t have much time for. These and carping outlooks to a degree edged out their fantasies often fixate on political and media figures opposites in these decades. The explanation of why who present as cartoon heroes and villains. this happened is rooted in the tension between deep archaic (even primeval) longings for status and the tendency of modern prosperous societies like Schmitt’s world Australia to replace status with functionality. The n the 1930s argued that the key attraction of personalities to lachrymose and petu- distinction in politics was between friends and lant rhetoric is understandable as it embellishes the Ienemies. Schmitt was a German political theorist, standing of those who give voice to it. It is a medium the best of his generation. He was also a Nazi jurist. for moral status-climbing. Contemporary political twitter agrees with Schmitt. Status is a communication to others about one’s In of social media, the pursuit of online ene- relative superiority. Status-signalling, including mies has become super-charged. De-platforming, virtue-signalling, is what high-status groups or cancelling and pack aggression are common tech- persons do in order to maintain and boost their niques deployed against imagined enemies. In the position in the world relative to others. This nether-world of Schmitt-style behaviour, persons is achieved in many ways. A key to successful accumulate friends by attacking nemeses. Finding contemporary status-signalling is the phenomenon a “cause” is a key component of contemporary of “tribes”. These are not literally archaic tribes but downcast moralism. This is often then wrapped

20 Quadrant March 2020 Status Seekers and the Quiet Australian up in an exaggerated depreciation of foes and an loathing. Even so, the easiest way of get- expansive adulation of political or media celebri- ting “likes” for a post to a contemporary Australian ties. Meanwhile the actual world proceeds strangely newspaper is to make a hauteur comment about the untouched by these apparitional idols. political party that you oppose. Comments about Democratic politics is naturally polarised. Its public policy get little response from readers unless premise is that there is a governing party and an these comments are wrapped in partisan scorn. party. The expression of that democratic The experience of being a partisan is heady. It is political polarity varies over time. In its longest- endorphin-generating. lived, deepest and most consequential version, The political philosopher it personifies the schism between and warned about introducing the toxin of contempt . Even though the opposition between into politics. He observed its corrosive effects on capitalism and its opposite (statism) remains the the English seventeenth century. Lessons painfully most consequential practical divide in liberal learnt are rarely remembered. Our fate, it appears, democracies, it is noteworthy that the dominat- is the eternal return of social poisons. Hobbes ing polarity in those societies in the 2010s was that pointed to the enduring appeal of the feeling of between friends and enemies. The personas of capi- “sudden glory” that is achieved when a person dis- talism and socialism still played minor roles on the dains their opponents. All it requires today is to political stage, but typically only as partisan jer- send out a tweet filled with derision to achieve this emiads and material for contemptuous put-downs, psychological boost. This is not to be confused with aspersions and jeers. witty mocking or playful banter. It is when oppo- Australia is fortunate. The Schmitt-style nents become enemies that a line is crossed. The make­over of politics has had much less impact in politics of the 2010s became unwittingly Schmittian Australia than in the United States. The friend- in its style and mentality. Contumely, scorn, sneer- enemy distinction has dominated American politics ing and hauteur emerged as the common emotional for the last decade. It had some (understandable) tone of the social media era. This is different from salience in foreign policy during the Cold War era. debate that is sharp, robust and steely. It is not about But now it permeates US domestic political dis- ideas or insights or arguments. It is about feelings course. Around half of voters, sometimes more, in of superiority. We feel contempt towards those we each of the two major parties think of their oppos- feel superior to. We compare ourselves with others. ing peers in the other party not as intellectually We rank our fellows higher and lower than us. misguided or wrong but as morally deficient or sim- The propensity to rank things is natural. It is ply idiots. Opposition voters are not persuadable— coeval with the human species and deeply ingrained they are contemptible. A majority of voters in each in us. It is also naturally biased in our own favour. party think of their mirror opposites as being either We have a strong desire for this bias to be con- closed-minded, immoral, unpatriotic, unintelligent firmed by others, our peers. But what we elicit or lazy people—so much so that one cannot even from others is often spurious. For false rankings live near them. When we get to this point, con- are common—as are false plaudits. Rankings and tempt has replaced truth as a political value. It is grades are frequently higher than is warranted on not that your peers in the other party have wrong closer inspection. Sometimes ranks and grades are or untrue views. Rather they are bad people. lower than is warranted. In either case, the psycho- Contempt is a status-value. It places you above logical disposition to exaggerate a person’s status, others. Truth has no value in a status system. Nor whether one’s own or another’s, has to be kept in do facts. When contempt replaces truth, the nature check. If it is not, then a society is apt to spiral of party activism changes. The party activist is down into pervasive contempt. Rampant deprecia- conventionally defined by their loyalty to a regular tion occurs across the board. In the 2010s, belit- institution. In Schmitt’s world, though, the loyalty tling others, despising and abhorring them became of the activist is to a kind of irregular partisan war- the lingua franca of media-saturated politics. While fare personified by a leader who “fights”. The aim of politics only ever involves a small number of people that kind of politics is not simply to win a periodic directly, it sets the tone for the rest of society. The electoral contest. Rather it is to engage symbolically tone of contempt is an ugly one. in a permanent war to “win”. The principal weapons of this perpetual animosity are pugnacity, swagger, Peter Murphy is the author of The Political Economy scorn, contempt and excoriation. Australia’s happy of Prosperity: Successful Societies and Productive blend of optimism and matter-of-factness insulates Cultures (Routledge, 2020). A footnoted version of this it to a significant degree from this kind of primal article appears at Quadrant Online.

Quadrant March 2020 21 Peter West

The Burden of Proof and the Pell Case

he conviction of the guilty is just; it is the formulation, runs through every human heart. It is unremarkable business of a just criminal there the decision is made to model ; but the conviction of the or Dzerzhinsky, Blackstone or Yezhov, or any of a Tinnocent strikes at the heart of justice. If it happens myriad gradations of good and evil which fall on through error or negligence, it is bad enough; when either side of that line. Those who police the law, it happens by design, it is an abomination that cor- and even more, those who adjudicate the law, bear rodes trust in the law itself. a heavy responsibility, not merely for the integrity Maimonides in the twelfth century, in his com- of their own decisions, but for the integrity of the mentary on Exodus 23:7 (“Keep far from a false society as a whole. charge, and do not kill the innocent and righteous, Hence the importance of the presumption of for I will not acquit the wicked”) concluded, “it is innocence; the presumption that the accused is, at better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand worst, one of Blackstone’s ten. Many of the proc- guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to esses of criminal courts are informed by this imper- death once in a way”. ative. The burden of proof rests on the prosecution. Practical men, especially those who reasonably Aside from the logical problems of proving, even to expect never to suffer the consequences of flawed the standard of on the balance of probabilities, that a jurisprudence, have taken a more pragmatic view defendant has not committed a crime, the presump- than Maimonides. So English Chief Justice John tion of innocence throws onto the prosecution the Fortescue, in 1471, revised the number drastically. whole burden of proving beyond reasonable doubt that “Indeed I would rather wish twenty evil doers to the defendant is guilty of the crime. escape death through pity, than one man to be These lessons, and more, have been learned over unjustly condemned.” Later still, Lord Blackstone centuries of common-law practice, and have been in the late 1760s widened the scope to all crime and encoded in the manner in which trials are conducted. punishment, writing, “Better that ten guilty per- In most criminal trials, potential jurors are very sons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This last unlikely to be aware of any previous convictions of has become a fundamental maxim of common-law the defendant. It follows that they cannot have pre- criminal justice, generally known as Blackstone’s judged him. As the public profile of cases increases, Ratio. so does the probability that jurors will have heard Statesmen, and the secret police, can have their about it, and will have some opinion about the guilt own sense of the practical. Otto von Bismarck sup- or innocence of the accused. However, provided the posedly remarked that “it is better that ten inno- accused does not have some long-running notoriety, cent men suffer than one guilty man escape”. Felix and provided that members of the public are not Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, perpetrator of expected to carry some deep-seated grudge against the Red Terror, head of the OGPU/NKVD, was him, we can reasonably expect that an otherwise more to the point: “Better to execute ten innocent disinterested juror will attend to and assess the men than to leave one guilty man alive.” One of actual evidence presented. his successors, Nikolay Yezhov, restated his argu- Occasionally, however, a majority of the popula- ment: “Better that ten innocent people should suffer tion of the country carries just such a deep-seated than one spy get away.” What he meant by “suffer” grudge against a defendant. Fortunately, these occa- was illustrated when he fell foul of the Great Purge sions have been rare. Until our own benighted time, which he had orchestrated: he was executed in 1940. the most glaring example was Lindy Chamberlain. The line between good and evil, in Solzhenitsyn’s Only two men stood against the public mood. The

22 Quadrant March 2020 The Burden of Proof and the Pell Case coroner who conducted the original coronial inquiry examined, by video link. In the second trial, the found that there was no case for the Chamberlains accuser was not required to appear at all. The jury to answer. This did not satisfy the public craving for was shown a video recording of his testimony at a sacrifice, or the politicians who saw the advantage the first trial. The defence was thus denied the in giving it to them. Then, when the appeal finally opportunity to probe for further contradictions and went to the High Court, Justice Deane expressed weaknesses in his testimony. a dissent from the majority rejection which was These constraints did have the unexpected con- extensively quoted when Justice Weinberg drew to sequence that, on appeal, the prosecution could a close his own dissent in the Pell appeal. not argue that the jury had an advantage over the appeal judges in being able to observe the witness he vituperation towards Lindy Chamberlain in the context of the trial: the appeal bench saw was as nothing compared to the campaign exactly what both juries saw of the complainant. Tagainst Cardinal Pell. The theatre of the courtroom is eloquent in By the time of his trial, Pell was the single most expressing intent and expectations—the elevated widely loathed person in the country. He had been position of the judge, the ranks of the jury, seated subjected to a concerted campaign of calumny since like privileged spectators at the unfolding drama, he became Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, and the the accused in the dock attending to every exchange, intensity of that calumny reached a crescendo during and the focus for the most part on the witness box. Julia Gillard’s Royal Commission. “Court” is the place where majesty It was, as Justice Thomas described reigns, and hears petitions for jus- the hearings for his elevation to he presumption tice or mercy. The majesty now is the US Supreme Court, a high- T the majesty of the law, but remind- tech lynching. It was conducted in of innocence throws ers of its lineage are in the forms of the finest contemporary manner onto the prosecution dress and address. They proclaim, of postmodern contempt for truth, “This is no ordinary meeting, and in the immemorial tradition of the whole burden no ordinary proceeding. It ech- the pharmakos, the sacrificial victim of proving beyond oes down the centuries. Comport to heal the city of its afflictions. reasonable doubt yourself and focus your thoughts Not only did potential jurors with these things in mind.” have prior knowledge of the case— that the defendant is On this stage, then, what mes- thanks to the ABC, Melbourne guilty of the crime. is sent to the observer and the University Press, and radio and juror by the lengths to which the television hosts across the political court goes to protect the accuser spectrum—but they were convinced that he was a from any exposure to the accused; and by the fact monster who covered up for serial paedophiles and that the accuser is not even required to attend a was probably one himself. This attitude was com- second trial? Does this procedure convey a pre- mon amongst non-Catholic conservatives. Has the sumption of innocence? Or does it speak to the ABC ever broadcast any libel so grievous as when victimhood and suffering of the accuser, and to the Tim Minchin called Cardinal Pell “scum”, “pomp- guilt of the accused? ous buffoon” and “coward” in a song broadcast Another bizarre aspect of the trial was the rela- before Pell was to be questioned, again, by the Royal tive treatment of the reputations of accused and Commission? This at a time when Victoria Police accuser. Pell’s “conviction” in the court of public was planning to arrest Pell—not to charge him, but opinion for his imagined crimes has been discussed. for questioning—when he returned to Australia to What of his accuser? appear before the commission. In the trial of the murderer of Daniel Morcombe, In these circumstances, some asked whether Pell for example, the defendant’s history of child sex could get a fair trial. Was a hung jury the best he offences was not admitted. The defence tried to could expect? We now know the answer, and we cast suspicion on one of the witnesses called by can see the reasons for it; some of the reasons, at the prosecution, by reference to the witness’s own any rate. criminal history. The witness was greatly offended by this, both because he knew the defendant’s his- he conduct of the trial itself, when its processes tory, and because of the attempt to implicate him were finally revealed, was also a revelation to using sources denied to the prosecution. many.T In the event, the accuser was not required Other aspects of a witness’s or complainant’s to appear in person to confront Cardinal Pell with background and character might also be raised by his testimony. He gave his evidence, and was cross- the defence. One might expect, for example, that a

Quadrant March 2020 23 The Burden of Proof and the Pell Case witness’s history of mental illness, which called his sequences of these changes? Perhaps they have, and stability or probity into question, would be impor- perhaps within the profession they have expressed tant as an indicator of reliability and probity. their opposition. If so, it has been signally ineffec- In Cardinal Pell’s trial, such was not the case. tive. All, or almost all, of these changes will have All parties, except the jury, were aware that the received the imprimatur of the various state and accuser had a history of psychological problems. As national law reform commissions, with reference Cardinal Pell’s counsel put it in the application for no doubt to “international best practice”, part of leave to appeal to the High Court (emphasis mine): the standard camouflage of the modern ideologue.

The majority do not refer to the fact that he arguments, as fundamental as they are, are the applicant was not permitted to ask being made to the highest court in the land. questions about or subpoena the complainant’s TheyT have been implicit at every stage of the legal psychological history. Nor that the applicant persecution of Cardinal Pell: Operation Tethering, could not tell the jury that the complainant had the character assassination by leak and innuendo, had psychological treatment and the applicant had the committal hearing, the first trial, the second been denied the ability to obtain the records of it. trial, and the appeal—and have not diverted the juggernaut. The effect of the “reforms” on the Counsel referred to the relevant Victorian legis- integrity of judicial processes must now be clear, lation (emphasis mine). even to members of parliament. In respect of Section 32C, Justice Weinberg Section 32C of the Evidence (Miscellaneous wrote: “I make no criticism of [the Act]. This is Provisions) Act 1958 (Vic) limits access to and a matter for the Parliament, and for no one else.” use of any confidential communications with a This is the view from the bench of the relationship medical practitioner or counsellor unless, inter between the branches of government. Disturbingly, alia, the applicant can establish (without having seen it also corresponds with the reality seen from the the material or having been permitted to ask any suburbs. These are matters for the Parliament, and questions about it) that it has substantial probative for no one else. At least, no voters watching events value and the public interest in preserving unfold on their televisions have been consulted confidentiality is substantially outweighed by the on any of this. If they were disturbed by it, what public interest in admitting it. good would it do? Such matters do not rise to the level of concern to, or differentiation between, the In his pleading, he laid out the issue at stake, not major political parties. Their care and cultivation merely in Cardinal Pell’s trial, but for Australian fall to the administrative state, with its army of jurisprudence as a whole: policy-makers and propagandists, commissions and quangos. Rigid application of the onus and standard of Even when the government has a philosophical proof in 21st century sexual assault trials in commitment to conservative and traditional values, Australia is of particular importance. Over the experience has shown that the scope of ministerial last two decades … the laws of evidence and discretion is severely limited. This would come as procedure have been modified by Australian no surprise to devotees of Yes, Minister, but it is no parliaments … making it more difficult to test laughing matter. The tragedy is that these “reforms” allegations of sexual assault. Those … accused, that have passed through the inscrutable bowels of including by a complete stranger making the administrative state can only be undone by a decades old allegations, cannot, for example, parliament and an executive with the courage and investigate a complainant’s psychological conviction to unwind them. history in the hope of uncovering a reason There can be no discovery of a baby’s clothes in why a seemingly credible person is accusing a dingo’s lair to shame today’s mob, and there is no them … an accused is heavily reliant on the broadly-based movement to re-educate Australians presumption of innocence and the requirement in the foundations and tenets of our criminal justice for juries and appellate courts to apply … system. When most of today’s lawyers are ignorant reasoning which accord[s] with the onus and of those principles, what hope for the lay person? standard of proof. However, supposing that the electorate recovers a traditional sense of a fair go, along with a sense of Counsel refers, without apparent irony, to these shame where a fair go is denied, can the legislative changes as “reforms”. Have the various bar associa- abuses of due process be reversed? tions and the Law Council not appreciated the con- Given the refusal of the administrative state and

24 Quadrant March 2020 The Burden of Proof and the Pell Case half the US electorate to accept Donald Trump’s Western democracies, Dante’s grim advice at the election, and given the determination of the prior gate of Hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. UK parliament to thwart Brexit, and given the ina- bility of Tony Abbott to persuade his cabinet even Peter West is a retired computer programmer. He to rescind Section 18C, it might rather be appro- contributed “The Willing Suspension of Disbelief ” to priate to inscribe, over the polling booths of the the April 2019 issue.

Dancers

They danced to the same tune in a contemporary ballet company when they were younger. He used to lift her, his hands holding her thin waist, her rib cage revealing each breath. She was waxed bare. Her face painted in a theatrical mask, her red lips poised in position, her dark curly hair neatly trained. They got married even though he wanted to keep touring, she wanted to have children. He knew it would be the end of their career. Two boys came, contorting her body in ways she’d never moved before although she had moved in many ways. Her stomach sagged, her bottom fell he never saw her ribcage breathing again. Hair started growing everywhere— creeping down her thighs, under her arms, whiskers under her chin. She left blood spots on their sheets and didn’t do the laundry for a month. Her makeup went past its use-by date and had to be thrown in the bin. They were doing menial jobs and could only afford necessities. They were renting a flat in an area they hated. The boys shared a bunk in the second room and fought all the time. She grew fat like her mother. She hated her body, her life and she started to hate him. Everything was so boring. There were no lights in her eyes when she moved. When she cried, no one applauded her theatrics. No roses were gifted to her after a performance. Somehow she met someone. They’d known each other before and he still remembered her old body. She told her husband, “I’m moving out. I want the boys 50/50.” She packed her old touring suitcase and went to live in silence half the time. But even this drama in her life wasn’t enough. It felt flat, empty, tired, sad. Her new man was a disappointment too. And she still couldn’t find her stomach.

Rowena Wiseman

Quadrant March 2020 25 David Free The Texture of Reality: Clive James, 1939–2019

ll I can do is turn a phrase until it catches he increasingly used it to tackle the main events of the light.” When Clive James died last history. He was appalled by the ease with which November, at the age of eighty, news- advanced societies in the twentieth century had “Apapers and websites, along with a rump of literate collapsed into murderous . He was tweeters, paid him the highest compliment a writer haunted by the possibility it could happen again. can receive. They quoted bushels of his best sen- When his best essays were collected in a volume tences, including that one. He was gone, but his called As of This Writing, the epigraph came from the phrases were still catching the light. Sometimes it French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut: “Barbarism was hard to tell whether they came from his poetry is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful or prose. He had always hoped to be remembered shadow that accompanies its every step.” as a poet. In the epigraphs to his Collected Poems, he The shadow of barbarism had stalked James from quoted Horace: “If you rank me with the lyric poets, his earliest years. He was born in Sydney in 1939, a my exalted head shall strike the stars.” Whether month after the outbreak of the Second World War. James will be ranked that way it’s too early to know. His father fought in Malaya and was taken prisoner But maybe we saw hints, in those first responses to after the fall of Singapore. When the war ended, his death, that the distinction between his verse and he was still alive. With other liberated Australian his prose will come to seem unimportant, in the long prisoners of war, he was offered a ride home on an run. Maybe he’ll be remembered as a phrasemaker American B-24. The flight went down in a typhoon, of genius who dispensed his mini-masterpieces in killing everyone on board. Clive James was there an unusually various range of delivery devices. The when his mother opened the telegram. “At the age phrase quoted above originated, as it happens, in of five, I was seeing the full force of human despair,” one of his memoirs. But it was poetry, wherever it he would recall. “It was several days before she could came from. control herself. I understood nothing beyond the In several senses, poetry always came first for fact that I could not help.” James. The earliest piece in his Collected Poems was The death of his father had two lasting effects written in 1958, when he was nineteen. And poetry on James. Psychologically, it scarred him. “I think came last, too. During the final decade of his life he that I was marked for life,” he wrote, in Unreliable was in desperately poor health, battling a cancer that Memoirs. But the event shaped him intellectually went in and out of remission, as well as a disease of too. Measuring his experiences against the the lungs that cruelly hampered his ability to breathe backdrop of contemporary history, James came to and talk. In those straits, longer forms of expression understand, by the time he reached middle age, that were beyond him, and the short poem again became his own story did not qualify as a catastrophe. It his favoured refuge. Moreover, his verse had found was “just bad luck”, he said. The Russian memoirist its last great theme: his own mortality. Nadezhda Mandelstam, in her book Hope Against Between the bookends of his poetic output sits Hope, had written about “the privilege of ordinary the long shelf of James’s prose writings: three books heartbreaks”. Reading books like hers, James saw of television criticism, four novels, five volumes of that he’d always enjoyed that privilege, which had memoir, twelve volumes of literary essays, a book been conferred on him by the robustness of the about fame, a book of travel pieces, and the great democracies in which he was fortunate enough crowning work, Cultural Amnesia. James shifted to have lived. His father, he pointed out, “was a restlessly from medium to medium over the course free human being”. So was his mother. In Soviet of his long career. As his critical prose matured, Russia, Osip Mandelstam, Nadezhda’s husband,

26 Quadrant March 2020 The Texture of Reality: Clive James, 1939–2019 had been sent to the Gulag for the crime of writing job writing a monthly column about radio, and then a poem, and had died of hunger and cold. Crazed about television. had set a new benchmark for heartbreak In 1972, he was hired to write the Observer’s during James’s lifetime. By international standards, weekly television column. This would turn out to be he counted himself lucky to have grown up at all. his pivotal stroke of luck. He stayed in the Observer “[I]n our share of the 20th century,” he observed, job for a decade, building a huge and discerning “… to die young, and for no reason, has been, readership. Writing about television gave him a if not the typical childhood, then certainly the chance to flex all his muscles simultaneously. He representative one”. could be a drama critic, a cultural commentator, a The fact remains, however, that Clive James grew political analyst, a real-time historian and a mor- up as the only child of a bereaved mother. This was alist all at once. It let him indulge his performer’s surely the root of his lifelong eagerness to please—of instincts, too. James was an inveterate entertainer, the reluctance to be boring that seemed to weigh on and his writing always put on a show. People who him like a moral obligation. He wanted to live the called his television column “a cabaret turn”, he later life, or the lives, that his parents had been cheated confessed, “were exactly right”. Each week’s piece of. He wanted to speak every language, and read was “a one-man smoking concert in min- every book. He wanted to make phrases that were iature form”, with its own running order, opening light on their feet, but laden with universal truth. number, monologue, closing number, and encore. He had two great interests as a writer: himself, When performing to a live audience, James could and everything else. Verse was his preferred way get carried away: his crowd-pleasing instincts could of addressing the first preoccupation, especially as lead him into hammery. But in his best writing, he neared the end. But his prose faced outward, his formidable energies were tamed by his equally and served his ravenous urge to get the whole world formidable intelligence. His dynamic, reference- in. One of his earliest literary heroes was Albert riddled style proved influential; it gave the serious Camus. “Tyrants conduct monologues above a mil- English essay a bracing kick up the arse. George lion solitudes,” Camus had written, in The Rebel. “I Orwell had had many virtues, but he couldn’t make wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like you laugh. James could. He was a knockabout high- poetry,” James said. It was a young man’s ambition; brow. His prose was incredibly learned, but it was before he could fulfil it, he had to grow up, and demotic, irreverent and red-blooded too. In those figure out how his own version of the trick could distant days, Australian writers still wanted to be best be worked. Viewed in retrospect, his career thought of as having such qualities. When the young looks like a long quest to find the forms in which Martin Amis started publishing book reviews, his he could sound most fully like himself—the forms father, Kingsley, teased him about their Jamesian in which his fizzing assortment of talents could be inflections by reading the pieces back to him in an made to work in harmony, instead of propelling Australian accent. him off the rails. In a late volume of his memoirs, James recalls that he made himself unpopular in the offices of the hen James sailed for England in 1961, his Observer by laughing out loud at his own jokes when departure from Australia wasn’t meant typing out the final drafts of his weekly pieces. But Wto be permanent. But when he wangled a spot at he couldn’t help it, he said, because the jokes were University in the mid-1960s, after ratt­ always “the last aspect to form on the page. I had ling miserably around London for a few years, he the line of argument already worked out, but when a landed in the place that would become his second tricky thought suddenly condensed into a gag I was home. At Cambridge, all his impulses were catered surprised every time.” for. He joined the Footlights dramatic society, and James was a funny man, but he was almost never ultimately served as its president. He took a degree unserious. The kind of jokes he liked to hear, and in English, and enrolled to do a PhD. He married to tell, were jokes that crystallised an argument or the Australian-born Dante scholar Prue Shaw, with worldview: they were “not decoration but architec- whom he had two daughters. James’s doctoral the- ture”. He scoffed at the idea—popular among medi- sis never materialised. Although Cambridge would ocrities—that laughter has no place in high art. The remain his home town, no single place would ever be notion “that solemnity equals seriousness” was, he big enough to contain him, and his academic career argued, a “delusion”. Indeed, he thought there was gradually yielded to a literary career in London. something fundamentally wrong with humourless While still technically a student, he started pub- people. He fleshed the point out in one of his col- lishing essays in the New Statesman and the Times umns, while putting the boot into the tiresomely Literary Supplement. At the Listener he got a steady earnest film director Lindsay Anderson:

Quadrant March 2020 27 The Texture of Reality: Clive James, 1939–2019

Common sense and a sense of humour are the to arrive in his head unbidden. “I don’t know how a same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense phrase works in terms of its origin,” he said: “I just of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those know how to neaten it up when it arrives, how to who lack humour are without judgment and make sure that its order of events doesn’t injure its should be trusted with nothing. internal economy.”

James’s television column was the kind of place conomy was always the big thing for James. where things like that could be said. Enacting his He loved any human pursuit that cut an ele- own principle, he worked at different speeds dur- Egant line through the world, the way poetry cuts a ing the course of each week’s piece. Slowing him- line through perceptions. He was an aficionado of self down, he would articulate a general truth with tango dancing. He was no fan of team games, but Proustian thoroughness. Quickening the pace, he would watch any solo sport that contained echoes would refine the argument into a one-liner that of poetry: tennis, diving, gymnastics, ice skating, begged to be quoted. motor racing. Above all he was a connoisseur of fine “A poem,” he once wrote, “is any piece of writ- phrases. The aim was to catch an elusive thought ing that can’t be quoted from except out of context.” using the minimum number of verbal strokes. A By that measure, James’s essays are not poems. We hole-in-one would trigger an explosion of laughter. can quote their best sentences without fearing we’ve An eagle or birdie would earn you a smile of rec- done their author an injustice. Even so, it remains ognition. Discussing the wit of —the true that his snappiest lines, as good as they sound modern poet he most revered—James wrote: by themselves, sound even better when encountered in their original environment. “Peace is not a princi- On top of the scores of fragments that make ple, it is only a desirable state of affairs,” he wrote, in us laugh, there are the hundreds which we an essay about . The phrase lodges constantly recall with a welcome sense of instantly in the memory. The case against pacifism communion, as if our own best thoughts had been has probably never been stated so succinctly. But given their most concise possible expression. James had more to say on the subject than just that. To grasp the nuances of his position, you have to James was a junkie for distilled wisdom, and he read the whole of the essay from which that line didn’t care where he found it. He was well known comes. Then you have to consult all the other essays for observing no distinction between the high and in which he revisited the same theme. (Peace, he popular arts. This is sometimes taken as a sign of wrote in one of them, “can’t be obtained without a his egalitarianism. Maybe it was, but in the first capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of instance it was an expression of his exacting literary the threat”.) The killer phrases are hard-earned in taste. Wit was wit, whether it occurred in the mem- James’s work; the one-liners aren’t just one-liners. oirs of Jimmy Cagney, or in a novel by Raymond When people quoted him correctly, Clive James Chandler, or in an episode of True Detective. On the was never less than delighted. The day when Mia other hand, James had no use for poets or novel- Farrow retweeted his poem “Japanese Maple” was a ists who lacked linguistic vitality, no matter how highlight of his later life. But he had a poet’s horror inflated their reputations. People whose words stuck of being quoted inaccurately, even when the inac- in your head—those were the people he sought out curacy was apparently trivial. Famously, he once and listened to. He frequently quoted the observa- observed that looked, with tion that it doesn’t matter how well you play when his shirt off, like “a brown condom full of walnuts”. you’re playing well; what matters is how well you play The line was often repeated, but people had a ten- when you’re playing badly. The author of this maxim dency to leave out the word brown—“thus,” James was the tennis champion Martina Navratilova, and lamented, “fatally depleting the visual information”. you can see why James found her words compelling. Walnuts are brown, but they don’t look like brown This was wisdom earned on the job, and it was as rubber. Schwarzenegger’s skin, on the other hand, germane to the writing of poetry as it was to the did. So the condom had to be brown. If we picture playing of tennis. a transparent sheath, we miss a vital component of Cultural Amnesia was, among other things, a the desired effect. showcase for refined and polished truths of this Poets are linguistic purists. They think in images, kind. Among the hundreds of aphorisms James and they’re scrupulous about translating them into quotes in that book, the briefest comes from the the right words. Analysing his own activities as a Viennese miniaturist Peter Altenberg. When one phrasemaker, James confessed that the first part of of Altenberg’s female companions complained that the process was a mystery to him. The images seemed his interest in her was “only” sexual, Altenberg

28 Quadrant March 2020 The Texture of Reality: Clive James, 1939–2019 responded with four words. Rendered in English, of communion with their author. His intelligence those words are: “What’s so only?” There it was, an was already flaring out from behind his words. In entire philosophy whittled down into three and a his critical essays, he repeatedly achieved the same half words. Altenberg, James said, had an “unri- effect. Writing about Marilyn Monroe, he found valled capacity to pour a whole view of life, a few a devastatingly concise way of evoking her acting cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs”. style. “Every phrase”, he wrote, “came out as if it had If Altenberg had lived to venture such a quip on just been memorised. Just been memorised.” James’s Twitter, of course, his “attitude to women” would footwork here is even nimbler than Altenberg’s. By no doubt have been “called out”, by more than a few repeating and stressing just one word, he says eve- fools, as “problematic”. Clive James was familiar rything that needs to be said about Marilyn’s man- with people who thought this way. His reply to them ner of reciting dialogue. Wit and art live on in the would have been two words shorter than Altenberg’s, critic’s language, if not in Marilyn’s acting. and it wouldn’t have ended with a question mark. James wrote his Marilyn essay in 1973. When he He had no patience for the commissars of political published his selected essays in 2003, it was one of correctness, who deny the of human nature, the earliest pieces he deemed worthy of inclusion. and seek to stamp out humour into The mid-1970s were a sweet spot for the bargain. He put a premium on James’s prose. He was settling into common sense, and was suspicious is commitment his stride as a critic. He had found of any writer or thinker who drifted H his proper line and length. His away from it. That way lay ideol- to precise and honest essays were taking on weight and ogy; and James was well schooled English lay at the resonance. They began to feel like in the atrocities that could pieces in a larger mosaic, grouted deliver. He rarely lost his temper in heart of all his together by certain recurring print, but one thing that unfailingly criticism. It was themes: a contempt for pretension got his goat was shoddy language. fundamental to and euphemism; a scrupulous care His commitment to precise and for words, and for the conceptual honest English lay at the heart of everything he believed distinctions they alert us to, when all his criticism. It was fundamen- about art and politics. their proper meaning is conserved; tal to everything he believed about a respect, above all, for something art and politics. People who speak he invoked time and again in his in clichés give us a clear signal that they’re not work: “the texture of reality”. The essays were start- thinking straight about the world. Ideologues and ing to imply a general philosophy. It was a sane real- charlatans go further, infesting their terrible prose ism, opposed to ideology in all its forms. with jargon because they don’t even want to think straight about the world, and don’t want us to think n 1980, James published Unreliable Memoirs, the straight about it either. first instalment of an autobiographical sequence Over the years, James hammered this point Ithat would run for five volumes. He was only forty even more strenuously than Orwell did. He had a when that original book came out. That was an auda- special intolerance for the mixed metaphor. In an ciously young age at which to publish a memoir. But essay he wrote about mangled English, he claimed James was doubly estranged from his childhood, by to have discovered a perfect specimen of the form. time and by distance. Physical separation gave his The perpetrator was a British tennis journalist, who memories added sharpness and tang. His prose sang had written: “Now, the onus is on Henman to come like poetry, all right. And it didn’t sing only for him. out firing at Ivanisevic, the wild card who has torn Unreliable Memoirs evoked the lost paradise of his through this event on a wave of emotion …” You childhood so lavishly that it conjured up everyone could see what the guy meant, as long as you didn’t else’s childhood too. By the book’s second page, worry about the incompatibility of his clichés. He James had already hit his straps. His childhood hadn’t, so why should you? Writing like that says home in Jannali was, he recalled, nothing original, and takes a lot of words to say it. Clive James, like any poet, always strove to do surrounded by an area of land which could the opposite. Two of his later verse collections were be distinguished from the bush only because called Sentenced to Life and Injury Time. The phrases of its more lavish concentrations of colour. are familiar; they border on the banal. But by turn- Nasturtiums and honeysuckle proliferated, ing them into titles, James makes you rethink them. their strident perfumes locked in perpetual You see meanings in them you didn’t see before. Even contention. Hydrangeas grew in reefs, like coral before you opened his books, you already felt a sense in a sea of warm air.

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Unreliable Memoirs was as lyrical as James’s best that has to be a real smoker. From then on, poetry, and as politically serious as his best criti- with the help of the hubcap, I proved I was. cism. It was one of the funniest books ever written; but it was moving too. It was a work of autobiog- Similarly, James didn’t just drink, during his raphy, but it was also—by the author’s own admis- time as a drinker; he drank to excess, and the results sion—a work of fiction. Once more James had disturbed him so much that he finally resolved to go discovered, or invented, a form in which he could cold turkey. fire on all cylinders at once. For the moment, his James’s broadcasting career followed the same hot streak as a writer continued. trajectory: he did television to excess too, and ulti- There would be some less triumphant detours mately had to kick the habit. His literary misfires, of during the decade ahead. In the 1980s, James which there were a few, can probably be blamed on began to spread himself perilously thin. For one the same basic vice. His ravenous appetites led him thing, he became a television star. In 1982 he gave into temptation sometimes, and made him bite off up writing his Observer column, for fear he would more than he could chew. He never seemed fully at find himself reviewing one of his own shows. ease in his novels, for example. He published four There were many of those—far too many to list. of these, between 1983 and 1996, and by his stand- Some of them were memorable. His annual New ards they must be classed as failures: interesting Year’s Eve special was unmissable, a fireworks and instructive failures, but failures nonetheless. display for highbrows. On The Late Show, he had In a novel, the reader’s imagination needs room riveting round-table discussions with people like to move. Ideally, one should know nothing about and Anthony Burgess. James was the novelist at all. But by the early 1980s James free to be his untrammelled literary self on pro- had become a celebrity, whether he liked it or not. grams like that; he felt no urge to dumb things His voice was all over television. When you read down. On his lesser shows, the great man could his work, it was hard to get his distinctive intona- emit an unfortunate but unmistakable scent of tions out of your head. This wasn’t a fatal prob- ham. This could induce a strange cognitive dis- lem if you were reading an essay, or even a poem. sonance in you, if you knew how good a writer he But Brilliant Creatures, his first novel, sounded far was. Who was the real Clive James? Was he the too distractingly like its author to be an effective man who wrote minutely perceptive essays about work of fiction. The book was brilliant, all right. Primo Levi and Osip Mandelstam? Or was he the It contained some of James’s most inspired prose. man in Hugh Hefner’s pool, getting a face full of But there was way too much of it, and there didn’t silicone? Something had to give, and James’s liter- seem to be much substance underneath. There was ary reputation suffered during the twenty years or no meat, no bottom end. In his essays, reality itself so when he was a fixture on television. had always supplied the ballast, the counterweight Of course, the man in Hefner’s pool was the real to the style. Brilliant Creatures was all style—and Clive James. But he wasn’t the whole Clive James. the more of it the author piled on, the more he He was a complex man firing on just one cylinder, demonstrated his inability to sound, or to think, and firing on it, sometimes, to an unseemly degree. like anybody other than himself. The same qual- James must have known it: there must have been ity that made him such a potent essayist meant he times during his television career when his serious would never be more than a minor novelist. self wondered what his garrulous self had got him His second novel, The Remake, was better. For into. He would always insist, a bit defensively, that one thing, it was written in the first person. The his Postcard documentaries contained some of his device can free a novelist up, and it certainly had best writing. But he sold himself short when he that effect on James. Indeed, one wondered if it said so. Writing for television, he was supplying gave him more freedom than he really wanted. The words to go with pictures. When he really was at Remake is about the sexual indiscretions of a mar- his best, his words made the pictures. ried man, and the author drops some large clues in the text that he is talking about himself. The topic y his own account, Clive James had a lifelong was a minefield, and it seems possible that James tendency to overdo things. When he smoked, concluded, after the book made its way into the Bhe didn’t just smoke. He smoked so much that he world, that this time he’d delivered too much sub- used a hubcap for an ashtray. As he recalled: stance. In any case, he never again wrote a novel as convincing as The Remake. His next novel, Brrm! I had found the hubcap lying in the gutter in Brrm!, was a disappointment, and after The Silver Trumpington Street, and thought: “That will Castle, published in 1996, he stopped writing fic- make an ideal ashtray.” A man who thinks like tion altogether.

30 Quadrant March 2020 The Texture of Reality: Clive James, 1939–2019

ut James could afford to run a few failed played a bad tendency to make politics a playground experiments. He never stopped writing the for their imaginations, as if there just had to be Bcritical essays that constituted the backbone of his some social system more spiritually nourishing than achievement, and they never stopped getting bet- democracy. James saved his creativity for his art. ter. His third collection of literary pieces, From the In the realm of politics, he was a dedicated realist. Land of Shadows, was published in 1982, and it still , he insisted, was as good as it gets. feels central to his attainments as a critic. In the It was the atmosphere that permitted speech, and book’s introduction, James decided it was time to therefore literature, to flourish. Societies devoted to be explicit about the commitments that had been the ideal of human perfectibility had, he couldn’t steadily emerging from his work. His political edu- help noticing, a suspicious propensity to put their cation began, he recalled, shortly after his arrival in poets to death. England, when he’d sat down with the transcripts The unromantic nature of James’s beliefs gave of the Nuremberg trials. Reading them, he “began obtuse people another excuse to dismiss him as a at last, after a decade of horrified vagueness on the superficial writer. “I was once told by a reviewer in topic, to get some precise idea of the times we had whose radical politics I was not interested that I was all been living in”. More recently, he’d taught him- not interested in politics,” he wrote. “Similarly peo- self to read Russian. He’d done this ple are reluctant to call you serious for literary reasons: he wanted to if you do not take them seriously. I know how Pushkin really sounded. don’t mind being called frivolous by But there was no detaching litera- Liberal democracy, he the solemn: in fact it is a reputation ture from politics, especially when insisted, was as good I court.” it came to Russia. James’s readings as it gets. Societies Courting that reputation was a in Russian gave him a direct taste risky move, though. The solemn will of the leaden language, and the devoted to the ideal of always tend to dominate politics, general soul-death, of Soviet com- human perfectibility especially left-wing politics; and munism. The was still they have certainly come to domi- in business at the time, still grimly had, he couldn’t help nate the literary arts. So defending dedicating itself to ruining the lives noticing, a suspicious James’s reputation, and the ideals of its own people. James’s book was he stood for, will be an ongoing about the politics of totalitarianism propensity to put task. Liberal democracy keeps out and the politics of freedom. It traced their poets to death. extremism, and extremism is the the author’s sharpening awareness of enemy. The message may be ele- the gulf that separated them. “Such mentary, but it is strange how many an awareness,” he felt ready to say, “is my politics.” alleged intellectuals still struggle to agree with it. Radical acquaintances thought this a simplistic And it is hard to think of another writer in the lan- position. James believed it was elementary rather guage who prosecuted the same message as tirelessly than simplistic, and eminently worth defending. and variously and brilliantly as Clive James did, over The older he got, the surer of that he became. “If I the last half-century. had wanted to be thought deep,” he wrote in 2001, “I would have spent the last thirty years proposing he summa of his work as a critic was Cultural something a lot less scrutable than the elementary Amnesia, published in 2007. If Unreliable Memoirs proposition that democracy is even more impor- Twas his personal masterpiece, Cultural Amnesia was tant for what it prevents than for what it provides.” his political one. The book was an eloquent defence Communism and , he observed, “were far of democracy and , set against the horror less the enemies of each other than they were the show of twentieth-century history, and the increas- common enemy of democracy”. Indeed, he thought ing threat of twenty-first-century denialism. At one it misleading to conceive of politics in the tradi- point in the book the author worries that he might tional way, as a spectrum with communism on the be coming across as “an Ancient Mariner, who stop- left and fascism on the right, and liberal democracy peth one of three and boreth them to tears”. But he sitting in between. “Better,” he wrote, “to think of was in no danger of being boring. Once again he’d liberal democracy as the breathable atmosphere of invented a form in which all his qualities could fire a planet. Above the breathable atmosphere there is at once: his humour, his love of phrase, his willing- an unbreathable stratosphere called extremism, try- ness to range freely between the high and the popu- ing to get in.” In that choking stratosphere, “the lar arts, his deep moral seriousness. Weighing in at extremes not only touch, they blend”. nearly nine hundred pages, Cultural Amnesia is by In the twentieth century, intellectuals had dis- far the longest prose work he ever published. But the

Quadrant March 2020 31 The Texture of Reality: Clive James, 1939–2019 book never flags. Every chapter in it seems, while when a literate and engaged reading public had still you’re reading it, to be a scintillating little digres- been ready to pay good money to reward and nur- sion—on cinema, on comedy, on language, on por- ture good prose. With the exception of the pieces nography. But the digressions keep adding up; they that make up Cultural Amnesia, all of James’s best all turn out to be variations on a theme. The theme essays originated as commissioned book reviews. He is human freedom, and the ideologies that seek to liked writing for the newsstands. It kept him in close crush it. touch with the public, and out of the ivory tower. Nor was James in any danger of being irrelevant. Also, he got paid for it. The point is not negligible. By the time he completed Cultural Amnesia, a new Consider again his observation that “peace is not a kind of murderous extremist was doing his thing, principle, it is only a desirable state of affairs”. The up there in the unbreathable stratosphere: the inef- muse didn’t just decide, spontaneously, to drop this fable figure of the jihadi. Here was a fresh variety phrase on James’s head one day. He came up with of for the ignorant to misunderstand and it only because had offered him a romanticise. Meanwhile, the institutions that under- healthy sum of money to sit down and think about pinned the West’s democracies were in increasingly a biography of Bertrand Russell. At some moment dire shape. In the universities, the serious study of during that spell of paid contemplation, probably literature and history was on the wane. Instead, near the end, the crystallising phrase had hardened departments of cultural studies were teaching the into being, like a diamond produced by geology and young that literary merit was an illusory and oppres- heat. The bon mots that people freely tweeted when sive construct, as indeed were the ideals of liberal Clive James died had not been composed in a vac- democracy. Force-fed on such doctrines, a genera- uum. Their author had been formed in an age when tion of joyless ideologues set about turning real life newspapers were central to the culture, and critics into a giant grievance studies workshop from which were central to newspapers, and a serious literary there was no escape. Newspapers and magazines, education was central to criticism. The structures even the best of them, were surrendering to the that fostered and sustained James’s talents are falling logic of click-metrics and identity politics in order to apart before our eyes, and if we imagine that writ- survive. Purportedly liberal publications employed ers like him will magically keep appearing in our columnists who openly called for the curtailment of skin-deep electronic future, we’re kidding ourselves. free speech, on the grounds that unfettered language “Criticism,” he once wrote, has a tendency to hurt the feelings of the underpriv- ileged. Facebook was converting the world into a is not indispensable to art. It is indispensable relativist’s paradise, by “curating” reality to suit each to civilisation—a more inclusive thing. When user’s personal tastes. As the World Values Survey Pushkin lamented the absence of criticism has horribly confirmed, commitment to democracy in Russia, he wasn’t begging for assistance in is internationally on the slide, even in the liberal writing poems. He wanted to write them in a West, and especially among the young. In 2016, civilised country. Literary criticism fulfils its one in six Americans told the survey that a military responsibility by contributing to civilisation, takeover would be a “good” or “very good” thing. whose dependence on criticism in all its forms Cultural amnesia, the force for which Clive James is amply demonstrated by what happens when invented such a resonant name, is these days running critical inquiry is forbidden. Being indispensable rampant. Common sense gets less and less common to civilisation should be a big enough ambition all the time, and James’s position looks more radical, for any critic. and more necessary, by the year. Almost as soon as he published Cultural Amnesia, But the professional critic is an increasingly James started brewing plans for a sequel. He’d hit a superfluous figure in the age of the internet. These rich vein, and was reluctant to stop working it. At days, everyone’s a critic. People are so busy review- the same time, he found one last ideal outlet for his ing things themselves—deficient porn, iffy deodor- energies: a multi-media website that “might prove”, ant, subpar zinger burgers—that they’ve got no time he said in 2009, “to be my most characteristic means left to read even the all-caps prose of their fellow of expression, if only because, having made a start on amateurs, let alone to pick up a book or magazine or it, I have no real idea of where it might end”. newspaper. The activity that James deemed essential On the whole, Clive James was an enthusiast for to civilisation is drowning under the effusions of dil- the World Wide Web. But it’s worth recalling that ettantes and volunteers. The indispensable vocation he was already a made man by the time he started is being dispensed with. This, you hope, is not an republishing his wares online for free. His career lay early sign that civilisation will end up being dispen- largely behind him, and he’d forged it during an era sable too.

32 Quadrant March 2020 The Texture of Reality: Clive James, 1939–2019

n 2009, James published The Blaze of Obscurity, years. He wrote an epic autobiographical poem for the final volume of memoirs that would appear which he salvaged the title of that never-written Iin his lifetime. The book wasn’t bad; but the fall- war novel: The River in the Sky. He wrote a verse off in lyrical intensity, between his first volume of commentary on Proust. And he had one last big memoirs and his last one, was pronounced. And no trick up his sleeve. In 2013 he published a verse doubt it was inevitable. Writing the first volume, translation of the whole . James James had been evoking a distant past, conjuring up rendered Dante’s terza rima in quatrains—a tactic the colours and tastes of a half-forgotten age. But that obliged him, at certain points, to invent lines as the memoirs progressed, the events they dealt that weren’t previously there, and make them seem with were getting less and less distant all the time. worthy of Dante. His translation was hailed for its The author’s past was catching up to him, or he was freshness and chutzpah. Back in the 1950s, the Kid catching up to it, and the semi-fictional form he’d from Kogarah had set out to absorb and conquer the invented to transmit the essence of his life, while whole of European culture. It was a brazen ambi- dancing around the inconvenient details, was getting tion. By the end of his life, he’d come reasonably increasingly hard to sustain. In the earlier books, close to pulling it off. James had given pseudonyms to his famous friends. The Divine Comedy was destined to be James’s Robert Hughes was Huggins, was last big project. Or was it? It remains unclear, for Dave Dalziel, was Romaine Rand, the moment, whether he was able to complete the was Bruce Jennings; and Prue sixth instalment of his memoirs. We do know that Shaw, James’s wife, was Françoise. This distancing he started it: a few years ago, in an interview, he device had licensed the author to treat real people reported that he was 10,000 words into the book. as characters. But one by one the characters were Did he get any further? Illness, you suspect, wasn’t turning back into real people, and re-entering the the only barrier to his progress. As he had guessed memoirs under their true names. With each succes- even when he was well, the sixth volume would have sive volume, the unreliable memoirs were having to to be his last. The funny man would have to get seri- become more reliable. ous about himself, in a form designed to be humor- This, one had cause to suspect, was the last thing ously evasive. There had been a reckoning in his James wanted them to be. He was a deeply private poetry. Would he be able to conduct a similar reck- man. For reasons that may have been unclear even oning in prose, unshielded by the fig-leaf of poetic to himself, he felt comfortable enough making inti- technique? Clearly, the ambition was still there. He mate revelations in his poetry, but baulked at being never stopped wanting to write one last big book. equally candid in his prose. Perhaps he felt that the But something else was there, too: a steely resolu- technical intricacies of his poems served to cush- tion not to write anything that would inflict further ion or insulate his disclosures. Or maybe he was pain on the people around him. As his confessional emboldened by the way poetry reaches a discerning late poems piercingly make clear, he believed he’d sliver of the public only, so that it gets read either in hurt his loved ones more than enough already. good faith or not at all. Certainly he had a tendency In many ways, James’s life had been a long agon to look uncomfortable when television interview- between his ambition and his better judgment. ers read his most personal poems back to him on Sometimes the former had prevailed, sometimes the camera and asked him to dilate on their contents latter. But his final volumes of poetry suggest that for the people at home. The old problem of context his moral seriousness definitively gained the upper had come back to bite him. You can say things in hand during the years of physical decline he called a poem that you wouldn’t necessarily want to tell his “autumn’s autumn”. (He also called those years people face to face. Indeed, that may be why poetry the “most fruitful chapter of my life”.) Any careful gets written in the first place. reader of his late poems would lay a large bet on the At the end of The Blaze of Obscurity, James made following proposition. If James couldn’t find a way reference to certain subjects—including the death of completing the memoirs without further hurting of his mother—that he would have to address in the people he loved, he didn’t complete the memoirs. his “next, and presumably final volume”. But he Maybe he did find a way through the minefield. If made that promise in 2009, the year before he there is to be one last volume of memoirs, the book got sick. Illness would play havoc with his ability may yet turn out to be his masterpiece. If there isn’t, to produce extended works of prose. The sequel to we can console ourselves with the thought that he’d Cultural Amnesia fell by the wayside. So did a long- written at least two masterpieces already—unless planned novel about the war in the Pacific. Turning we decide that his true masterpieces were his light- to poetry instead, James produced slim volumes at catching phrases, of which he left behind far too an astounding rate, during his compromised final many to count.

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got to know Clive James during the last decade clichés, he would have hated to be called a force of of his life. We never met in the flesh, but we nature. All the same, he had a way of bringing that exchangedI numberless emails. It feels necessary to phrase to mind. Even in old age, even when dying, disclose this fact, even though it made no difference the man seemed to have freakish reserves of brio. He to what I thought of his writing. I admired the work never stopped being the Kid from Kogarah. There already, well before I got to know its creator. Indeed, was something boyish or puppyish about the depth there turned out to be no significant distinction and range of his enthusiasms. In private, he was between the two entities. The real Clive James was interested in even more things than he was in print. in his books. One suspected it already. To know the He was a lover of high-level gossip. He kept up with man was to have the point confirmed. Clive James the minutiae of Australian news and politics to a sounded, in his emails, exactly and uncannily like startling degree. When he hadn’t read something, Clive James. he would admit it. There just wasn’t much that he Still, there were a few surprises—a few things hadn’t read. I once quoted a stave to him from the about him that couldn’t be inferred from his autobiography of Andre Agassi, having naively published writings. One of them was his generosity. assumed that this strangely excellent work wouldn’t Clive lavished a lot of his time on other people, even yet have crossed his desk. Inevitably, it had. Clive when he was running out of it. He embraced the role James was already a keen student of the Agassi of mentor with typical gusto. He loved being the doctrine. wise uncle, the seasoned hander-down of tradecraft. When Clive signed off on an email, he used a Knowing him made me a better writer. He always one-word salutation: Onward. The word summed read my stuff, even when nobody else did. It put me him up. He was always forging restlessly ahead. on my toes. You didn’t want to mix your metaphors Considerable as his achievements were, he didn’t when Clive James was looking over your shoulder. waste time being satisfied about his past. He just (How can I look over your shoulder, he would have wanted the next thing to be good, and to be thought said, if you’re standing on your toes?) good. He wrote with unbelievable speed. In three Naturally, he didn’t advertise his generosity in minutes he could fire off an email that read as well as his writings. It would have been bad manners, for a his published prose. You’d say that he wrote the way start—and Clive was an impeccably well-mannered he breathed—except that breathing stopped coming man. This was another surprise. In print, he could be naturally to him, while writing never did, until the unkind, even when being funny—indeed, especially very end. In his emails he was in his element, still then. His mind was so formidable that you assumed making words do anything he wanted them to. He he’d be a formidable person. But he wasn’t at all. sounded as robust and intellectually acrobatic as he He wanted to be liked. This sounds like a banal had in his prime—so that it came as a shock to see observation. Most people want to be liked. But like his frail handwriting now and then, and be reminded so many of his qualities—like his talent itself—this that he was an ailing man. You could easily forget it desire was super-sized in Clive. He wanted to be when reading him. And you had the feeling that he liked more than most people want to be liked—and forgot it too, as long as he could still whip words the point helps to explain, I think, why his oeuvre into line. Only during the last year of his life did was so extensive, so various, and so user-friendly. one detect signs that he was finally starting to flag. He could be charmingly deferential, even towards When news of his death reached me, I can’t say people who ought, by rights, to have been deferring I wasn’t expecting it. But for a few days, I reflexively to him. If he caught you perpetrating a solecism in kept checking my overnight emails, as if he might print, he would let you know. But he performed that somehow have managed to go on writing. After duty so tactfully that the reprimand could almost feel all, he’d been writing his way through cancer and like a compliment. I once wrote, in a published piece, emphysema for ten years. Couldn’t he write his that somebody was “bored of” something. Gently, way out of death itself? But in a way, of course, he Clive pointed out that the accepted usage, in his day, can, and does. You can lose a man like that by your had been “bored with”. But usages die out, he said; own death, but not by his, said Bernard Shaw about and that one was surely obsolete, if even a linguistic William Morris. Like all great writers, Clive lives hotshot like me had chosen to stop heeding it. I took on in the language he left behind. “Books,” he wrote the hint, and have never committed the same gaffe in one of his final poems, “are the anchors / Left by again. the ships that rot away.” Even in contexts where he no longer had to, Clive couldn’t help exercising his charm. It was one of his David Free is a critic and novelist. His novel Get Poor secret weapons. But his real superpower, the gift that Slow was published by Picador in 2017. He is currently underlay all the others, was his energy. Loathing completing a book about conspiracy theory.

34 Quadrant March 2020 Stephen McInerney

Not Gold but It Stays Good: The Poetry of Clive James

or most of his writing life Clive James was a book was his arrival, or so he wanted us to believe. much better poetry critic than he was a poet. In reality the best anthologies of Australian poetry Though he was wrong about Hardy, whose in the 1980s and 1990s (’s New Oxford Fwork he undervalued, he was particularly strong Book of Australian Verse, Geoffrey Lehmann and on twentieth-century poets, including W.B. Yeats, Robert Gray’s Australian Poetry in the 20th Century W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Richard Wilbur and ’s Oxford Book of Modern Australian and Philip Larkin, and he had an eye for newer Poetry) all included James’s work, and the worst talent (such as Stephen Edgar) others tended to didn’t, a sure sign he was doing something right, miss before James spotted it. As a poet, though, even if there was a sense through this period that he was for many years lost “through comfort” (to his rare talent was still waiting to be fully realised. quote MacNeice on minor poets)—the comfort The time afforded James by his retirement from occasioned by celebrity and his remarkable achieve- television was a necessary condition for its realisa- ments as a critic, memoirist and television person- tion but it was an insufficient condition. What he ality. This makes his late flowering as a poet even needed was a crisis. more precious. He got two. In 2011 he was diagnosed with In 2007, he wrote: “I can only wonder, looking leukemia. Then, the next year, after the aptly named back, if my name as a poet would not have made A Current Affair exposed his infidelity, it turned quicker progress had I been less notorious for other out that at least some of James’s talent had been things.” It wouldn’t have, as the main reason many buried “between women’s breasts”, another fate of people read James’s poetry was because of the other the minor poet MacNeice had identified. When things, not despite them. Did any other contem- accused of infidelity on an earlier occasion, James porary poet’s work appear in airports and railway was quoted as saying his practice was to “look but stations in proximity to Bret Easton Ellis’s shrink- not touch”. Most could forgive what this portended wrapped American Psycho? No, the attention James’s if not James’s uncharacteristic recourse to cliché, if poetry received, and its regular appearance in pres- only because it ironically contrasted with the sup- tigious American journals like New Yorker and posed practice of the more innocent generation his Poetry, owed as much to James’s celebrity as it did parents belonged to, which was believed to touch to his undoubted gifts as a poet. Since he deserved but not look, with the lights off. James, however, his celebrity, we should not begrudge him the help never looked with Kantian detachment; his kind of it gave to his reception as a poet, but we should not looking was always going to lead somewhere. believe the myth that it hindered it. Happily, he emerged from the onscreen expo- When his work appeared in Peter Craven’s Best sure chastened, even ascetic, with all the serious Australian Poems in 2003, James reacted like the raw material to match his serious gifts as a poet: local boy who’d made good, using his review of two new sorrows—terminal illness and a wounded the anthology to promote his own poems and “the family—to add to the one he’d nursed since his Australian poetry boom”—a boom James would childhood, when he grew up without a father. These not have noticed (or made readers aware of) had subjects—his dead father (and the effect of his death his own voice not been considered part of it. Auden on James and his mother); James’s betrayal of his said that it was every poet’s hope to be, “like some wife, and his own looming death—inspired most of valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere” but James his best work. The rest of the best was inspired by didn’t feel he’d arrived as a poet till he’d arrived his meditations on Sydney—what it meant to grow back at home—and his appearance in Craven’s up there, and what it meant to be apart from it—

Quadrant March 2020 35 Not Gold but It Stays Good: The Poetry of Clive James and his wry and wise celebrations of the rich and very heart of his own divine nature. James thinks famous (actors, sportspeople, intellectuals), such the first option is clearly preferable, but there is no as Johnny Weissmuller, Gabriela Sabatini, Shirley sense that he has suffered into this truth; there is Strickland de la Hunty and Egon Friedell. nothing of Frost’s recognition that the alternatives are both horrendous (or, as Paul Simon puts in a ’ve come to praise James, but before identify- very different context: “every way you look at it you ing his strengths as a poet, and the poems that lose”). Neither does James rise to Robinson Jeffers’s Iwill survive, it is important to explore two of his sense of awe at the purity of nature’s indifference, weaknesses—(i) his failure convincingly to handle nor achieve the clarity and solemnity of Robert the larger philosophical and religious themes he Gray’s declarations on this subject (“all partly unwisely took up from time to time and (ii) his fail- autonomous things / trample others down, / even ure to assimilate his influences, especially Larkin— what is their own”). It seems the choice for James since these strike a fatal blow to the recent claims is as easy and obvious as choosing champagne over that James is a major poet. cask wine: His poem “Natural Selection” illustrates the first weakness. It takes thirty-five lines to say what Better by far Robert Frost said much more memorably and mov- To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear ingly in fourteen lines, in “Design”, the greatest A conscious mechanism of mutation sonnet of the twentieth century. Here is Frost’s Bringing its fine intentions to fruition closing couplet. Watching a white spider holding Without a qualm about collateral horror. up a moth “like a white piece of rigid satin cloth”, the poet wonders: He gets closer to Frost earlier in the poem, but in a way that shows just how far away that is: What but design of darkness to appall?— If design govern in a thing so small. Those who believed there must have been a wizard And here is James, drawing a similar though not Said the whole thing looked too well-planned identical conclusion from the fact that scorpions’ for hazard. tails are “equipped for murder” and that some chil- dren are “born to pain”: The theme is the same as Frost’s, but what a difference! Creation, if the thing’s to be believed— The problem here is not only poetic. James And only through belief can life be loved— didn’t have many gaps in his cultural knowledge, Must do without that helping hand from but he had some, in the way a commercial trawl- Heaven. er’s net sweeping up the ocean’s contents has gaps. Forget it, lest it never be forgiven. He caught almost everything, except the smallest and biggest creatures. Sometimes—as in “Natural James’s sing-song iambic pentameters and half- Selection”—James treats a big subject (Christianity, rhymes try to pack too much in, yet they end up the problem of suffering and evil, and the weak- saying significantly less in these two (and too) con- nesses in the argument from design) like a small fident, bouncy declarative sentences than Frost does one, precisely because its contours and texture elude in a single interrogative one—and what they do say him. Watch James foundering on the problem of is silly. “Only through belief can life be loved”? evil in his Talking in the Library interview with Piers Surely the content of belief—not simply “belief” Paul Read and you’ll get the point. James drags per se—is what counts. But what could it mean to his big net to the surface with its glittering catch believe in “Creation” minus a creator? Why would (including Ivan Karamazov’s speech on the impos- it—and how would it—receive our forgiveness of sibility of reconciling a child’s suffering with the its horrors? And why would it matter if we did not idea of a loving and just God) but the whale stays forgive it? Pathetic fallacies are one thing; fallacious far beneath it—and far out to sea—gazing back at pathos quite another. James out of the depths of Read’s eyes. It wasn’t Frost’s poem is chilling precisely because it the only time the big one got away from James. He presents two equally terrifying alternatives: either managed to write an essay on Sophie Scholl with- nature without design, void of all meaning, or crea- out once mentioning the most important fact about tion by a creator who has ingrained violence at the her: that she was a devout Christian motivated to very heart of his design (“design with a vengeance”, resist the Nazis and meet her death by her faith in as Randall Jarrell described it) because evil is at the Christ. James turns her instead into an excuse to

36 Quadrant March 2020 Not Gold but It Stays Good: The Poetry of Clive James write an essay about Natalie Portman, and into a doubt why he falls back on them (though he is not saint for secular humanism, which is a bit like mis- consciously alluding to them) to conclude his own taking the Sistine Chapel for the Rothko Chapel. poem, “The Place of Reeds”. In fact, the image But I digress. Larkin threads along his closing lines is one of his The second weakness is more serious. Paul Valéry weakest and most strained, as the beautiful, closely- said that God created the world out of nothing but observed detail that animates the rest of “The the nothing shows through. One might say of James Whitsun Weddings” gives way to an unconvincing that he created his poems out of everything (and and imprecise image. Here is Larkin: everyone) but the Larkin shows through. Consider the first stanza of James’s “Event Horizon”: We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there For years we fooled ourselves. Now we can tell swelled How everyone our age heads for the brink A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Where they are drawn into the unplumbed well, Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. Not to be seen again. How sad, to think People we once loved will be with us there And here is James: And we not touch them, for it is nowhere. Led by the head, my arrow proves to be The stanza unintentionally evokes and is over- My life. I took my life into my hands. whelmed by comparison with at least four of I loosed it to its wandering apogee, Larkin’s best-known poems. The first sentence (“For And now it falls. I wonder where it lands. years we fooled ourselves”) positions the speaker, like Larkin, as one of the less deceived, a wised-up The image is not the only give-away; the main version of one of Larkin’s old fools (“What do they pause in the last line of each poem is identical. think has happened, the old fools?”). The second James said in a short piece on Richard Howard that line (“everyone our age heads for the brink”) ech- he—James—had to be careful not to read too much oes the eighth line of “High Windows”: “everyone poetry when he was writing his own poems, lest young going down the long slide”. But it is in the the poet he was reading cut across his own music. fourth, fifth and sixth lines that James really gets The problem is, as “Event Horizon” shows, he knew going, or rather Larkin’s “Aubade” does. Consider Larkin’s music so well he was incapable of turning first James: it off.

Not to be seen again. How sad, to think ther poets’ lines appear unintentionally from People we once loved will be with us there time to time, too. In 1983, Les Murray’s mag- And we not touch them, for it is nowhere. Oisterial “Bentwater in the Tasmanian Highlands” appeared in The People’s Otherworld. In that poem Now consider Larkin: Murray describes the movement of water, “headlong … a hairlip round a pebble”. The next year, James The sure extinction that we travel to published “Johnny Weissmuller Dead in Acapulco” And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, in the London Review of Books. In it he writes: Not to be anywhere … “headlong, creek-around-a-rock trough”. As with No sight, no sound, the presence of Larkin in James’s “Event Horizon”, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, this is not a deliberate literary allusion; rather, it’s Nothing to love and link with … one more example of the weight of all that James has read and admired making itself unintentionally felt The “nowhere” that ends each stanza of James’s in the imagery, phrasing and cadences of his own poem not only apes the “not to be anywhere” of poetry. He has the best lines at hand, it’s just that “Aubade”; it is clearly the “nothing” Larkin sees in they are not always his. In a first volume of verse by “High Windows”, that “is nowhere, and is endless”. someone in their twenties this kind of thing is com- And the rather pedestrian “How sad” (How inade- mon, and forgivable, but in a mature poet? quate! Why isn’t James screaming?) is surely derived Still, the rest of this poem works a distinctly from the titular first sentence of Larkin’s plangent Jamesian magic. “Johnny Weissmuller Dead in “Home is So Sad”. Acapulco” charts the declining fortunes of its epon- Larkin jumps up elsewhere. For some reason, ymous hero, the star of the Tarzan films and later James thought the closing lines of “The Whitsun the Jungle Jim movies, and the poet’s early fascina- Weddings” were among Larkin’s best, which is no tion with these heroes whom he first encountered

Quadrant March 2020 37 Not Gold but It Stays Good: The Poetry of Clive James on Saturday afternoons, on the big screen, at the poetry gets. Seeing the Nazis approaching in the Rockdale Odeon. The movement from Tarzan to street below, and knowing what they have in store Jungle Jim corresponds to the movement from vig- for him, Egon takes matters into his own hand: orous young manhood to middle age, and takes the author back in the other direction, to his childhood: So out into the air above the street He sailed with all his learning left behind, With eighteen Tarzan movies behind him And by one further gesture turned defeat Along with the five Olympic gold medals, Into a triumph for the human mind. He had nothing in front except that irrepressible paunch The civilized are most so as they die. Which brought him down out of the tree house He called a warning even as he fell To earth as Jungle Jim In case his body hit a passer-by So a safari suit could cover it up … As innocent as was Egon Friedell.

… once it had all been intact, the Greek classic Hopkins said, “What I do is me”—expressing body the view, traceable in the first instance to , Unleashing the new-style front-up crawl like a that our actions reveal and shape our identity—a baby reality James captures perfectly in the rhyme of fell/ Lifting itself for the first time, Friedell, which links the Jewish intellectual’s name Going over the water almost as much as inextricably with his manner of death. In giving up through it, his life, and ensuring no one else is harmed in the Curing itself of childhood polio process, Friedell’s gesture, in James’s estimation, By making an aquaplane of its deep chest, contains all that is best in life. Each arm relaxing out of the water and Actions like Friedell’s are, for James, where stiffening into it, life approaches the perfection of art and then out- The long legs kicking a trench that did not fill up does it. This concentration of an entire way of life Until he came back on the next lap, in an image is what he is always looking for—the Invincible, easily breathing point where art and life throw down their brave The air in the spit-mouth, headlong, creek- but doomed challenge to the flux of time that will around-a-rock trough overwhelm them. James invests the unlikely (and Carved by his features … now long gone) Sydney ferry token with such pos- sibilities in his poem of that title, one of his many … when Tarzan dropped from the tall tree and beautiful evocations of Sydney: swam out of the splash Like an otter with an outboard to save the Boy Not gold but some base alloy, it stays good from the waterfall For one trip though the currency inflates— It looked like poetry to me, Hard like the ferry’s deck of seasoned wood, And at home in the bath I would surface giving The only coin in town that never dates. the ape call. (“The Ferry Token”)

James’s admiration for Weissmuller’s physical Except that it did date, and is now out of circu- prowess matches in intensity his lust for the beauti- lation, replaced by the Opal Card—which brings ful young women he celebrates elsewhere (see espe- me to James’s most beautiful celebration of Sydney, cially the superb “Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela “Go Back to the Opal Sunset”. Sabatini”) and his sense of awe at moral cour- In this poem, the speaker imagines “bottoms age and genius (“Egon Friedell’s Heroic Death”). bisected by a piece of string” wobbling “through Except when he is looking down Sabatini’s dress, or the heat haze”, avocado mousse “thick and strong describing Weissmuller’s paunch, in poems of this as cream from a jade cow”, “the midnight har- kind he positions himself as a mere mortal, looking bour lacquered black” and prawns that “assume a up from far below at the glorious stars. size and shape / Less like a newborn baby’s little Friedell is an important figure in James’sCultural toe”. (Living in England in 2011-12, I couldn’t look Amnesia, but nowhere in the essays that comprise at a European or Honduran-sourced prawn from that volume does James write so well about the Sainsbury’s without recalling that image.) The con- Jewish intellectual as he does in his poem “Egon trast between London and Sydney is intensified by Friedell’s Heroic Death”. The last two stanzas are the contrast between the speaker’s inertia and the as close to perfection as contemporary formalist hydrofoil’s determined energy:

38 Quadrant March 2020 Not Gold but It Stays Good: The Poetry of Clive James

Yet out there at the moment, through the swell, he power and authority of these late poems not- The hydrofoil draws its triumphant line. withstanding, James—as I’ve argued—is not a Such powers of decision should be mine. Tmajor poet. He has many fine poems, but none that Go back to the opal sunset. Do it soon. elevate him into the company of the giants of his generation: Murray, Heaney, Walcott and Mahon. Though he certainly had the hydrofoil’s powers of Among modern Australian poets, he is down the decision after his diagnosis, by 2012 James knew he’d list too. Even at their best, his meditations on death never return to Sydney; his illness would not let him. and terminal illness shrink in importance when His physical weakness, however, became his poetic compared to those of . But so what? strength. “Japanese Maple”, which first appeared in Some of James’s poems will last, and what more the New Yorker and was then collected in the best- can any poet hope for? His evocations of Sydney selling Sentenced to Life, became an instant hit: will no doubt be mentioned alongside Kenneth Slessor’s, Murray’s and Robert Gray’s. His transla- Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes, tion of Dante will survive (and will even survive the A final flood of colours will live on unfortunate and unintentionally comic use of the As my mind dies, phrase “going down” in the last line of Canto 5 of Burned by my vision of a world that shone Inferno, on the sin of lust: “I went down as if going So brightly at the last, and then was gone. down to stay”), though his attempt at epic, River in the Sky, probably will not. In Sentenced to Life and Injury Time James is at the He may even find himself on the syllabus. And height of his powers, the derivativeness and dreariness then we’ll be flooded with commentaries. One of “Event Horizon” notwithstanding. “Sentenced to commentary, Ian Shircore’s So Brightly at the Last, Life”, “Use of Space” and “Quiet Passenger” are tri- has already arrived. It provides important and umphs, as powerful in their way as “Japanese Maple”. interesting biographical background to some of “Quiet Passenger” brings the poet back to where he the poems, some important judgments about the left off in “Go Back to the Opal Sunset”: work, including its weaknesses, and some engaging readings of individual poems. It is clearly the work When there is no more dying left to do of a friend, which is no bad thing, though what And I am burned and poured into a jar, James also needs now is a scarifying editor to slim Then I will leave this land that I came to him down to size, so that his real achievement can So long ago, and, having come so far, shine. Head home to where my life’s work was begun. Just as a poet should discard his limping lines, so But nothing of that last flight will I see a friendly editor who wants to serve James should As I ride through the night into the sun: publish a slim volume, about the size of Larkin’s No stars, no ocean, not the ochre earth, High Windows, of James’s best twenty poems, No patterns of dried water nor the light discarding the rest, not because the rest are all bad That streams into the city of my birth, (many are quite good) but because (as with all other The harbour waiting to take down my dust. poets) they are patchy and threaten to hinder a full So why, in that case, should I choose to go? appreciation of what James’s poetry really offers. My day is done. I go because I must: In my view, the following twenty poems will Silence will be my way of saying so. ensure James survives as a poet. Any reader coming to his poems for the first time, should start (and It was just like James to imagine that the har- perhaps end) here. The poems are: bour had nothing better to do than await his dust, “The Book of My Enemy has Been Remaindered” but, as always, we can forgive him, so sonorous are “Johnny Weissmuller Dead in Acapulco” these lines. The measure of James’s talent though is “Egon Friedell’s Heroic Death” nowhere more apparent than in the closing lines of “The Ferry Token” “Leçons de ténèbres”, where we find the poet paying “Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini” homage “Go Back to the Opal Sunset” “Son of a Soldier” to the late sublime “In Town for the March” That comes with seeing how the years have “Occupation: Housewife” brought “My Father Before Me” A fitting end, if not the one I sought. “Whitman and the Moth” “Sentenced to Life” That’s as good an end to a poem as there is. “Early to Bed”

Quadrant March 2020 39 Not Gold but It Stays Good: The Poetry of Clive James

“Leçons de ténèbres” volume of this kind himself, but very few poets are “Japanese Maple” their own best judges. Still, if readers regard his “Balcony Scene” poems only half as highly as James did, the place “Return of the Kogarah Kid” he already occupies as one of our country’s most “Quiet Passenger” entertaining and moving poets will be secure. “Intergalactic Junket” “Use of Space” Stephen McInerney is Academic Director and Had James been as good a critic of his own work Deputy CEO at the Ramsay Centre for Western as he was of others’, he would have published a slim Civilisation.

Dead Mother

Dead mother is a doll, with a doll’s face, left neatly unwrapped, in the creamy quilted case. Someone has positioned a hair of silver chain, and clasped it, across her fist, but she can’t really grasp it. The calligrapher has stitched Going Home, in white silk, and I Love You Grandma welts from little lime cushions, like milk. Her golden wig is brushed, nesting the head, beige jacket and blouse to match it, buttoned at neck. Someone has powdered the thin face and patched it, with puttied skin, a not-quite-in-synch puzzle-of-pink. I look away. Her thin rose lips taunt a bittersweet kiss, as if to say, do whatever you want (but perhaps I am imagining this). Her nails are painted, eyes waxed shut and tinted, drop-earrings hang askew, as if to say, who would wear pearls to bed, in a box, would you? Suddenly, I feel my mother’s hand in mine. That’s not really me, she says, so kind. I know, I softly intone, and we go outside, standing together on grey stone. I’d like to go for a walk now with you, she says, and we do, so closely pressed, leaving the son, quietly weeping there, on unfamiliar steps.

Joe Dolce

40 Quadrant March 2020 Snow at Night

Abrupt awake, my quilt and pillow cold Light through the paper of my courtyard door Deep in the night, heavy snow At times the sound of bamboo cracking

Bo Juyi, translated by Ted Rule

Five Poems on a Spring Day, No. 1

A night of rain and distant thunder Emerging light shimmering on blue green tiles New buds cradling spring tears Rose branches drooping weakly in dawn light

Qin Guan, translated by Ted Rule

Song on an Autumn Night

The ticking of a clock, the dripping of a tap, the night stretches forever. The moon scuds between endless wisps of cloud Hidden insects chirp in dark autumn corners ... Oh please no frost tonight ... I haven’t sent his winter battledress

Zhang Zhongsu, translated by Ted Rule

An Ambassador Travelling on Duty

A lone carriage at the frontier Crossing the state of Juyan A tumbleweed blown from our borders A wild goose flying back to the world of the Turks In the vast desert a single plume of smoke The sun a brilliant ball sinking into the endless river Xiaoguan, we meet a mounted patrol Our troops have reached Yan

Wang Wei, translated by Ted Rule

Quadrant March 2020 41 Merv y n F. Bendle

The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton

t was Paris, May 1968, when Roger Scruton saw millennium. into the heart of darkness. He then began an In the half-century after that May experience, intellectual odyssey that largely defined modern Scruton established himself as Britain’s leading con- Iconservatism but came to an end with his passing on servative public intellectual and columnist, and as an January 12, 2020. influential philosopher in a large number of fields. It began as the twenty-four-year-old Scruton He published over fifty books, innumerable articles, witnessed the student rebellion erupting in “the several novels, two operas, and many other works. narrow street below [his] window [where] the stu- His most notable publications include The Meaning dents were shouting and smashing” the neighbour- of Conservatism (1980), Thinkers of the (1985), hood. The delirious destruction was reflected in the Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986), shop windows as the iconoclastic orgy unfolded. The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), The of Then, suddenly, “the plate glass windows of the Music (1997), The West and the Rest: Globalisation and shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second the Terrorist Threat (2002), Liberty and Civilisation: and then give up the ghost, [sliding] in jagged frag- The Western Heritage (2010), Green Philosophy: How ments to the ground”. Indeed, it seemed that reality to Think Seriously About the Planet (2011), How to Be a itself had been affronted. Repulsed at the insanity of Conservative (2014) and Conservatism: An Invitation the mindless mob, it had recoiled and collapsed into to the Great Tradition (2017). countless pieces, never to be reconstituted. Such success lay well in the future on that May day Scruton recalls this striking reaction to the 1968 fifty-two years ago. For a critical moment, anarchic French student rebellion in his autobiography, Gentle leftism held sway and appeared to threaten President Regrets (2005; all quotations are from this source Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. Transfixed, unless otherwise stated). He had completed a BA Scruton watched the violent battle between students in philosophy at Cambridge and was determined and police unfold until, in the middle of this arche- to be a writer, taking Jean-Paul Sartre as his role typal 1960s event, it appears that Scruton enjoyed an model. He did this because the French existential- epiphany, a sudden intuitive insight into the nihil- ist’s prose moved effortlessly “from the abstract to istic postmodernism that was about to engulf the the concrete and from the general to the particular West. The shuddering windows and disintegrating [and] wound philosophy and poetry together in a images served as a metaphor for the collapse of clar- seamless web, which was also a web of seeming”, as ity, representation, and truth that came Scruton later recalled on his web page. From Sartre to blight the next five decades. They vividly evoked he learned that intellectual life need not be confined the violence, fragmentation, heresy and unbelief to the academy but can flourish around the creative that Scruton later claimed in A : arts—literature, art and music—“through which Arguments for Conservatism (2006) provided the con- the world strives to become conscious of itself”. text for the conservative philosophical response of However, Scruton rebelled against Sartre’s convic- which he proved to be the most articulate British tion that such a life demanded a radical political proponent. commitment, and Sartre’s mindless embrace of the Earlier that May day, Scruton had been reading chic anti-intellectualism of alienated him de Gaulle’s Memoires and he had been struck by the completely as 1968 unfolded. He developed instead a Gaullist insight that a nation is defined “by lan- conservative worldview and applied his very consid- guage, religion and high culture [and that] in times erable gifts as an analytic philosopher to the central of turmoil and conquest it is those spiritual things questions of the late twentieth century and the new that must be protected and reaffirmed”, and now

42 Quadrant March 2020 The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton he saw this sacred dimension under threat by the book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively profane Dionysian forces that had been unleashed appropriating facts in order to show that culture and below him, “throwing away … all customs, institu- knowledge are nothing but the discourses of power” tions and achievements, for the sake of a momentary to be condemned as just further forms of oppres- exultation which could have no lasting sense save sion. A work not of philosophy but of rhetoric, “its anarchy”. goal was subversion, not truth”, and it perpetrated Later, Scruton was visited by a female friend “the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely who had spent the day on the barricades as the fists, invented by the Father of Lies—that ‘truth’ requires batons and cobblestones flew. She was a devotee inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to of Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”, a variety epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the of late surrealism that assaulted the sensibilities of episteme, imposed by the class which profits from contemporary audiences and aimed to tear apart the its propagation”. This was a core conception of the false reality that Artaud insisted lay like a shroud cultural that is now a taken-for-granted over their perceptions. Predictably, the May events premise of academic discourse, while Foucault’s appealed to her as the high point of an anarchic “vision of European culture as the institutionalised assault on the absurdity of bourgeois life. Soon, she form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as and her comrades were convinced, “the Old Fascist gospel”, as Scruton lamented. de Gaulle, and his regime would be begging for Scruton doesn’t reveal what transpired that night mercy” as the student insurrection escalated into a after he confronted his guest with the philosophical new French Revolution. implications of her antinomian politics, although he (In fact, she was deluding herself, as de Gaulle mentions that she eventually put the theatre of cru- had no intention of begging. Instead, he had gone elty behind her and “is now a good bourgeois like secretly to consult the leadership of the French mili- the rest of them”. He notes also that “Foucault is tary to confirm their loyalty if he decided to crush dead from AIDS, contracted during well-funded the protests violently. This was a task for which they tours as an intellectual celebrity”, but not before he were well equipped by their brutal experiences in the passed on the disease in numerous sadomasochistic Algerian War, and if de Gaulle had taken that path homosexual encounters, as James Miller describes in he would have transformed the cultural and political The Passion of (1993). history of France and the West. At the time, how- ever, the initiative and the momentum were allowed cruton’s insight came at a cost. With hindsight it to remain with the students and for a few critical seems that he was never in danger of succumb- months it appeared that the bourgeois world they so Sing to the siren call of the 1960s zeitgeist, as he had despised was about to be overthrown.) been inoculated by the writings of Burke, Kant, T.S. Scruton listened carefully to this radical critique Eliot, Leavis and Wittgenstein, who had all rejected of French society. He then asked his visitor what the “Jacobin” lust to destroy in a maniacal pursuit she proposed to put in its place: “What vision of of a world that can never be. Nevertheless, he dis- France and its culture compels you?” To which “she covered himself to be a cultural anachronism, posi- replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, tioned perilously “on the other side of the barricades the bible of the soixante-huitards [’68-ers] the text from all the people I knew”. These otherwise intelli- which seemed to justify every form of transgression, gent folk had turned their backs on a time-honoured by showing that obedience is merely defeat”. Michel world that Scruton still revered and now “looked Foucault’s virtually unreadable paean to madness [instead] to Marx, Lenin and as their had appeared in 1966 (English translation, 1970, as authorities, not just in politics, but in every area of The Order of Things), and quickly become de rigueur human thought and action, art, literature and music amongst intellectuals and students desperate to included”, embracing “nihilism, anger and selfish- appear aligned with the avant-garde of social theory. ness”, as Mark Dooley recounts in Roger Scruton: The This was despite the fact that Foucault’s structuralist Philosopher on Dover Beach (2009). reduced people to the status of mere The title of Dooley’s study takes Scruton at elements in a gigantic system of power-relationships his word in order to evoke the isolation in which and was the antithesis of the libertarian anarcho- Scruton found himself. Dooley adopts the title of communism that the soixante-huitards professed. one of Scruton’s own books to present him as a phi- Invoked more often as a magic talisman than read, it losopher whose unyielding conservatism left him was an impenetrable exercise in radical isolated on a desolate shore as depicted in Matthew that established Foucault’s reputation as a “master Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach”, with its thinker” of the Left. “powerfully dark picture of our homelessness in a For Scruton, The Order of Things “is an artful cold, indifferent world”, as Stefan Collini observes

Quadrant March 2020 43 The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton in Arnold (1988). Whereas “the Sea of Faith / Was held sway, “the lionised historian of the Industrial once, too, at the full”, now can be heard only “its Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”, leaving in its now the orthodoxy taught in British schools” (and wake “neither joy, nor love, nor light”, but only “the reigns supreme once again in the British Labour turbid ebb and flow of human misery”. For Dooley, Party). Consequently, the library was well stocked Scruton’s work is “an attempt to restore some joy, with the works of Marx, Lenin, Mao and every love and light to a world” that Arnold believed was variety of socialist journals, but proudly bereft of “lost in a morass of addictive pleasures”. In the face Strauss, Voegelin, Hayek, Friedman and any con- of this, Scruton offers redemption for those stranded servative periodicals. on Arnold’s “darkling plain swept with confused Finding himself treated as an “intellectual alarms of struggle and flight”. It is the great value of pariah” and unencumbered by any collegiality Scruton’s work, Dooley believes, that he has “given from the Left, but with convenient teaching hours, us a way of philosophically affirming traditional Scruton took the opportunity to study law and “dis- institutions and forms of life, in a world dedicated covered … the answer to Foucault” in the common to their extinction”. law of England, which he took as This reference to “forms of life” proof “that there is a real distinction takes us to the heart of Scruton’s t is the great value between legitimate and illegitimate conservatism. It also reflects the I power, that power can exist with- importance in Scruton’s think- of Scruton’s work, out oppression, and that authority ing of the later Wittgenstein, who Dooley believes, that is a living force in human conduct”. originated the concept and linked Seeking to broaden his understand- it to similar notions including “lan- he has “given us a ing of this, he went in search of a guage games” and “worldview”, way of philosophically viable conservative philosophy and all of which emphasise the extent affirming traditional found , who was to which knowledge is contextual then regarded by the Left establish- and localised, embedded in con- institutions and ment as of antiquarian interest only. crete activities and experiences, forms of life, in a Consequently, although students and constrained above all by lan- “were still permitted to read him”, guage. This is related to another world dedicated to this could only be in association concept adopted by Scruton, that their extinction”. with as part of the of Lebenswelt or “life-world”, which intellectual history of the French he took from and Revolution, which many soixante- phenomenology. This refers to the myriad inter- huitards saw as the model for the epoch-defining subjective realms of meaning constructed and main- radical upheavals in which they fancied themselves tained by communities of language-users for whom to be currently engaged. they serve as commonsense and taken-for-granted Once again in stark contrast to his generation, everyday worlds. Scruton approached Burke not from this political These related notions lie at the core of Scruton’s direction but from their shared interest in aesthetics own philosophical worldview, as he believes that sci- and how this field of philosophical inquiry illumi- entific and industrial society has devastated the tra- nates the affirmation of home, soil and settlement, ditional life-worlds and forms of life within which which is the one theme that unites all of Scruton’s people have for millennia lived and made sense of many inquiries, as Dooley emphasises. And this is their lives, producing a crisis of disorientation, dis- true whether these concern the elevated realms of location and alienation. Moreover, “this crisis is not aesthetics and religion, or the more concrete con- only intellectual; it is also moral, indeed a crisis of cerns of environmentalism, fox-hunting and wine. civilisation itself. For the Lebenswelt falls apart when A sense of place was also vitally important. not maintained by reflection. The result is a loss of Recoiling at the desecration of his childhood meaning, a moral vacuum”, as Scruton observed in landscape by modern architecture that had left The Oxford History of (1994). him mentally homeless, Scruton came to see that “aesthetic judgement lays a claim upon the world, cruton’s conservatism made him very few friends that it issues from a deep social imperative, and that in academia, as he discovered in 1971 after he it matters to us in just the way that other people hadS completed his PhD and accepted a lectureship matter to us, when we strive to live with them in at Birkbeck College, “the heart of the Left establish- a community”. “Like Burke,” he says, “I was in ment that governed British scholarship”. There, the search of a lost experience of home”, a physical and likes of the communist historian psychological sense of place that had been stripped

44 Quadrant March 2020 The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton away by the depredations of , “with its are conducted”. denial of the past, its vandalisation of the landscape Burke persuaded him that “societies are not and and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world cannot be organised according to a plan or a goal, that of history”. In A Political Philosophy Scruton spoke there is no direction to history, and no such thing as movingly of the attachment people feel for a place moral or spiritual progress”, while all attempts to “that is theirs by right, [a] place where you and I pretend otherwise must decline into “militant irra- belong and to which we return, if only in thought, at tionality” as the proponents of such visions struggle the end of all our wanderings”. Arrogantly ignoring to impose their abstract template onto an intracta- the centrality for human beings of community, ble world. Faced with such resistance, the would-be home and settlement, a rampaging modernity leaves revolutionaries seek to mobilise the masses around behind nothing but atomised individuals, “living a shared hatred of a real or imagined foe: “Hence like ants within their metallic and functional shells”. the strident and militant language of socialist lit- This pervasive sense of homelessness can be erature—the hate-filled, purpose-filled, bourgeois- overcome, Scruton believed. Indeed, the desire to baiting prose, one example of which had been offered overcome it is itself a powerful psychological force: to me in 1968”. Such clamorous discourse became “underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief “the basic diet of political studies” in his university, that what has been lost can also be recaptured”, albeit and when Scruton dared to question it, he says, “I in a modified form, “to reward us for all the toil of blighted what remained of my academic career.” separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression”. And he saw this redemptive his marginalisation was accomplished above all faith as “the romantic core of conservatism, as you by The Meaning of Conservatism (1979) which, find it—very differently expressed—in Burke and Tas Scruton put it in a 2004 interview, gave his left- Hegel, in Coleridge, Ruskin, Dostoevsky and T.S. ist colleagues someone new to hate, with Radical Eliot”. It was found also in F.R. Leavis, who insisted Philosophy dismissing it as “clearly too ghastly to be in The Great Tradition (1948) that superior literature taken seriously”. It was a dense text that proposed a displays “a vital capacity for experience, a kind of philosophical foundation for the Conservative Party reverent openness before life, and a marked moral as it was about to enter its years of triumph under intensity”, and found these qualities present pre- . Scruton himself described it eminently in the novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, as “a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence. the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers”. For Leavis, Scruton explained in The Philosopher on This stance provoked the neo-liberal Institute for Dover Beach, “the task of culture was a sacred task Economic Affairs to recommend that Scruton “be [having] to express and to justify our participation avoided, as exhibiting dangerous tendencies towards in the human world. And the greatest products of extremism”, or alternatively be recognised as “part culture … were to be studied as the supreme distilla- of a sophisticated KGB operation to split the tions of this justifying force”. They offer no abstract Conservative Party”. Acknowledging his distance theoretical knowledge, “but life—life restored to its from the neo-conservatism of the time, Scruton meaning, vindicated and made whole”. agreed in the interview that the book revealed more As such passages reveal, Scruton valorised the of a kinship with American paleo-conservatism particular and abhorred the modernist reduction of with its concern with tradition and religion, an life to abstract categories. Instead, he insisted on the expanded civil society and a limited state, the value centrality of contextual and localised “social knowl- of the Western heritage, loyalty towards home, and edge” once embodied in the common law, political a strong sense of place and belonging. and social conventions, manners, customs, morality Nevertheless, The Meaning of Conservatism duly and civility of the traditional English Lebenswelt, became a classic and gave Scruton a prominent pro- all of which arose as by an “invisible hand” from file as an articulate champion of conservatism. He the innumerable social transactions, age-old nego- returned regularly to this topic and even as recently tiations and compromises perpetuated by custom as 2017 he published Conservatism: An Invitation to to restrain and channel conflicting interests and the Great Tradition, a very accessible text that traces passions. In this he found support in Burke, who the emergence of the British tradition of conserva- celebrated the thriving variety and uniqueness of tism out of the work of the classical liberals Hobbes, traditional life but also explored its political implica- Harrington, Locke and , the point of tions, persuading Scruton that “the utopian promises departure being the conservative insistence that lib- of socialism go with a wholly abstract vision of the erty must be grounded in the customs, conventions, human mind … that has only the vaguest relation to traditions and institutions of a society if it is not to the thought and feelings by which real human lives become an oppressive abstraction enforced by state

Quadrant March 2020 45 The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton power (as we are currently witnessing). them bad reviews, and to obstruct his bids for This sudden prominence led to Scruton’s promotion. Overall, as he recalled in a 2002 article, appointment as editor of the Salisbury Review, “My Life Beyond the Pale”, his eighteen-year a journal named after the conservative British editorship of the Salisbury Review: prime minister who, as Scruton observed, “kept everything so well in place that nothing now is cost me many thousand hours of unpaid labour, known about him” (except perhaps his observation a hideous character assassination in Private that good government consists of doing as little as Eye, three lawsuits, two interrogations, one possible). The Salisbury Review took a strong stand expulsion, the loss of a university career in on communism, the Moscow-inspired nuclear Britain, unendingly contemptuous reviews, disarmament and peace movements, the treatment Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals of dissidents in Eastern Europe and Christians everywhere. And it was worth it. in the Middle East, feminism, the various forms of postmodernism, political correctness and ne thing that made it worthwhile was the government-enforced egalitarianism. It also saw impact the Salisbury Review had in Eastern the first appearance of a series of critical articles by Europe.O An underground, samizdat, edition began Scruton on Foucault, Sartre, , R.D. to appear in Prague in 1986, and Scruton recalls Laing, E.P. Thompson, and “their wafer-thin pages—the final carbon copies others. These were later collected as Thinkers of the from sheaves of ten”, which he felt “had the spiritual New Left (1986) and updated as Fools, Frauds and quality of illuminated manuscripts” and testified to Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015), offering “a belief in the written word that had been tried and scathing polemics against intellectual fascism. Such proved through real suffering” in Czechoslovakia attacks on the favoured authors of the Left further and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain. Scruton was entrenched his academic alienation. involved with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, At the outset, as editor, Scruton found it difficult under which Western academics smuggle forbidden to find writers prepared to contribute to an explicitly literature and provide classes in Prague and Brno conservative journal at a time when the radical as part of an underground education network hegemony over the intellectual life of Britain was leading to university degrees. This led to him being virtually absolute. The dangers faced by contributors detained, expelled and listed on the Czech Index of were exemplified by the Honeyford Affair, in Undesirable Persons. After the fall of communism, which the Salisbury Review published an article in President Václav Havel awarded him the Czech 1984 on “Education and Race” by Ray Honeyford, Republic’s Medal of Merit for his work. the headmaster of a middle school in Bradford, Scruton learnt a great deal about totalitarianism where some 95 per cent of the pupils were Asian by working with this underground network as it and Muslim. The article promoted integration, struggled to provide medicines, Bibles, religious questioned multiculturalism, and argued that the materials, books, education and support for writers home environment in immigrant families was a and artists blacklisted by the communist regimes. primary determinant of educational performance. As he recalled in a 2013 BBC feature on democracy, Honeyford was duly accused of racism, disciplined, totalitarianism “endures not simply by getting rid threatened, placed under police protection, sacked, of democratic elections and imposing a one-party reinstated after a court case, and then forced into early state. It endures by abolishing the distinction retirement, never to teach again. Other contributors between civil society and the state, and by allowing were sacked for defending Honeyford and the nothing significant to occur which is not controlled Salisbury Review was subjected to an academic show- by the Party.” He realised that “political freedom trial and found guilty of scientific racism, while the depends upon a delicate network of institutions”, school itself was eventually burned down in an arson which the dissident network was desperately seeking attack. On the other hand, the controversy gave the to resuscitate. First among such institutions is an Salisbury Review a public profile and generated judicial system and respect for the rule 600 subscribers it needed to survive. of law. Also of vital importance are property rights, As for Scruton, the University of Glasgow political pluralism and the presence of an opposition officially boycotted a paper he was to deliver there, able freely to criticise the government and contest while at the same time conferring an honorary power within a functional political system. doctorate on Robert Mugabe. It also became, he Freedom of speech and opinion are also essential, says, “a matter of honour among English-speaking and here Scruton observed that a critical lesson is intellectuals to dissociate themselves from me”, to to be learnt from the experience of communism: warn off prospective publishers of his books, give too many people in the West take these freedoms

46 Quadrant March 2020 The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton for granted and assume that such is “the of all past generations. Consensus, which holds the default position of mankind” to which we will social order together, flows from this, as does justice all inevitably gravitate. On the contrary, Scruton which requires a rule of law that is rooted in tradi- insists, “orthodoxy, conformity and the hounding of tion and consensus. the dissident define the default position of mankind, In Scruton’s view, conservatives should strongly and there is no reason to think that democracies are resist the intrusion of the state into the many areas any different in this respect from Islamic theocracies where it lacks competence or there is no political or one-party totalitarian states”. or philosophical rationale consistent with the The hounding of conservative dissidents has position outlined above. “In particular, they oppose become increasingly prevalent in the West, as state interference in the market”, except for the Scruton himself experienced only a year ago when provision of public goods, while “some argue (with he became the victim of a concerted attempt at char- Hayek) that the attempt to control the market is acter assassination carried out by the New Statesman. inherently irrational [and] is destructive of the That journal’s deputy editor published and vigorously state’s legitimacy”, individual responsibility and promoted a doctored account of an interview he had social cohesion. It is also vital that the separation of conducted with Scruton, successfully seeking his state and civil society is maintained. Consequently, dismissal from an honorary govern- conservatives strongly resist those ment post. He then posted a picture revolutionary doctrines (such as of himself on Instagram drinking onservatism - and fascism) champagne, captioned, “The feeling C that threaten this balance, on the when you get right-wing racist and emphasises concrete basis that the “total invasion of homophobe Roger Scruton sacked happiness over [civil] society by political decision- as a Tory government adviser.” making … is the mark of totalitarian Eventually the full transcript was abstract freedom, and power”. released and an apology was forced sees individuality, Scruton insists that religion plays out of the journal. freedom and happiness a vital social role, and acknowledges that some conservatives, like espite such attacks, Scruton’s as “products of social Eric Voegelin, even argue that time at the Salisbury Review order”, and dependent political conservatism actually Dallowed him to develop a coher- originates in a religious attitude, ent conservative position, which he on the institutional and “identify the rejection of outlined in his editor’s introduc- structures of society conservative political order with tion to Conservative Thinkers: Essays that nurture them. the heresies and transgressions from the Salisbury Review (1988). which undermine that attitude, “Conservatism, like liberalism, sees and which destroy man’s humility the individual as uniquely valuable and his condition before the divine”. At the very least, conservatives as the true test of political order”, however, unlike recognise “the indispensability, in sound political liberalism, conservatism emphasises concrete hap- judgement, of religious ideas—in particular, ideas piness over abstract freedom, and sees individuality, of original sin, corporate guilt and suffering—and freedom and happiness as “products of social order”, of the ever-present fear of death and retribution”. and dependent on the institutional structures of Such recognition highlights the extent to which society that nurture them. Similarly, conservatism conservatives “place politics, culture and morality also places concrete duties above abstract rights, before economic order and the distribution of and in particular emphasises the principle of reci- power”, as Marxists and other radicals would have procity, whereby the availability of rights presup- it. Conservatives “see politics not as the pursuit of poses the acceptance of duties and responsibilities. some ultimate goal—whether national supremacy, Underpinning this is a social order based on “three social justice, or economic growth—but as the principles: tradition, consensus and the rule of law”, attempt to reconcile conflicting interests, and to which Scruton elaborates to show their intercon- establish law, order and peace throughout society”. nectedness. Here the core idea is derived from Burke and entails recognition of the centrality of spontane- ver the past two decades Scruton has been able ous order in society: “the traditional order is distinct to refine and apply this conservative paradigm to from both planned order and random association. Oan astonishing array of areas, including aesthetics, the It contains its own inherent principles of develop- history of philosophy, politics, religion, sexual desire, ment, and is composed of instincts, prejudices and terrorism, , farming, fox- values”, which represent the accumulated wisdom hunting and the enjoyment of wine, demonstrating

Quadrant March 2020 47 The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton conservatism’s relevance to a wide range of political, and the divine and the responsibility and judgment cultural and social issues. On the topic of wine, for that this entails. The price paid is metaphysical example, he published I Drink Therefore I Am (2009). aloneness: “God is … avoidable only by creating a This moved one reviewer to paint an enticing picture: void. This void opens before us when we destroy the Scruton’s “dinner parties sound a real gas: ‘A good face—not the human face only, but also the face of wine should always be accompanied by a good topic’; the world. The godless void is what confronts us.” he prescribes, for example, ‘whether the Tristan chord Scruton believes ours is a culture “in full flight is a half-diminished seventh or whether there could from the sacred”, in which we rage against our be a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture’. Everybody back self-inflicted fate but refuse to confront our own to Rog’s, then …” responsibility for our predicament. Consequently, A more highly relevant example is Green “desecration becomes a kind of moral necessity— Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet something that must be constantly performed, and (2011, new edition 2012), which attempts to develop an performed collectively, in order to destroy the things alternative approach to environmental problems that that stand in judgment over us”. avoids the potentially catastrophic statist solutions Scruton further pursued the sacred in The Soul advocated by the Left and the Greens (including of the World (2014), and attempted to defend it various forms of world government), and draws from the faddish fascination with philosophical instead on the “oikophilia”, or love of home and place, that characterises Britain, Australia and traditionally demonstrated by local communities some other Western countries (although it lacks (the Greek term oikos means home or settlement), traction in the Third World, where Christianity augmented by various technological innovations and Islam are booming). Once again drawing on and adaptations. Above all, Scruton stresses the insights offered by his conservatism, he inquired relevance for conservation of the fundamental into the nature of intimacy, relatedness, inter- conservative insight that each generation holds the subjectivity, moral intuitions and the capacity for present world in trust, from the past into the future. aesthetic appreciation, and their implications for Most recently, Scruton turned his attention to the sacred and transcendent in a society besotted religion, publishing Our Church: A Personal History by an arrogant unprepared to accept its of the Church of England (2012), which focused own profound limitations. One reviewer saw it as “a very much on those aspects of the Anglican genuine ‘turning for home’ on the part of a learned Communion with which Scruton most clearly and deeply thoughtful man, who offers us hard-won identifies, especially its centuries-old institutional insights as he fixes his gaze on our final end”. role as a bearer of English culture and traditions, Such inquiries into ultimate questions but also its music, architecture, art and the English concerning the sacred and the transcendent seem language, exemplified by the profound influence of to be the most appropriate terminus of Scruton’s the King James Bible. A further example is The Face philosophical investigations. They complete an of God: The Gifford Lectures (2012), which attempts odyssey through the de-sacralised wastelands of to “reconcile the God of the philosophers with postmodernism, bestowed upon the world by the the God who is worshipped and prayed to by the generation of the cosseted soixante-huitards whose ordinary believer”. Typically for Scruton, he tried antics Scruton witnessed, reflected momentarily to avoid abstract philosophical argumentation and in the disintegrating shopfront window in a Paris insisted instead that God’s presence in the world street fifty-two years ago. is revealed through attention to the intimate inter- At the outset of his career, Scruton witnessed subjectivity of true human communion, or, as he put the profanation and disenchantment of a revered it: “God is understood not through metaphysical world, the subsequent disfigurement and destruc- speculations concerning the ground of being, but tion of the sacred, and the eclipse of a traditional through communion with our fellow humans.” The order of things in which he had been at home and intimacy of this is captured through the image of whose value, for him, was beyond price. Left meta- “the Face”—of the other person and of God, with physically homeless, he energetically explored the both of whom we should be profoundly engaged if we implications of this desecration and sought a way are to realise our fullest humanity. The rootlessness, back home to the profound truth it obscured. And alienation and depersonalisation of modern life now he has found his way back, bequeathing to us prevent us from recognising this imperative and the priceless results of his lifelong quest. make it so easy to deny God. Modern atheism therefore involves not just the Mervyn F. Bendle is the author of Anzac and its rejection of some metaphysical claims; it involves Enemies: The History War on Australia’s National a flight from a genuine encounter with the human Identity (Quadrant Books, 2015).

48 Quadrant March 2020 Mark Latham

The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments

ecent NAPLAN and PISA results show how encouraged to question their own identity, to believe New South Wales schools are at a tipping that personal characteristics like gender, sexuality point. Without significant reform, our stu- and even race can be fluid. This reflects the insidious Rdents will continue to slide in academic attainment, rise of identity politics in schools, dividing society economic competitiveness and social capability and into groupings divorced from individual merit and fairness. Our young people are paying a heavy price character. Schools need to return to the values of for the failed educational experiments of the past meritocracy, understanding that a person’s skin col- three decades. our and other aspects of their appearance are irrele- Students from disadvantaged areas pay the vant to their worth. We need to go back to the great heaviest price. Living in households and suburbs Australian habit of looking through and ignoring in crisis, by far their best chance of breaking the race, gender and sexuality. poverty cycle is a good school. Without basic skills 3. Postmodernism and identity politics in our and deep knowledge drawn from the curriculum, schools are trying to engineer a very different type they have little chance in life. Without rigorous of society, based on “progressive” ideology rather testing and grading, they struggle to show society than on the learning needs of students. Society how good they are, matching other schools and stu- and Culture, Geography, History and even English dents who are enjoying the advantages of inherited courses have become intensely political. This is a opportunity. worrying trend, with regular reports of teachers The decline in the New South Wales education projecting their worldview in the classroom. No system is a crime against our children. The tragedy is responsible adult should put their political prefer- readily apparent: everything about classroom prac- ence ahead of the needs of children. tices and results has been studied in every country, 4. A critical part of learning is self-knowledge: in every conceivable way over many years. We know to appreciate the virtues, history and other civilisa- what works and what doesn’t work in boosting stu- tional influences of the society in which one finds dent outcomes. This attention to evidence, however, oneself. If we don’t understand our own culture, how has been sidelined by a desire within the system to can we understand others? Yet in New South Wales pursue experimental fads in classroom content and syllabuses, every subject is guided by three learning methods. objectives—Aboriginal Culture, Engagement with The culprits walk into schools every day: Asia and Environmental Sustainability—with little 1. Postmodernism propagates the myth that mention of Western civilisation. In fact, in many everything we know about ourselves and our society courses, the material is openly hostile to who we are and its history has been “socially constructed”, and and where we have come from as a nation—a self- that there is no fixed understanding of the facts and loathing that must not be allowed to stand. records of our civilisation. The purpose of schooling 5. The 2008 Melbourne Declaration changed must be to teach truth through knowledge, not the direction of New South Wales schools by mov- to tell students there are no clear-cut facts, that ing away from academic attainment into “a broader somewhere behind the scenes there is a conspiracy frame” for the “social development” of the child. This to “socially construct” information. Postmodernism is another case of social engineering, falsely assum- is an anti-educational doctrine, deliberately trying ing that teachers can replace the functions of par- to replace knowledge with confusion in the minds ents and families. It gave rise to the “Safe Schools” of students. program and other “fluidity” teaching, plus an abid- 2. Out of this confusion, students are then ing focus on health and wellbeing issues. Some New

Quadrant March 2020 49 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments

South Wales non-government schools, for instance, The message is clear. If “back to basics” is to mean are now surveying the sleeping and home screen- anything, it must mean schools being schools, with time habits of their students, downgrading their teachers instructing students directly. Unfortunately, core role as educators. the Interim Masters Report ignores this evidence 6. As a close ally of these five trends, low-value and policy direction. It raises little objection to the experimental content and practices have entered failed, faddish experiments of the past thirty years the classroom. None of these fads have a clear evi- and, in fact, seeks to go further down the same path. dence base but they have been allowed to flourish. Masters makes no mention of the problem with Educationists have developed a long list of junk postmodernist content. Nor does he deal with the programs: play-based learning, philosophy cir- proliferation of politics in schools. Junk programs cles, guided group work, inquiry-based learning, and practices are accepted as a given. In learning facilitation teaching, so-called “twenty-first-cen- to read, there’s no insistence on synthetic phonics tury skills”, general capabilities, creative thinking, being taught ahead of inferior whole-word methods. growth mindset, co-teaching, collaborative class- In effect, the Interim Report is more of the same, rooms, flexible learning spaces and constructivist reinforcing the failed thinking and “flexibility” that teaching. John Hattie’s research (a global meta- has already taken schools in the wrong direction. analysis of 95,000 studies involving 300 million students) tells us that Direct Instruction achieves the best classroom results. That is, when teachers Postmodernism in English actually teach, standing at the front of the classroom he English curriculum has become more like and instructing their students on how to do things, a tutorial in identity politics than the develop- creating a rich interchange of knowledge, ideas and Tment of comprehension and writing skills. Studying inspiration. Yet in many schools this evidence has the great works of English literature has also been wiped and Direct Instruction abandoned. become optional. If students choose to pursue poli- 7. Programs with a poor evidence base can only tics at university, good luck to them. But it shouldn’t flourish if ministers and departmental heads let be compulsory during their school years under the them. While some countries tightly prescribe con- fraudulent banner of “English”. tent and teaching methods and materials in their Large parts of the high school English syllabus curricula, New South Wales has moved in a differ- now focus on identity issues, promoting gender ent direction. With policies such as Local Schools/ theory and the politics of “diversity”. The curriculum Local Decisions, schools have wide latitude in states: “Students experience and value difference deciding what they teach and how they teach it. and diversity in their everyday lives. Age, beliefs, Fads and ideology have been allowed to prolifer- gender, language and race are some of the factors ate, unchecked by central systems of quality control. that comprise difference and diversity. English The new curriculum needs to avoid vague notions provides students with opportunities to deal with of “learning with understanding”, “curriculum flex- difference and diversity in a positive and informed ibility”, “emotional engagement” and “diversity”, as manner, showing awareness, understanding and fostered by the Interim Masters Report. Classroom acceptance.” content, practices, learning materials and external Students are asked to “identify the ways in consultants should only be used by schools after which cultural assumption is presented in texts, for a rigorous, high-effect evidence base has certified example, gender, religion, disability and culture”. them. The “conventions of speech” are said to “influence Given the scale of these problems, inevitably, community identity” while language “embodies the recent PISA results showed fifteen-year-old assumptions about issues such as gender, ethnicity New South Wales students to be several years and class”. behind their Asian counterparts. Why? Because Multimedia, film, animation and speech studies Asian schools don’t use the junk trends listed have been introduced, usually with intensely political above. In their system, schools function as schools, content, such as the actress Emma Watson’s address not as political laboratories or social work clinics. to the United Nations promoting Left-feminism. Their teachers actually teach, as the centrepiece of The class time allocated for studying the classics classroom activity—unlike our schools, where it has of prose, plays and poetry has been substantially become fashionable for teachers to wander around reduced. For students in Years 7 to 10, the syllabus open-plan “learning spaces”, coffee mugs in hand, contains no requirement for reading novels, let alone as “facilitators”. the great works. In successful education systems, evidence The few classics that remain in the classroom outweighs ideology. What matters is what works. have been recast through the prism of leftist politics.

50 Quadrant March 2020 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments

Even the meaning of Emily Bronte’s work has been riculum encourages this foolhardy process. The K-10 rewritten. In the New South Wales curriculum, syllabus starts by declaring: “There are many differ- “Wuthering Heights is traditionally read as a novel ing perspectives within a nation’s history and histo- about intense human relationships but contemporary rians may interpret events differently, depending on alternative readings include a political reading, their point of view and the sources they have used.” seeing it as a novel of social class and bourgeois Thus students are forced to spend vast amounts exploitation in Victorian England and a gendered of time on “source verification”. Instead of learning reading, with gender stereotypes.” Little did Cathy the joy and wonder of history, they are required to realise she was coming home to a tutorial in cultural question how our knowledge of history has been Marxism. “socially constructed”. As if the causes of the First In Year 10 English, students have to answer World War are unknown or China’s objection to the question, “Is This Who We Really Are?” as nineteenth-century colonisation remains a mystery. part of a unit on “Media Gender Representations”. This is an insult to historians and the diligence and The course aims to “make young people aware that records of the academy. It’s part of the postmodernist besides media representations, gender stereotypes pedagogy of promoting doubt and confusion ahead also exist and are perpetuated by many factors, such of deep knowledge. Source verification involves as peer pressure, family upbringing, culture and asking how history was recorded, rather than the tradition”. This is not education, but an attempt to key questions of how and why it happened. Many push young people away from observable truths in students find this process torturous and drop out of their lives, in favour of postmodernist propaganda. senior-year courses such as Modern History, which Like the discredited Safe Schools program, has overdosed on verification techniques. it seeks to pressure students into disregarding As a school principal has told me, “The history the things they have learnt in the family home. curriculum is designed to confuse students rather The unit presents students with a list of so-called than educate them. The priorities are wrong. How gendered adjectives, including clever, decisive, could anyone regard the ‘Pro-Democracy Movement responsible, hardworking, leader and even frigid—a in Burma’ as more important than studying the bizarre English exercise in sex education. There is French Revolution?” Aung San Suu Kyi came into no evidence of words such as these being “gendered” the high school history syllabus when she was (even if that mattered in the teaching of English). fashionably popular among the Left. Now she has In Years 11 and 12, postmodernist texts have lost favour (due to allegations of genocide) her story become common, such as Alain de Botton’s might not be taught as much—another lesson in ridiculous book The Art of Travel. Botton constantly the folly of constructing courses around transient complains that the things he is witnessing as a political trends. tourist are not real. Yet if there is one thing in our Another school leader has said, “We spread our lives that is self-apparent it’s the act of travelling and resources too thinly in teaching history. The syllabus seeing famous places first-hand. No one pays good deals with many cultures and peoples across the money for tourism to believe that nothing is real. world, without developing a clear knowledge of This is typical of the postmodernist agenda: Western history. If we don’t properly understand encouraging students to believe that all they know ourselves, the history of our nation and culture, how and feel about themselves and society is inherently can we understand that of others?” fluid, that there is no valid reality in their young In Stage 4 (Years 7 and 8) it is possible to study lives. This is not the study of English, but an attempt “The Ancient World” without the history of Rome or at indoctrination. Greece being taught—the birthplace of democracy, Postmodernism and identity politics need to humanism and Western values, architecture, arts be removed from the English curriculum. Priority and legal codes. In studying “Ancient to the Modern needs to be given to literacy, comprehension and World”, it is possible to not learn European history, writing skills. Secondary students need to study the to overlook the Renaissance, Enlightenment and great works of our civilisation, the literary classics rise of . A combination of the that tell us who we are and explain the evolution of Ottoman empire, Khmer empire and Mongol our culture. They need to learn English, not politics. expansion can be studied instead. In “Modern World” classwork, there’s nothing mandatory about courses on the rise and fall of Postmodernism in History communism, the Cold War and the post-September he facts of history are well established. No 11 war against terrorism. Rather, the emphasis amount of politically motivated can is on “rights and freedom”, “popular culture”, Trecast them. Yet the New South Wales history cur- “the environmental movement” and “migration

Quadrant March 2020 51 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments experience”. In senior-year Modern History, there Hence his advocacy for creating extra “time within are case studies on the West, but mostly from a the curriculum” and in “professional learning” and negative perspective. Several courses are trivial and “teacher education programs” so that “Aboriginal strange, such as “Tibet in the Modern World” and knowledge and perspectives are relevant across the “The 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, its impact on curriculum and throughout the years of school”. environmental awareness and the impact on Earth Should Aboriginal content be taught in our Day 1970”. schools? Absolutely. Should it be taught in every The teaching of indigenous history has also syllabus? Absolutely not. become problematic. Leftists might wish for something more glorified than the truth of a nomadic people (hunter-gatherers) but the facts Postmodernism in Science do not support such revisionism. Historians as ne would normally expect the teaching of sci- diverse as Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey ence to be immune from political content. It’s have reached the same conclusion: that by the start aO pure subject, universal in its knowledge base and of the eighteenth century, geographic isolation application. Yet even school science has been tainted had left Aboriginal society behind, compared to by postmodernism, with attempts to position it as the technological advances of Europe’s Industrial culturally and socially “constructed”. Students need Revolution. to “appreciate the contribution that diverse cul- Historians are united in what happened, mainly tural perspectives have made to the development, because it did happen. The colonial settlement breadth and diversity of scientific and technological of Australia involved significant mistakes but knowledge”. generally, governors such as The K-6 science syllabus claims Lachlan Macquarie tried to civilise to “foster in students a sense of won- those around them, in both the ven school science der and curiosity about the world”. indigenous and convict populations. E Instead, it is more like a course in They tried to turn a prison into a has been tainted Environmental Studies, interwo- new society, ultimately building the by postmodernism, ven with diversity, indigenous and best nation on Earth. This is one of “intercultural understanding”. In the great achievements of human with attempts studying the “Earth’s relationship history and should be recognised as to position it with the Sun”, for instance, stu- such in the curriculum. “National as culturally dents are required to “investigate pride” should not be treated as a how changes in the environment dirty concept. and socially are used by Aboriginal and Torres The fiction underpinning Bruce “constructed”. Strait Islander peoples to develop Pascoe’s Dark Emu has no place in seasonal calendars”. schools. There’s no shame in a people In understanding the fusion of being nomadic. Logically, it means that written materials, students need to “identify a range of nat- languages, history books and wheeled transport ural materials available locally and through trade are not practical parts of such an existence. That’s used by Aboriginal people for a specific cultural how Aboriginal Australia was for 60,000 years, and purpose”. There’s also a requirement to “identify that’s how it should be taught in schools. I can’t how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peo- imagine anything more disrespectful to indigenous ples care for the Earth’s resources on-country, for people than rewriting the truth of who they were example: ochre, fish and seeds”. In studying agri- and how they lived. cultural technology, classes “explore the plants and Australian history is important, both pre- and animals used in customary practices of Aboriginal post-1788, but there is no reason for indigenous and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. culture and history to dominate the curriculum. Due to the requirement for an Aboriginal learn- Currently in the Years 7 to 10 History syllabus, ing priority in every course, some of the content is there are 133 mentions of “Aboriginal”, thirty-seven a massive stretch, bordering on comical. In under- of “British” (mostly negative), fourteen of “Western” standing “Digital Technologies”, for instance, K-2 and seven of “Christianity’. This is part of a pattern: students are required to “explore the uses of digital downplaying and stigmatising the achievements of devices in developing and sustaining Aboriginal and the West, while idealising indigenous culture. Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and lan- Masters plans to add to the Aboriginal overload guages”. Indigenous culture had no books or written with his proposals. He gives his personal political history but now apparently, it is sustained by digital opinion, without reference to a clear evidence base. devices. Bruce Pascoe, eat your heart out.

52 Quadrant March 2020 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments

In words that could be lifted from a Greens recognisable as cultural knowledge.” No one is too pamphlet, “Sustainability education” is said to be young to avoid the reach of postmodernism: “futures-oriented, creating a more ecologically and socially just world”. What does this mean in practice Kindergarten students can be introduced to the for a primary school student? In a desperate attempt idea of knowledge as problematic. For example, to include any and all environmental content, they in talking about my family, they can see that are taught to “turn off dripping taps and unnecessary families mean different things to different lights” and develop “reusing/recycling campaigns”. people (one, two or many parents; no siblings or In a strike against the commercial world, the syl- many; extended family or nuclear) and that the labus aims to “develop informed consumers” among notion of family depends on circumstances. nine-year-olds, “making sustainable choices”. Too much of curriculum development has Really? In the name of education, five-year-olds become an exercise in virtue signalling. In 2018, for are told it’s possible to have more than two parents. instance, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and How could this be a useful part of kindergarten Reporting Authority (ACARA) published ninety- tuition? five ways in which science teachers can incorporate As daft as it may seem, family fluidity also fea- indigenous culture into their lessons. This included: tures in the K-2 History curriculum. Little children • Students examining the transformation of are taught “Present and Past Family Life”, hav- energy by studying Aboriginal fire techniques; ing to answer the question, “How has family life • Researching indigenous knowledge of celestial changed?” This is an invitation for teaching about bodies and the origins of the universe; and various sexuality types and gender fluidity. • Studying increases in velocity and impact-force It’s not hard to predict how Asian schools would through Aboriginal use of spear-throwers. deal with this nonsense. But in New South Wales Some of this is actually anti-science. It’s typical it is embedded in classroom practice and the curric- of how subjects are being taught through the lens ulum—a prime reason why, in international bench- of white-leftist-guilt, rather than academic integ- marking, our results have tanked. Our system is rity and political independence. It might cleanse the more interested in social engineering and supersed- conscience of political types, but it is doing nothing ing the role of parents than actual education. to help our students or economy compete interna- tionally. It’s consigning Australia to be the academic trash of Asia. Teaching literacy asters has little to say on the vital question of how best to teach children to read. Yet the Postmodernism in classroom practice Mevidence is clear: Hattie’s research assigns Phonics n their teacher education and instruction book- a 0.6 effect level and Whole Language 0.06 (with lets on Classroom Practice, universities are also 0.4 as the “hinge point” at which something is Ispreading anti-educational postmodernism. On a worth teaching). Learn-to-read programs in the recent visit to a school I was handed its guide to New South Wales curriculum must be based on teaching: a departmental document prepared by the explicit teaching of Phonics. Despite the weight James Ladwig and Jennifer Gore from Newcastle of evidence supporting this approach, school lead- University. ThisClassroom Practice Guide (2003) talks ers persist in pursuing fad ideas involving Whole of “knowledge not as a fixed body of information Language reading. but rather as being socially constructed and hence For instance, the state government’s Language, subject to political, social and cultural influences Learning and Literacy (L3) program, taught to and implications”. Nothing is immune from this more than 16,000 Kindergarten to Year 2 students, doctrine, with “scientific knowledge open to social only teaches Phonics incidentally. It is based on a and historical dynamics”. Vast amounts of time are New Zealand project called “Picking Up the Pace”, likely to be wasted as “teachers or students dig out which is described as a “socio-cultural, co-construc- the historical background behind the knowledge tivist view” whereby “language and meaning are a presented in a topic”. Source verification is appar- way of thinking, feeling and acting in a social prac- ently more important than learning science, history, tice”—that is, postmodernist pap. geography and literature. L3 is part of the government’s Early Action for Some of the references for teachers are not only Success (EAfS) literacy and numeracy strategy. outdated but also unusual, such as the claim that Evaluation reports highlight how 77 per cent of the “People living with HIV have developed a unique schools that joined EAfS in 2013 had either negligi- knowledge of Australia and its institutions that is ble or negative changes in Year 3 NAPLAN reading

Quadrant March 2020 53 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments scores. This is not surprising, as L3 uses a method- tion that “ongoing changes in Australian society ology similar to the discredited Reading Recovery are requiring” a new mode of schooling. This is program. simply a personal opinion. Most parents would say Even though CESE identified Reading Recovery they expect schools to be schools, leaving the social as ineffective and the government stopped support- development of children to those who know them ing it, schools themselves have defied this research best: their families. and policy by piecing it back into literacy programs. There are some fine teachers in New South Wales I have visited government schools where L3 and schools but for parents, ultimately, they are relative Reading Recovery are still being used, perpetuat- strangers in our lives. Parents are responsible for ing Whole Language methods. It’s a strange sys- their children, as the core source of love, guidance tem where the research and government can say one and pastoral care. When schooling is finished, good thing and schools are free to do the opposite, to the parents are still there, always there, to deal with the proven detriment of students. challenges facing their children. The era of laissez-faire teaching must end. In the drift away from the basics of learning, Evidence-based boundaries need to be placed New South Wales schools are also engaged in men- around classroom practice. Governments need to tal health programs. In truth, the best thing they govern and teachers need to teach solely in ways that can do for the mental wellbeing of their students is are known to work and benefit students. to stop pushing dangerous notions of gender fluid- ity. Telling children as young as five they can be boys one day and girls the next is a form of ideologi- Schools as schools (not social work cal child abuse and should be treated as such. centres) At its core, fluidity teaching runs against life’s n recent decades, school resources have been observable truths. With very few exceptions, peo- diverted into a range of non-academic objectives. ple are born either male or female—a basic truth IWhile Masters identifies the extent of the prob- of biological science. Programs like Respectful lem, he also legitimises the “social development” Relationships undermine the legitimacy of sci- approach: ence in our schools, a self-defeating outcome. They should be abolished, along with similar indoctrina- Ongoing changes in Australian society are tion lessons in physical, health and sex education requiring schools to take on broader roles and and library resources. responsibilities than the implementation of Why have schools over-reached in this fashion, a set of syllabuses. Schools are increasingly intruding on family life? Perhaps teachers find pas- focused on students’ social and emotional toral care an easier job than being held account- development, physical and mental health and able for academic results. Maybe, as employees of wellbeing, and a range of personal skills and the state, they are more comfortable with the social attributes, including resilience, optimism and engineering of young people—a worrying trend. the ability to communicate and collaborate Certainly the paucity of government funding for with others. School-wide priorities of these community and allied health care has pushed these kinds are not adequately addressed as syllabuses responsibilities onto school budgets. and “outcomes”, but nevertheless need to be Whatever the case, we have one guarantee: the recognised as part of the total curriculum of more school and teaching resources are diverted into today’s schools. A challenge is to provide the pastoral and health care, the more academic results time and support in schools to address these will continue to decline. If Asian schools spend 100 broader priorities. per cent of their efforts on knowledge development but our schools are only 50 per cent engaged in this This is part of Masters’s more-of-the-same activity, it is inevitable that their outcomes will out- approach, extending the folly of the Melbourne strip ours. Declaration. For schools, most of these activities are Health funding is a problem for all governments, futile. There is no compelling research to say that especially in addressing the “missing middle” of schools can teach or measure personal attributes like service provision (preventive/community-based resilience, optimism and collaboration. So why are care, positioned between primary GP and hospital vast amounts of time and resources being diverted services). In Victoria, a new mental health tax is away from knowledge development (which can be being introduced, a sign of how governments need measured and taught)? Masters never answers this to find new ways of overcoming community health question. scarcity. Similarly, he offers no validation of his asser- With the full Gonski resources now flowing,

54 Quadrant March 2020 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments schools are awash with funds. Increasingly, they • “To increase significantly (second) language are being used to compensate for the “missing mid- learning in NSW schools”, commencing in the pri- dle” in health care. High schools are bringing allied mary years health professionals onto staff—in some cases, cre- • Year 12 students undertaking a Major Project, ating health care faculties. Most likely for these without any evidence of benefits flowing from such schools, in heavily disadvantaged areas, it’s too big a a commitment task. They run the risk of losing focus on academic • Legitimising the “social development” role of outcomes, overwhelmed and distracted by health schools, finding extra time for teachers to go down care management (a discipline for which they have this path. Masters takes this to the extreme of pri- little training or experience). oritising “social and emotional development over The best outcome would come from a differ- other mandated areas of the curriculum for children ent approach: refocusing schools solely on aca- who require this in the early years of school”. demic attainment and vocational education; while There are huge transitional costs in redesigning properly funding community/allied health budgets syllabuses over the next twenty years, the Masters to provide these other services for young people. time horizon. None of the Masters proposals listed Ideally, schools should be schools, working closely above are needed. His task was to take things out with well-resourced community health services to of the syllabus, not add items devoid of an evidence ensure their students are physically and mentally base. This is how the system got into trouble in the primed for learning once they enter the school gate. first place. The New South Wales Health Department is a The solution should be simple: remove the failed long way from achieving this goal. It needs a rocket fad elements, thereby boosting the potential for under it, plus a new approach to healthcare resourc- improved academic attainment and de-cluttering ing. For instance, in south-western Sydney, a fast- the curriculum. Return the system to the basics of growing region with areas of high socio-economic learning (foundational skills and deep knowledge) disadvantage, the state government has not built from which it should never have deviated. Give a community health centre this century. There’s a students the essential content in literacy, numeracy, backlog of six new centres to be built. science and history they will need to deal with the challenges of economic and social change. Schools need to drop the modern obsession with De-cluttering the curriculum turning themselves into political laboratories, gen- he major concern with the syllabus in schools is der fluidity factories, mental health clinics, social its breadth. As a high school principal told me, work centres and cultural propaganda tutorials. “WeT are spread too thinly, trying to do too many Our NAPLAN and PISA results tell the story. We things instead of developing deep knowledge and have “growth mindset” but not growth in academic understanding among students, the type of depth results. We have high school students who have that sparks their learning interests into the future.” heard of “gendered words” and the sins of colonisa- A primary principal said, “There are too many ‘nice tion but cannot read or write. to knows’ in the curriculum, as we call them, the The curriculum would immediately be de-clut- bits that should be optional if we had time to teach tered if its postmodernist, identity-political and them.” social development content were dropped. Vast De-cluttering the curriculum has also been the amounts of time and resources would be freed up government’s mantra: a “back to basics” approach for for teaching and learning the basics. literacy and numeracy. Unfortunately, the Interim Report fails to advance detailed recommendations in this regard. In fact, Masters heads in the opposite Curriculum flexibility direction, advocating extra syllabus content in the his is another looming Masters disaster, with following areas: his recommendation that: “Within a clear • A theory component in vocational education frameworkT of expectations, teachers should have • A practical component in academic sub- flexibility to decide what to teach, when and how to jects (almost impossible to achieve in courses like teach it, and how much time to spend teaching it.” Ancient History) We know what works and doesn’t work in the class- • More identity politics via proposals for an room, so why allow teachers to ignore this evidence “Inclusive Curriculum” and “Recognition of base and decide themselves what, when and how to Diversity” teach? This is the laissez-faire ethos responsible for • Every student being required to learn more of driving down New South Wales results under poli- “Aboriginal languages, cultures and histories” cies such as Local Schools/Local Decisions.

Quadrant March 2020 55 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments

Wouldn’t it be wiser to require teachers to teach quite frankly, teachers find it impossible to know from a certified menu of programs and practices which is which.” Not surprisingly, the rise of the proven to be beneficial to students? The know-how “snowflake school” model has coincided with a col- exists to adopt this approach but it’s consistently lapse in student academic results. ignored. This is the problem with “experts” like There’s another aspect of Masters’s “curriculum Masters. The same academics have been writing flexibility” that beggars belief. At page 69, he dis- the same reports for thirty years for the benefit of misses alternative, easier syllabuses for weaker stu- the adults in the system (teacher autonomy) rather dents as requiring “courses [that] invariably lower than the children (student results). They are like a expectations, risk categorising and labelling stu- “progressive” travelling troupe, going from report dents, and often impose ceilings on how far indi- to report, promoting the same failed ideas and viduals can progress in their learning”. Yet, as an recommendations. expression of identity politics, he advocates adapt- In particular, the troupe has an aversion to test- ing “the content of the curriculum” to take account ing and grading. Masters rolls out the standard of “varying cultural and language backgrounds” to critique of NAPLAN and the ATAR as too “high- properly align “the assumptions and expectations of stakes” and “stressful’. Yet this is not what the best schools”. schools say. They see NAPLAN For Masters, syllabuses differen- as a chance to verify what they tiated by learning abilities are bad, already know about their stu- chools need to while syllabuses differentiated by dents from internal testing, plus a S culture and language are good. The chance to showcase their high-level drop the modern argument is nonsensical—unless school achievements. The campaign obsession with one has a blind, dogmatic attach- against NAPLAN is a campaign ment to identity politics. by education interest groups— turning themselves Unfortunately, a variation of the elites who would rather hide failing into political Masters approach is already used in results than fix them. laboratories, gender New South Wales. The new buzz- Masters also embraces the phrase in the system is “differenti- Gonski-inspired concept of “pro- fluidity factories, ated learning”. Schools are expected gression points”: replacing the mental health to have modified exams, lessons assessment and grading of students and work sheets for each designated in year groups with a new system clinics, social work category of students: Aboriginal, of individualised progress, bench- centres and cultural ESL, Gifted, Disabled and then the marked against past performance. propaganda tutorials. remainder. Segregation on racial In practice, it’s a backdoor way of and ethnic grounds is a particularly abandoning the rigour of student worrying development, for obvious comparisons against their peers (abolishing A-E reasons. It’s a surefire way of building resentment grades), so that students are only compared against and division in schools. themselves. It also involves increased confusion In school management, it’s also a workload and work for schools, in introducing a system that nightmare, made worse by NESA’s fastidious polic- hasn’t been implemented successfully anywhere in ing of differentiated learning. A better understand- the world. New South Wales shouldn’t be a guinea ing of equity comes from the equal treatment of pig for this unproven theory of student assessment. all students, with schools aiming to maximise the Under the banner of “mindfulness” and “men- learning potential of everyone under their guidance tal wellness”, standards have already fallen away. (regardless of race and other personal characteris- Schools are dropping their testing, grading, award- tics). Divisive identity politics is poorly suited to the recognition and homework requirements to achieve challenges of outcome-based education. a different type of classroom result: less stress, less anxiety, less discomfort. Naturally, some students are milking this new approach to minimise their Conclusion and recommendations workload. If a student doesn’t want to do something henever we receive confirmation of Australia’s at school, they simply need to say they are anxious declining school results there’s surprise about it. “Anxiety” (what we used to call “worry- amongW the political class. Yet this disturbing out- ing too much”) has become an all-purpose alibi for come, so damaging to all aspects of Australian life, avoiding effort and responsibility. As a school leader has been utterly predictable. Every move away from has told me, “The mental health issues in schools the evidence base for what works in classrooms has are a mixture of the real and the confected and been a move in the wrong direction.

56 Quadrant March 2020 The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments

Changes to the school curriculum have been at Priorities” (Aboriginal Culture, Engagement with the core of the nation’s academic decline. How could Asia and Environmental Sustainability) and replace it be otherwise? Diverting the focus away from the them with an emphasis on self-knowledge as a soci- basics of learning, into faddish social and political ety and a nation. objectives, could only ever have one outcome: our • Focus on the basics of literacy and numeracy, international standing and competitiveness drop- and knowledge-rich courses in science, history, ping like a stone. geography, other social sciences and the great works Given the importance of the curriculum in of our civilisation. schools, its failings tend to be all-consuming. • Reject Masters’s proposals for adding extra Syllabus material works its way into textbook con- material to the curriculum. tent. Teachers having to teach a new subject go • Return the focus of schools to academic attain- straight to the textbooks for guidance. This process ment and vocational qualifications, ending attempts also influences professional development, as teach- to engineer the “social development” of students. ers share their syllabus/textbook/class experiences Schools must teach classroom material in a manner with colleagues. As a principal describes it, “The consistent with the values of families and Australian cycle of propaganda grows and grows.” meritocracy. Even the good schools, wanting to be evidence- • Build community health centres linked to dis- based in the development of foundational skills and advantaged schools, ensuring all students are ready deep knowledge, are trapped by the current cur- to learn and maximise their potential. Schools riculum. NESA rigidly polices syllabuses, seeking should not be diverted from their essential educa- compliance line-by-line. The net result has been tional mission, becoming quasi-health providers. system failure, with more failing students, more • Require CESE to research and certify an failing schools and failing overall results. evidence-based, high-effect menu of classroom Policy-makers have lost focus on the core pur- content, teaching methods, learning materials pose of school education: to maximise the knowl- and external consultants, from which schools are edge, skills and future prospects of every student, obliged to teach and operate. consistent with the hopes and values of their family • Given the New South Wales government and the guiding principles of their nation. is the largest employer of teachers in the country In such a large system, changing direction can (with substantial labour market leverage), draw be an intimidating task. But major reform is now new graduate teachers solely from universities using essential. This must include the crafting of a very and developing pedagogies consistent with CESE different curriculum. Repeatedly, the govern- certification. ment led by Premier Berejiklian has said it wants • Ensure reading programs are based on the a “back to basics” approach. Such an approach will teaching of synthetic phonics, not failed whole- not come from the Masters process, which should language methods. be abandoned. Whatever the government thought • Develop school practices that value testing, when it appointed Geoff Masters, its stated goals grading and continuous improvement. Reject the are not being realised. His Interim Report is the introduction of “progression points”. antithesis of “back to basics”. Even the first line of • End the practice of “differentiated learning” the Terms of Reference—“The Review is conducted and ensure students are treated with greater com- in a context of a high performing NSW Education monality and fairness. system”—has become a joke. • Ensure all future changes to the curriculum The government should ignore Masters and are evaluated for their impact on student learning, adopt the following approach: before and after modification. • Abandon the Masters process and instead, • Conduct a comprehensive review and overhaul place the review in the hands of an appropriate of NESA, which has been a sub-standard organi- reference group focused on key reform goals: using sation in managing the Masters process and also an evidence-based approach to improve school out- teacher certification (as per the recent Auditor- comes, de-clutter the curriculum and develop basic/ General’s report). foundational skills and deep knowledge among students. The Hon. Mark Latham is a Member of the New • Instruct the reference group to remove all South Wales Legislative Council. This is an edited postmodernist, identity-based and political content version of his submission in response to the New from syllabuses. South Wales Curriculum Review Interim Report late • Remove the current “Cross-Curriculum last year.

Quadrant March 2020 57 Kevin Myers

How Sinn Fein Has Shattered Irish Politics

reland awoke on Sunday, February 9, to find the IRA had to pretend they were dealing with rea- that the two-party political system that had sonable people who would be amenable to evidence, governed it for nearly one hundred years lay in logic and argument. But of course, it was the absence Ipieces. The triumph of Sinn Fein, the political wing these very virtues that had made the IRA campaign of the Provisional IRA, across the Republic had possible in the first place. been moderated only by the limitations of its ambi- Faith in the ultimate outcome thus became the tions. Had it had any inkling of what a stunning driving force of the peace process. The authors—pri- victory awaited it, and accordingly put candidates marily John Hume, the leader of the constitutional, in every constituency instead of only half of them, law-abiding Social Democratic and Labour Party, today it would almost certainly be forming a single- the peaceful voice of Northern Irish Catholics, and party government. The Army of the Irish Republic the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin— would ultimately be answering to the IRA Chief of invested their political capital on civilising and ulti- Staff, whilst the Irish police, An Garda Siochana, mately disarming a terrorist group that was defined would be taking orders from the IRA man running by its devotion to violence. A vast amount of effort the Department of Justice. was put into this project, by successive Irish govern- Yes, it is that bad; almost a lawful coup d’état. ments, later by British governments and finally by Thus has Ireland finally—though not yet fully— Washington, all of which accepted that it was pos- reaped the harvest that has been sown by thirty sible to make a law-abiding political party out of a years of peace process falsehoods. The very success band of murderers. of the peace process was based on treating Sinn New concepts emerged, the most important and Fein as largely a separate entity from the IRA, over most secret of which was that not merely would which it had little nor control—which was largely partial disarmament by the IRA be accepted as full true, for the opposite was the case. The IRA—or disarmament, but also this fiction would then be rather its governing body, the IRA army council— sold to the public through the obliging media. A effectively controlled Sinn Fein. The policies of the commission was created to supervise this “disarma- Sinn Fein-IRA movement were largely devised in ment”, and indeed many useless IRA weapons were secret within the army council and then transmitted decommissioned. Crucially, in its heartland of South to the broader mass of the Sinn Fein membership, as Armagh the IRA handed in no guns, and neither did with any cult. It was always a top-down movement, it reveal the locations of the bodies of those people it whether it was about embarking on a campaign of had murdered and secretly buried. Why, even as the violence to overthrow the Northern Ireland state, IRA was surrendering some guns, it was importing blowing up London, murdering policemen and sol- AN-94 twin-shot sniper rifles from Russia. diers or occasionally slaughtering Protestants, the What might have been the primary obstacle to movement was tightly controlled by its leaders. propitiating the IRA, the Unionist politicians of The peace process, which was born around 1988, Northern Ireland, were outwitted, out-bluffed and became a viable political proposition simply because out-manoeuvred by the three governments as they of the refusal of various governments in the Republic agreed to enter a power-sharing executive initially to take the necessary measures to crush the IRA (as with the SDLP, and later with Sinn Fein. The they had repeatedly done from the 1920s into the Reverend Ian Paisley, who for decades had proved to early 1960s). If force, coercion and counter-terror be the most “obdurate” opponent to any settlement were not to be used by government, then all that was with even moderate nationalists, never mind armed left was suasion, and for that to work, those outside republican terrorists, turned out in the long run to be

58 Quadrant March 2020 How Sinn Fein Has Shattered Irish Politics a buyable egomaniac who, when the chance finally who was a TD for ten years, recently retired on a came, basked in the improbable glories of governing pension of €80,000 a year. one of the dreariest corners of Europe. Nonetheless, A political class could only pamper itself by the Northern Ireland executive has proven to be so ensuring the administrative class around it was riven and unstable that it has had to be suspended comparably cosseted, and Ireland’s civil service is four times in twenty years by the Secretary of State not merely the largest per capita in Europe but also for Northern Ireland, a post which was supposed to the best-paid. It is quite efficient, not least in the have been abolished long ago as the province became vigorous manner in which it protects its own inter- self-governing. This has not proved possible, and ests. The only employees in Dublin’s congested city never will, because it is like a raft shooting the rap- centre who get free parking are public servants. An ids from hell, on which wobbles some unfortunate iniquitous system called “index-linking” means that British politician hoping to save his or her career. civil servant pensions continue to rise commensurate with civil service pay, so that five years after retiring, uring those twenty years, the two middle- civil servant pensioners have often found themselves ground parties that had negotiated the Belfast earning more money than when they were working. AgreementD of 1998, the Ulster Unionists and the All the parties gorged at this trough, even during Social Democratic and Labour Party, were driven the years of austerity after the Irish government and into virtual extinction by the boundless appetite of the banking system went bust. Meanwhile, what are London and Dublin to conciliate the IRA at any ruefully called the “coping classes” who ran small price. As Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, businesses and paid their taxes had no such pension remarked to Seamus Mallon of the provision. The bail-out of the Irish SDLP: “Your problem, Seamus, is banks in 2008 burdened Ireland that you haven’t got any guns.” with historically unprecedented And Ireland’s problem was that The IRA still has debts, which have had to be serv- the IRA did have guns, and still has guns, and more iced by a compliant but nonetheless them, and more relevantly, it has an relevantly, it has resilient private sector. The outcome army council that decides the poli- has been that an under-capitalised cies for a still-armed political move- an army council state has simply not been able to ment that pretends to be completely that decides the provide the housing required for unarmed. Orders for Sinn Fein a population that is both growing leaders emanate from that council. policies for a naturally and being augmented When Gerry Adams was Sinn Fein political movement by immigration. This has caused leader, he was also on the council, that pretends to be increasing anger and resentment, as so the instructions did not have to adult children have been unable to travel far. Mary Lou McDonald, completely unarmed. leave the family home, and house the present Sinn Fein leader, is not prices have been rising as mortgages on the council, and is the first such become dependent on multi-income leader not even to have been in the IRA. However, households. While young people have become angry, she still takes orders from on high: one morning she a mirror-image ire has assailed the other end of the said she was against having an all-Ireland referen- demographic, as people in their fifties in the private dum on the border question, and by noon, after a sector have realised that their retirement pensions sharp phone call or two, she had changed her mind. will be too small to live on. Sinn Fein’s electoral base after the Belfast Agreement in 1998 was largely confined to Northern ll this was grist to the mill for Sinn Fein, which Ireland, but its aspirations could not be confined was not the author of these problems. Of course, there. The Republic is a quite different polity, with Ait has had to be sanitised, prinked and preened a culture of clientelism that requires politicians from its days of what was called “the ballot box and to be doing endless favours for their constituents, Armalite strategy” as it fought parallel political and and in return they over-reward themselves finan- terrorist campaigns. This has been comprehensively cially. Until the crash of 2007, the Prime Minister achieved over the past seven years of the “decade of of Ireland (the Taoiseach) earned more than the centenaries”, as Ireland commemorates the seismic President of the USA, and in retirement collects a events of 1913 to 1923. The party, though with the pension of around €130,000 a year, plus a secretary IRA still attached but inactive, has been involved in for life, plus all phone bills paid for by the state. many of the commemorative ceremonials, especially Even ordinary MPs (or TDs) retire on vast pen- with the British royal family. Martin McGuinness, sions. The former leader of the IRA, Gerry Adams, who authorised the mass murder of the Mountbatten

Quadrant March 2020 59 How Sinn Fein Has Shattered Irish Politics boating party in 1979, even shook hands with the bers of unemployed who are clearly determined to Queen, and Gerry Adams, the IRA’s most prominent remain that way, yet still expect to be housed by leader of the last forty years, similarly greeted Prince the state. Charles. Attempts to derail the Sinn Fein campaign with Sinn Fein was now a “respectable” entity in the reminders of what the IRA had recently done came Irish Republic, especially in the poisoned atmos- to nothing. As the election campaign warmed up, phere engendered during the protracted Brexit cri- the IRA’s murder in 2007 of a young South Armagh sis in which Anglophobia became chic throughout man named Paul Quinn surfaced as a reason not the political and media classes. This primal big- to trust Sinn Fein. To comply with the fiction that otry—which in reverse would certainly have caused the IRA had disarmed, instead of shooting him the the Irish ambassador in London to have made for- IRA men beat him to death with iron bars, shatter- mal protests—was enunciated most clearly by the ing every bone in his body. A Sinn Fein spokesman Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Irish Times, which dismissed the killing as being of a mere criminal, often used virtually racist stereotypes about the and this murder, and the disdainful indifference English. Nonetheless, Sinn Fein remained largely towards its moral implications, were adduced as evi- unelectable as it embraced the tax-and-spend social- dence of how Sinn Fein could not be trusted. But ist policies that characterised the other left-wing despite the impassioned pleas of the boy’s family not parties of Europe. Having done poorly in local gov- to reward the political wing of his killers, his mur- ernment and European elections, Sinn Fein lead- der did not affect Sinn Fein’s vote in the least. ers reassessed where Irish society was weakest; and quite correctly, they identified two areas—housing eanwhile, caught in the cleft stick of their and health. own devising, namely the lie that Sinn Fein Here was the stroke of genius. If Sinn Fein-IRA Mwas a wholly constitutional entity, the main political could get almost everyone to forget their primary parties in the Republic, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, role in fomenting a twenty-six-year war in which nonetheless had to pretend during the campaign over 3000 people died, if they had managed to that there was something imprecisely improper shake the hands of members of the royal family, if about Sinn Fein, and that it was mysteriously con- they could even win an invitation (as the IRA army trolled by shadowy creatures from Belfast. They did council managed to do) to spend a weekend with not dare to spell out the terrible truth that Sinn Fein Tony Blair at the Prime Minister’s country retreat was not controlled by shadowy anything, but by very at Chequers, could they not similarly persuade the real men with real ambitions for power, namely the Irish people that their policies could solve the hous- army council of a still-armed IRA. ing and health crises? The outcome has been an unprecedented calam- Neither crisis is solvable by any known method. ity. The two main parties have been humiliated, Ireland spends more per capita on health than any and a third, the Labour Party, the oldest party in other country in Europe, and twice as much as the Ireland, all but extinguished. It is hard to feel sorry UK, yet has probably the most incompetent medical for any of them. Fianna Fail bankrupted the country service this side of Albania, with absenteeism rife twelve years ago. Fine Gael, in government since and hospital corridors packed with patient-occupied then, far from cutting the vast perks and pensions trolleys, and incompetence protected by unions. One of the political and administrative classes, actually new TD in the Dail was elected solely on his ability encouraged civil servants to take early retirement to smuggle his constituents into the British National on the full pensions they would have got had they Health Service. stayed working until retirement age. The Labour The few remaining banks are in even worse Party dedicated itself to advancing the Left-liberal shape. On orders from the European Union, Irish cultural agenda on abortion and gay marriage while banks have strict regulations on mortgage loans, ignoring the conditions of the working classes, who and membership of the euro has meant that no Irish have the lowest educational achievements and the government has any control over money supply. least upward mobility of any in Europe. The result Nonetheless, Sinn Fein campaigned as if they were of this complicity in bad governance is that Ireland cargo-cultists who could conjure money from the owes the world’s banks some €200 billion, making it skies to build (as the party promised) 100,000 new the most indebted country in the OECD, with each homes. The prospect of what is winsomely called individual’s share of the national debt amounting to “affordable housing” (as opposed to the unaffordable €42,500. So, naturally, there is no money to build housing that other parties apparently preferred to 100,000 “affordable” houses. seduce the electorate with) appealed not merely to Perhaps because observers had too much faith in those struggling to cope, but also to the large num- the “intelligence” of Irish voters not to be bought

60 Quadrant March 2020 How Sinn Fein Has Shattered Irish Politics by Sinn Fein bribes, nobody foresaw the party’s aboriginal peoples of Ireland, the Gaels, represented electoral blitzkrieg through Ireland, carrying with politically today by Fianna Fail (meaning “warri- it some deeply unpalatable characters into the centre ors of destiny”), and the Anglo-Norman settlers of public life. In the case of one successful candidate of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, represented the mask slipped, with eruptions of unapologetic by the paradoxically-named Fine Gael (“family of IRA ballads in the counting hall when the result the Gael”, which they are not). Even today, Fianna was announced. Among the new TDs is the IRA’s Fail families tend to have Gaelic names, and Fine master bomb-maker, who was responsible for the Gael have Anglo-Norman names (the classic being deaths of unknowable numbers of people—probably Garret FitzGerald: pure Norman). Not merely do hundreds. these two castes seldom intermarry, they appar- Most of the new TDs are unknown outside their ently seldom even have casual sex with one another. constituencies, and in addition to guaranteeing Forming a government from the two would almost their constituents houses galore, a dazzling health be a pioneering experiment in interspecies co-oper- service, cakes and ale along with upwardly-flow- ation. The alternative to that ecumenical exercise ing canals, they also promised an endless service is that the Provisional IRA arrives in power in the of clientelism, with no personal request ever being Republic, via a coalition probably with Fianna Fail. unrequited. Meanwhile, all plans for inward invest- Either way, Sinn Fein is now the ascendant polit- ment into Ireland went into immediate deep freeze ical force in Ireland, both north and south, which as conglomerates waited to see if this was to be a would be a grave enough matter anyway. But there is Corbyn-type high-tax regime. another element to this, namely the emotions, fears Not that the IRA worries about such mundane and insecurities of Ulster Protestants, who have matters. Their obsessions are more about their role never really come to terms with Irish nationalism in Irish history—rather like the men of 1916. They in any of its forms. Some Ulster Protestants were really do believe in the apostolic succession of the made so insecure in 1966 by the triumphalism to republican tradition, and that they have been blessed the commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of by the moral authority thereby conferred to take life the 1916 Rising that a few resorted to armed terror- in the service of the “Republic”. All of the IRA’s ism against innocent Catholics, and others to vio- army council members have personally killed people, lent displays of rabble-rousing fundamentalism. Out whereas the soldiers of the Army of the Republic are of the resulting disorder emerged the Provisional true patriots and vaunted peacekeepers, not killers. IRA, to be followed by a quarter of a century of civil These two organisations now vie to be the legitimate conflict. Fifty-four years on, the old ingredients are armed expression of Irishness, and the general elec- back in the pot, and the ladle of history is once more tion of 2020 almost produced an outright contest of diligently stirring. moral authority between the two. There is absolutely no reason for optimism here, for kindly outcomes are not usually the result of he logical resolution to Ireland’s electoral such kitchen alchemy. This island is brimming with conundrum is for the two main constitutional competing identities that too often heed the melan- Tparties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, to go into coali- choly sirens of Ireland’s ancestral voices. To be sure, tion, nearly one hundred years after their ancestors we are not at war; but then neither are we at peace. fought the civil war of 1922-23. But these par- ties are divided by more than the memory of that Kevin Myers lives in Ireland. Among his books is the futile war, for there is a deep cultural divide within memoir Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Catholic Ireland between the descendants of the Belfast.

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Quadrant March 2020 61 Butterfly Sleeps Perched on the Temple Bell for Les Murray

“butterfly sleeps perched on the temple bell until it rings” These lines are from a haiku by Buson on Hiroshige’s road to Tokaido in Japan. I love writing and reading haiku for its essence. I record a moment keenly observed. Ten words, three lines, seventeen syllables may, as perception of nature’s miracles, march to present time.

I wonder at the way ideas of present time come to me to be written when old Japan is asleep in the sun on a windless day. Silent bell ringer starts the pull sequence without words. Then the bell booms out. The butterfly by God’s grace escapes from death. The essence of recovery includes butterfly perception.

On the road to Tokaido perhaps the perception of the bong of bell and butterflies is to old Japan as Hiroshige’s journey is to formulate words, syllables needed for haiku. Perch on a temple bell will bring nothing of peacefulness as an essence essential to that moment of keenly observed time. Used sparingly, words delineating behaviour by

butterflies, temple bells or bell ringers have, by establishing a landscape, recalled Old Japan. I go on the journey through the woodblock essence of Hiroshige’s prints leading to Tokaido. The words of the haiku, senryu, tanka are part of perception needed for the journey to the butterfly. The time taken is from the start to the end. Temple bell

booming, wakes the butterfly perched on the bell. I love also the tiny woodblock prints whose essence captivates my soul on this journey through Japan. Slowly through the mountain passes, the time stills, walking with my friends. The perception is of hot and cold, winter and summer and day by day as night follows the sun. Oceans of words

62 Quadrant March 2020

tell their histories. My friends are poems of words arranged in particular sequence that show the essence of a singular moment in a day’s delightful perception. The perception of what I see is recorded faithfully by images in my mind of how the butterfly departs the bell before the boom. Monks pull ropes to sequenced time in a Kyoto temple for a new year’s grace, in old Japan. My journey follows Hiroshige’s Tokaido through Japan. I listen to the wind sounds through the forests of time. I see again in my mind’s eye the butterfly perch on the bell. I wait to hear the boom, to have the clear perception of the wood striker bringing forth a depth of sound by the strike on the big bong bell. I write lines of words: haiku that have all of poetry’s instant simple essence. big bong bells rest in winter waiting wanting spring thaw summer heat

Marilyn Peck

Dove in a Squall

Had one imagined them chiseled from marble or cast in bronze, the dove’s splayed talons might have grasped at more than straws. Caught in a squall, lured to that losing gamble by a lull in the wind they couldn’t make head or tail of, wings that proved themselves not wholly unflappable tacked and tumbled to no end, their tragicomic choreography a momentary marvel. As in some classical paradox, approach after approach came up just short of its perch, till the bird trailed off in parabolic resignation, seeking more private failures and consolatory skies, where peace were likelier synonymous with respite or grace.

J.S. Westbrook

Quadrant March 2020 63 Daryl McCann

The Trump Doctrine and the Return of Pax Americana

ny serious reckoning of the Trump Doctrine why should anybody else make the case for a cogent will see the experts recoiling in horror or Trump Doctrine? Haley’s disclosure gives credence simply snickering at the very thought of to this sentiment, expressed in the aftermath of the Aattaching “doctrine” to the foreign policy initia- Qasem Soleimani killing by the reliably anti-Trump tives of President Trump. What informs Donald journalist Joel McNally: “The most dangerous day Trump’s decision-making, according to most nar- of his presidency is always tomorrow.” ratives, is nothing more than an incongruous com- The fact remains that the Third World War has pendium of braggadocio, narcissism, opportunism not erupted on the provocateur-in-chief’s watch. and impulsiveness. His America First worldview, Recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel did in the opinion of the naysayers, cannot be config- not trigger a new Israel-Arab conflagration any more ured as a coherent set of principles. The Obama than will the “Deal of the Century”. Egypt, Saudi Doctrine was ascribed to Barack Obama and the Arabia and the United Arab Emirates remain allies Bush Doctrine to George W. Bush, but to talk ear- in an anti-Iran alliance. North Korea and America, nestly of a Trump Doctrine is to suggest a degree notwithstanding setbacks and deviations, may still of lucidity in Donald Trump’s actions where none be on the path to a peace accord. The promise of exists. As a consequence, the targeted killing on era-changing relations with India remains. Japan January 3 of Qasem Soleimani, commander of and South Korea are now more likely to pay the Iran’s Quds Forces, foreign legion division of real cost of America’s protection. Vietnam, the Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, can Philippines, Malaysia and others in the region, make no strategic sense in the eyes of the experts, including Australia, appreciate more than ever that though it could—and still might—trigger general their future means either an ever-closer relationship war in the region. Maybe it is the anti-Trump nar- with the US or client-state status in China’s rative that lacks credibility. version of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Scepticism about President Trump’s judgment Sphere. Moreover, President Trump, against the in foreign affairs runs very deep. We now know, trend of President-for-life ’s growing thanks to revelations by the former US ambassador triumphalism, successfully negotiated phase one of to the UN, Nikki Haley, in her book With All a trade agreement with China without precipitating Due Respect (2019), that Rex Tillerson, Donald a depression-inducing global trade war. Trump’s Secretary of State in the period 2017-18, The list of successes goes on. Poland, the Baltic questioned his judgment. In conjunction with John states and Ukraine all received lethal military Kelly, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff for a technology from the US without that generating a time, Tillerson considered it his duty to impede Second Cold War. The so-called “pink tide” went President Trump’s inexpert ideas to save America out in Brazil, resulting in a presidential victory for and the world from calamity. Secretary Tillerson, the Trump of the Tropics, President Jair Bolsonaro. astonishingly, attempted to enrol Ambassador Member states of NATO are now more likely to pay Haley in an anti-Trump cabal operating at the very their way. Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada heart of the Trump administration: “Kelly and agreement has been ratified by Congress. The Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted construction of the US-Mexico wall continues apace the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, while Mexico provides a “mobile wall” by returning they were trying to save the country.” If even those Guatemalans and other Central American illegal close to him—or, at least, those who were close to emigrants to their countries of origin. By the year’s him—have no confidence in President Trump, then end US will likely have a “massive” new trade deal

64 Quadrant March 2020 The Trump Doctrine and the Return of Pax Americana with post-Brexit Britain, although Boris Johnson’s Nuclear Deal would result in Tehran entering into capitulation on Huawei 5G will not help. And, “an era of harmonious relations with the rest of finally, the targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani the world”. This turned out to be a catastrophic did not, as Joel McNally predicted, send the world error of judgment. The Iranian mullahs used their “stumbling toward World War III”. Can all this American moolah to subsidise Qasem Soleimani’s be put down to Donald Trump’s beginner’s luck? foreign militias. President Trump, as a direct There is surely a pattern here and critics might, at consequence, withdrew the United States from some point, want to connect some of the dots of his the Iran Nuclear Deal on May 18, 2018. We might America First stratagem. recall that Secretary of State Tillerson resigned his post on the eve of this decision. Tillerson’s notion he best thing you could say about the Obama of “saving the country” and Trump’s America First Doctrine is that faced with the option of con- credo were entirely at odds. tinuingT in the role of the world’s (hated) policeman To believe that killing Qasem Soleimani, along or acceding to the new normal of a multipolar world, with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, leader of the Kata’ib President Obama made the only sensible choice and Hezbollah faction of the Popular Mobilisation ran up the white flag. Even James Burnham, whose Forces (PMU), would lead to the Third World Suicide of the West was published as long ago as 1964, War was to see the Middle East through the prism might be taken aback by the mollifying nature of of the Obama Doctrine. It was to believe that no the Obama Doctrine. President Obama extended alternative exists between out-and-out conflagration his hand to America’s customary and tremulous appeasement. The antagonists and all that ensued was Trump Doctrine, which in essence snarling and snapping. That is why is a revival of the Pax Americana the July 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal is Trump’s America albeit in a post-Cold War and absolutely critical in any attempt First framework post-9/11 context, means what to defend the Obama Doctrine. borrows from the best Candidate Trump always said it Here, if nowhere else, was the one would mean: America First. The occasion when an American adver- of the two preceding United States Armed Forces, in sary, the Islamic Republic of Iran, foreign policy doctrines the case of the targeted killings came to the negotiating table and outside Baghdad International signed up for peace. Many would and omits many of Airport, were responding to hostile argue, of course, that no such thing their delusions. acts against American personnel occurred (see “Obama’s Munich enacted by Kata’ib Hezbollah/ Moment”, Quadrant, September PMU militiamen. On December 2015) and yet Obama apologists, such as Peter 27, 2019, an American contractor working at a US Beinart writing for the Atlantic, could argue that, airbase in northern Iraq died as a consequence of although not an “ideal outcome”, negotiating with incoming fire from Kata’ib Hezbollah. President the Islamic Republic was better than any “alterna- Trump responded, on December 29, with the tive at hand”—risking war, in other words. targeted destruction of Kata’ib Hezbollah facilities We can, of course, literally follow this line of throughout Syria and Iraq, resulting in the deaths thinking all the way to Doomsday. Handing over of twenty-five and the wounding of some $1.3 billion is better than risking war. Allowing sixty-plus others. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the Iranian regime to cheat on the deal is better explained to Iraq’s caretaker prime minister, Adil than risking war. Allowing Commander Qasem Abdul-Mahdi, that America’s retaliatory action was Soleimani to stir up strife in Lebanon, Gaza, directed not at his government but at the Iranian Syria, Iraq and Yemen is better than risking war. regime. On December 31, 2019, the Iranian-backed Allowing Iran to encircle and threaten the citizens Kata’ib Hezbollah entered the outer precincts of Israel is better than risking war. Finally, after of the US embassy in Baghdad. The rampaging the Iran Nuclear Deal has run its course, allowing militiamen howled out their fiery entreaties to Tehran to achieve nuclear-weapons capability is the high heavens: “Death to America!”, “Death to better than risking war. Israel!” and “Qasem Soleimani is our commander!” The Trump Doctrine, which entails no boots- Qasem Soleimani was indeed their commander— on-the-ground invasion of Iran, unlike the First some called him the governor of Iraq, perhaps the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and the Second number two man in Iran itself. But they would only Iraq War, turns out to be an authentic “alternative be saying that for another two or so days. at hand”. Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s primary Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s loyal second- adviser on all matters Iran, promised that the Iran in-command for eight long years, asserted that

Quadrant March 2020 65 The Trump Doctrine and the Return of Pax Americana killing Qasem Soleimani amounted to tossing “a leveraging one against the other and signalled to stick of dynamite into a tinderbox”. Most of the the world an out-of-focus fear and loathing on the commentariat, from those writing for the New part of the Bush administration. York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post President Bush, at least in his second term, to the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian dialled back on the divisive rhetoric. In retrospect, Australia, agreed with Biden’s assessment. We now his earlier bombast served little purpose other know they were wrong. Tehran did fire off some than to assuage the horror and uncertainty punitive rockets in the general direction of US bases many Americans felt in the wake of al-Qaeda’s but seemed as relieved as anyone that not a solitary dramatic September 11 terrorist mission. At the American was injured as a result. The shooting commencement of America’s post-9/11 military down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 intervention, we might recall, George W. Bush by the armed forces of the Islamic Republic, on made these incautious remarks in an interview: January 8, only reinforces my point, if in horrific “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to circumstances, that it was the despotic Iranian take a while.” While the original Crusaders (1095– regime that lived in dread after the Soleimani 1291) are often depicted in a falsely negative light, killing. In its panic it mistook a civilian airliner, we can see Bush trapping himself in the generalities departing from its own international airport, for of his bluster. a potential threat. There would be no “stumbling Had Bush’s tenure in office coincided with towards a Third World War” if Tehran had any say more propitious circumstances, as enjoyed by his in the matter. The question is not why the experts father, President George H.W. Bush, he might got everything about the Baghdad International have lived up to his original self-description Airport airstrike wrong, but why they get everything as a non-interventionist and “compassionate about the Trump Doctrine wrong, if they allow for conservative”: that is, a wealthy patrician informed its existence in the first place. by economic and social liberalism and committed to the international status quo however that might he Trump Doctrine, clearly, is the opposite of be configured at the time. The worldview of the the Obama Doctrine, which in turn was the House of Bush is exemplified by the tepid and repudiationT of the Bush Doctrine, at least as it oper- even embarrassed response of President George ated during George W. Bush’s first term. However, H.W. Bush to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. the negation of the negation, the cancellation by He seemed rattled by the rise and rise of Boris Trump of Obama’s peace-for-our-time appease- Yeltsin in 1990, the dissolution of the Soviet Union ment, has not brought us back to Bush’s Global in 1991 and the political demise of his good friend War on Terror but to a whole new paradigm. The Mikhail Gorbachev. The two had talked endlessly Trump Doctrine allows for a military response, as of a “new world order” and the promise of a future with the Bush Doctrine, but is much more dis- “historic period of co-operation” between the criminating and focused. The Trump Doctrine US and the USSR. James K. Oliver generously privileges non-military solutions, as per the Obama described George H.W. Bush’s cautious reticence, Doctrine, and yet the tenor of any negotiation is in The Foreign Policy Architecture of the Clinton rarely one of supplication. and Bush Administrations (2007), as “conservative Trump’s America First framework borrows internationalism”. That, of course, is one way to put from the best of the two preceding foreign policy it. doctrines and omits many of their delusions. In George W. Bush’s pre-emptive military adven­ the case of the Bush Doctrine, for instance, we turism and us-or-them speechifying, much of might recall how George W. Bush, in his January it prompted by his hawkish advisers, was a first- 29, 2002, State of the Union address, introduced phase response to 9/11. The second-phase response, the phrase “axis of evil”. The Islamic Republic of as outlined by David Kilcullen in Blood Year and Iran was linked with ’s Iraq and the Failures of the War on Terror, focused on the the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea as “disaggregation” concept promoted by a new grave threats to humanity: “I will not stand by as generation of anti-terrorist experts. The Obama peril draws closer and closer. The world will not Doctrine might be described as less disaggregation permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to than anti-aggregation or, if you like, America threaten us with the world’s most destructive weap- Last. After his inauguration, in January 2009, ons.” President Bush’s criticism of the three rogue President Obama grabbed the first opportunity regimes was not unwarranted, but treating them to go on national television and run up the white as an interconnected entity served no strategic or flag, pleading with an unspecified “Islamic world” tactical purpose. It reduced the likelihood of ever to forgive and forget, telling them, “America is not

66 Quadrant March 2020 The Trump Doctrine and the Return of Pax Americana your enemy.” In the same interview, Obama made kleptocrats and their deadly henchman help to right a pitch to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: “If countries past wrongs? America First means never having to like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will say you are sorry. find an extended hand from us.” It is possible, given Trump, in fact, has been far more sympathetic to the timeline for selecting Nobel Prize candidates, restive young Iranians who despise their tyrannical that President Obama secured his nomination for overlords than Obama was during the 2009 Iranian the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize at that very moment. presidential election protests. Obama’s silence was no Obama, or so it seemed to millennialist progressives doubt intended as an extended hand to the Iranian everywhere, not least in Norway, was the one for regime in his quixotic quest to unclench the fists whom we had been waiting. of Tehran’s anti-American zealots. Their good will The Obama Doctrine, meant to undo the was essential to his plans. For Trump, contrariwise, problems created by George W. Bush, only made the goodwill of Khamenei and company is not matters worse. A short list paints the picture of a germane. What he requires, as a bottom line, is world lurching towards utter chaos: the rise of the that the Iranians do not kill Americans in their Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; the emergence of neighbourhood nor acquire the weaponry to do the Islamic State; the Syrian Civil War; Russia’s so from the other side of the ocean. It is not out invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of of the question that in the future a cash-strapped Crimea; the new bellicosity of Iranian regime will seek to cut a China; the old bellicosity of North deal with Trump or a like-minded Korea; the Iranian takeover of Iraq; successor. Any such pact, it goes and so on ad infinitum. The Trump Doctrine without saying, will accord with the eschews the “new principles of America First. ne of the secrets of the Trump world order” fantasies We return, finally, to the Doctrine is that it eschews the deadliest criticism of Trump’s pie-in-the-skyO “new world order” of both the Bush foreign policy initiatives: “The most fantasies of both the Bush Dynasty Dynasty and the dangerous day of his presidency is and the Obama Doctrine. The always tomorrow.” Michael Moore, world is what it is. The enemies Obama Doctrine. as a case in point, issued a public of America’s enemies, as I wrote The world is what apology to the people of Iran for the here many years ago (“The Future it is. The enemies of drone strike on their most important of the Pax Americana”, Quadrant, military commander. This echoed October 2009), are just as likely to America’s enemies the official view of the Iranian be America’s enemies as well. The are just as likely regime that the targeted killing of major upside to this less-than-san- Soleimani was an act of American guine worldview is that the United to be America’s “state terrorism”. It reminded me of States remains advantageously situ- enemies as well. the attempt by Tariq Ali to equate ated in a geopolitical sense, with an George W. Bush with Osama ocean to the west and an ocean to bin Laden. Donald Trump, no the east, and (still) possessing a military reach far doubt anticipating the charge, was quick to issue beyond its rivals. It maintains the capacity, if not the this statement: “Soleimani was plotting imminent will, to insist that the rest of the world accommo- and sinister attacks on American diplomats and date themselves to America rather than, as Obama military personnel, but we caught him in the act came to prefer, America accommodating itself to an and terminated him.” Trump’s most fervent critics ungrateful world. Unlike his predecessor, Donald will dispute this on account of his being a congenital Trump was never indoctrinated by New Left pur- liar or some such, and yet the truth is disturbing. veyors of anti-American ideology. Barack Obama Moore cannot accept that Soleimani perfectly fits is more likely to know the details of the 1953 CIA- the description of a “state terrorist” because it proves sponsored coup d’état in Iran, which saw the over- that President Obama’s 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal was throw of a democratically elected government and, madness. Barack Obama’s Munich moment would, according to some experts, eventuated (ultimately) I suggest, make an excellent chapter in a new version in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. All this, Trump of The Suicide of the West. might remind us, is mostly beside the point. He would point out that he was only six years old at the Daryl McCann, a regular contributor to Quadrant, time of the coup d’état and, in any case, how does has a blog at http://darylmccann.blogspot.com.au, and handing over $1.3 billion to a clique of theocratic tweets at @dosakamccann.

Quadrant March 2020 67 Collin Jones Beware of Identity Politics

hristopher Hitchens, in his small book Letters any meaningful way. to a Young Contrarian (2001), instructs the It is important to mention that identity politics nameless recipient of his letters to “beware is played out on the far right of the political spec- Cof identity politics”. And he puts an even stronger trum as well. Neo-Nazi ideologues who wish to stipulation on his reader in the very next sentence: bring about an ethno-state play the same game of “Have nothing to do with identity politics.” identity politics. This kind of language is not a mere suggestion, Second, all the factions are engaged in constant but a demand. It is uttered with the same straight- conflict with one another over which one has the faced conviction a parent uses when lecturing their least power. And this speaks to the paradoxical child about avoiding those they perceive as being a nature of identity politics—it is not a struggle for negative influence. power, but a struggle from power. The sentiment of identity politics is that an indi- Identity politics implicates every individual in vidual’s immutable qualities (such as race, gender one form or another. There are, of course, those and religion) are paramount—that the idiosyncra- who denounce this system, but they are almost sies of the individual are irrelevant. The result of immediately dismissed on the basis of their skin this strange ideology is the splintering of groups of colour, gender or sexual orientation. But prejudice people based not on who they are, but on what they and sweeping generalisations based on immutable are. Not only are men and women pitted against qualities are not the only weapons the adherents one another, for example, but black women are have at their disposal. There are cases where an pitted against white women, straight individuals individual or group is denied the opportunity to against gay individuals, straight black individu- share ideas on university campuses. One recent als against gay white individuals, feminists against example occurred at the University of Scranton, in TERFs against black feminists, and so on. And Pennsylvania, where the student government was with each group a unique grievance is brought to given “unfettered authority” by the administration the forefront. in deciding which students could form on-cam- The qualities deployed to categorise individuals pus political groups. The group under review was by what they are instead of who they are is precisely Turning Point USA. Despite having won a majority the definition of prejudice. And the adherents of vote, the students were told that they didn’t have this ideology appeal to systemic power structures enough of a majority, which is a classic example of as their impetus for behaving the way they do— moving the goalposts if I’ve ever seen one. thereby exempting themselves from taking respon- The sociopolitical strategy of barring and cen- sibility for their prejudices. soring ideas does not augur well for the longevity of But there are two good reasons why no one is a country that purports to support free speech and able to call these factions what they are. open debate. It is not difficult to see how this sort First, all the factions agree on one thing: of behaviour has an authoritarian bent. And this straight white men are responsible for the installa- authoritarian behaviour is on display most promi- tion and perpetuation of a patriarchal system that nently in academia—specifically in the Humanities. has a stranglehold on every identity-type save their I experienced this during my undergraduate career own. And while the sweeping generalisation of all at the University of Alabama, and have also had a straight white men sharing a common mindset and taste of it in my graduate courses as an MFA stu- belief system is consistent with the sentiment of dent in Minnesota. identity politics, it also serves as an attempt to pro- One example is that I was discouraged (in the hibit straight white men from political discourse in form of a letter written by a peer) from writing a

68 Quadrant March 2020 Beware of Identity Politics fictional story about mental health because it “stig- if I elect not to discuss their plight, I am neglecting matizes mental health patients and makes it more to address the issues they face in their daily lives. difficult for them to seek help”. I was trying to How is this progress by anyone’s definition? It is a embody and represent the reality of a character’s very nasty kind of tribalism that eliminates authen- experience suffering from mental illness, as some- tic discourse and possible solutions to real issues. one who has battled with depression and knows I have heard many people being accused of being what it’s like. The story was “punching up” at the racist, sexist and essentialist for drawing out some mental health industry and its failure to care for of the points mentioned above. To call someone any its patients properly. I do wonder if my peer would of these terms is the death knell of progressive dis- have responded differently if, say, they had known course. There are obviously examples of real racists, my relationship to the fictional character. While the sexists and essentialists. But these terms have been goal of the class was to give constructive feedback used to suppress individuals who defy this unpro- on each other’s written work, this peer attacked me ductive ideology. It is an act of intellectual laziness for writing about a subject in a way they did not to slap these terms on individuals who do not agree approve. with a given set of ideas. It can—and does—shatter Which brings me to my final point about how careers and reputations. deep the ideological roots of identity politics go. These factions are, for the moment, united by By virtue of my immutable qualities (straight their common enemy. But what happens when their and white and male), I am prohibited from dis- common enemy is dethroned? Which faction will cussing the experience of any individual or group take the helm? How will they decide? I submit that who has a different set of immutable qualities. For there is no identifiable solution. There is only infi- example, I must not discuss the experiences of a nite regression. black man, since I am not a black man. This strange This is what implored his prohibition creates a double bind. If I try to discuss readers to have nothing to do with. And the cul- the plight of black men in the US (which has been tural climate since Letters was written in 2001 has an adverse one for most of the country’s history), I only become more inhospitable to those who defy am supposedly making light of their experience, but this tribalistic ideology.

The Loss After Sandro Penna

The last thoughts—sunk in the pillow, hardly turning into dreams—used to make it deep into the night. I loved to run over the day just passed, before moving to fancies about the next. Always, sleep arrived too soon. The magical aura of long summer watches—in through the window—still is what keeps me alive today. The child I was. But what a child! Much of it I’ve brought with me so very far away—tenacious even though unwitting. But not everything. Time makes impetus taper down, differences fade, both black and white just look like gray. I no longer linger over contemplating the evening—as if it were the most momentous moment, the one I liked to await after each awakening. To say it with an honest poet’s words—my old innocence is lost.

Alessio Zanelli

Quadrant March 2020 69 Michael Giffin

The Strange Death of Woman

ne of the more extraordinary events of 2019 enforcement agencies have embraced social activism was a British court ruling that Christianity on behalf of the elites against the citizenry. Now we is incompatible with human dignity and have the spectacle of biological men who identify Onot worthy of respect in a democratic society. In its as women attacking biological women. This is an determination the tribunal—a lower court—didn’t extremely disturbing cultural development. define human dignity, or democratic society, or The biblical worldview sees humanity at the justify its authority for determining that “Belief in centre of a creation (nature) made in God’s image. Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and The evolutionary worldview sees changes in herit- conscientious objection to transgenderism in our able characteristics through natural selection over judgment are incompatible with human dignity long periods of time. These two worldviews are and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, traditionally understood to be mutually exclusive, specifically here, transgender individuals.” Like the but they need not be, although harmonising them judgment against George Pell, this is clearly a case requires more mental subtlety, rhetorical civility and of judicial activism. patience than public discourse allows, or the media The defendant, a Christian doctor with twenty is capable of. years experience in the National Health Service, Now the West faces a greater problem as it applied to become a disability assessor. His crime enters uncharted waters, wilfully detaching itself was admitting that his conscience wouldn’t allow from evolution as well as Christianity. It’s one thing him to refer to a biological male with female to turn your back on Christ, when following him pronouns. becomes culturally perilous. It’s another thing to This case is about compelled speech and religious turn your back on natural selection, when Cultural freedom. It’s also about what the term nature means, Marxism becomes hegemonic, insists nature doesn’t and misrepresenting the compromise between exist—because life is socially constructed—and uses Christianity and evolutionary biology, when one’s law enforcement and judicial systems to mandate its identity depends on their mutual exclusion. The brave new world. trope of Christian fundamentalist is useful—as a scapegoat for many things—but jurisprudence isn’t ature (Greek physis, Latin natura) originally about scapegoating. In theory, in a democratic soci- referred to everything not made by humans. ety, the legal system isn’t where those who believe NIt was once a boundary between human activity in the Bible are persecuted, and courts aren’t where and the natural order. After Darwin, the theory of Cultural Marxism is compelled. natural selection became an alternative to religion. The previous year in Liverpool, a female lobby Those who didn’t believe in the biblical account of group, Standing for Women, paid for a billboard to creation, or the God of Israel, could still believe in advertise a simple dictionary definition: nature with a capital N. Yet natural selection—the key mechanism in evolution—tells us nothing about woman how evolution was set in motion. The same holds for wʊmən human uniqueness, its anthropology and psychol- noun ogy, since we don’t know when the singularity of adult human female the human body and mind began. If we’re honest, we must admit our power is limited to manipulating A transgender activist had it removed, and life-forms we didn’t create, but can destroy. branded Standing for Women a hate group. These begins Sexual Personae (1990) by examples show how the court system and law observing:

70 Quadrant March 2020 The Strange Death of Woman

In the beginning was nature … We cannot hope dilemma for those who generalise exceptions for to understand sex and gender until we clarify political purposes, since abortion cannot be justi- our attitude toward nature … Sexuality and fied simply because a pregnant woman doesn’t want eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature to be a mother. So, feminists and social justice war- and culture … Feminists grossly oversimplify riors push abortion as a human right, a woman’s the problem of sex when they reduce it to a right to choose, instead of a violation of the com- matter of social convention: readjust society, mandment not to kill, if you believe in God, or a eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and crime against nature, if you believe in nature. happiness and harmony will reign. Another obvious example is transgenderism. Intersex is a natural but rare phenomenon in which The identification of woman with nature is around 0.05 to 0.07 per cent of babies are born with ancient. Paglia believes it’s a reality, not a myth. ambiguous genitalia or have biological attributes of Feminists disagree and call Paglia anti-woman for both sexes. This is a hardware issue, which means suggesting there’s a limit to what woman can alter it occurs in nature and can therefore be regarded in herself and man’s relation to her. This takes us to as natural. In recent decades the hardware issue, the crisis of our age, the dilemma at the heart of our intersex, has morphed into a software issue, trans- culture wars, because we’re now legally compelled genderism, where a person feels they are in the to believe gender identity is socially constructed. wrong body and identifies as another sex or gender. At the same time, we’re also legally compelled to Transgenderism is a cultural not a natural ignore the link between sexual identity and evolu- phenomenon. Attempts to make it a natural phe- tionary biology. nomenon are unconvincing. Insisting a biological This is difficult, for many reasons. In evolution- male who identifies as female is a natural woman, ary terms, maleness and femaleness predate mod- real under the law, removes humanity further ern humans by millions of years. They existed long from nature. Homosexuality doesn’t alter nature’s before the primates split into dry-nose and wet-nose organic characteristics. Interfering with evolution- groups. They are not sociological constructs of a ary biology, denying its objective reality, legislat- patriarchy, deconstructed by gender theorists. They ing the reality of human imitation—mimesis—is are aspects of hard-wired dominance hierarchies tantamount to saying nature has no organic char- older than society itself. Nevertheless, at present, acteristics and doesn’t have or obey her own laws. we’re legally compelled to believe these differ- Our ethical and moral frameworks must distin- ences of sex and gender don’t exist. Apparently, guish between intersex and transgenderism. At sexual identity is really gender identity, wholly best, gender reassignment isn’t necessary. At worst, fluid because socially constructed, while sex and it’s rebellion against , a crime against gender are functionally independent; further, both nature. are independent of evolutionary biology and can be If Paglia is right to suggest we cannot hope to changed. This is madness. understand sex and gender until we clarify our We live in a society where speech is compelled, attitude towards nature, this is what we must do. where ordinary citizens cannot conscientiously It’s not helpful to simply assert transgenderism as a object to referring to transgender men as women, fundamental human right, with the same dignity as where ordinary women aren’t allowed to advertise biological sex, without demonstrating why that’s so. the dictionary definition of their biological sex. For Intersex occurs in nature and may require human logical consistency, it’s not enough to scapegoat intervention to ameliorate something natural but Bible-believing Christians here. For completeness, rare. Transgenderism is a purely cultural phenom- those who believe in nature rather than God should enon, sociological and political. also be scapegoated. The weaponisation of democratic institutions against the citizenry prevents the conversations n most battles in the culture wars, exceptions are that are necessary if Western civilisation is to sur- taken to be the and attempts are made to vive. It’s not dog-whistling to say this, or to notice Inormalise the exceptions for political advantage. the obvious dangers in the atrocities being acted Obvious examples of this include abortion; whether out daily around us. Much is made of common it’s justifiable if the foetus has abnormalities or the sense, but that doesn’t help during a hostage crisis. woman was raped. Yet these exceptions don’t rep- resent most pregnancies. Foetal abnormalities are Michael Giffin is a priest in the Anglican Diocese of unavoidable. Rape is avoidable. Most abortions Sydney. He wrote “Catholic Authority in the Anglican happen for other reasons. This presents an ethical Church” in the January-February issue.

Quadrant March 2020 71 Michael Connor

How Freedom Dies The Long, Dark Tunnel of Islamist Terrorism

slamic terrorism is a tunnel with no way out. In 2018 Philippe Lançon, the magazine’s theatre It’s Wednesday January 7, again. A door opens, critic, published the best-selling Le Lambeau (see again. Two black-clothed figures holding weap- Quadrant, December 2018), his account of the mas- Ions enter, again. The balaclavas they hide behind sacre and the surgical hell and miracle of having have owl-shaped eye slits: popular knitting with his face rebuilt. Riss in turn talks of his own life, motorbike riders. One hundred and nine seconds and the massacre, and offers portraits of his mur- later they have fired sixty bullets into the Charlie dered friends and colleagues. Hebdo offices and, from religious motives, have When Riss reflected on his situation he noted murdered eleven people—on the floor their bro- the obvious: “It seems impossible for many Muslims ken bodies lie over, on and between the wounded. to admit that Charlie Hebdo was not guilty of any Later, it will be widely accepted on the French Left crime in publishing the caricatures of Mohammed.” that the dead and mutilated brought their fate upon And he is rightly critical of the “collabos”, from his themselves because the magazine had published a own Left side of French society, who submit to, cartoon of Mohammed. or encourage, or politely turn their gaze from the Line drawings are displayed on a wall in the continuing destruction of free speech and tradi- cramped office, proposals for the current edition of tional French freedoms by Islamic fascism. the magazine. Among them is Charb’s last picture, a sketch of author Michel Houellebecq. His novel n a fine day in January the magazine’s nor- Soumission is published the morning his caricatur- mal weekly editorial meeting was taking ist is murdered. Months later the office, most of Oplace. The writers and illustrators who made the the blood stains cleaned away, is briefly unsealed to sat, slightly cramped, around four white allow Riss, an artist and magazine editor, back into tables. From outside came the sound of two bangs. the room to collect his belongings. He notices that The shooting of Simon, the webmaster—crippled Houellebecq is still pinned to the wall, and then in 2015 because of a cartoon published in 2006. the portrait disappears. When Riss has file copies Riss thought the noises may have come from sev- of the publication transferred to their new office eral heaters he had recently bought for the outside some copies are seen to have been ripped by a bul- office. The policeman protecting Charb, who had let, and in an unused wooden box, one side punc- drawn the Mohammed caricature, stood up say- tuated with a clean round hole, a bullet is found ing, “That isn’t normal.” And then the office door resting peacefully inside. swung open: Riss’s account of the magazine and the massa- cre, Une minute quarante-neuf secondes (One Minute 11 hours 33 minutes 47 seconds, they enter Forty-nine Seconds), was published late last year. The 11 hours 33 minutes 48 seconds, I am alive cover illustration, chosen by the author, is a single, 11 hours 33 minutes 49 seconds, I am alive staring, stressful eye—a detail from the magnifi- cent horse portrait in Théodore Géricault’s paint- The text continues, second by second, across four ing of a Napoleonic officer on his rearing charger. pages until:

11 hours 35 minutes 35 seconds, I am alive Une minute quarante-neuf secondes 11 hours 35 minutes 36 seconds, they leave by Riss I am alive Actes Sud, 2019, 320 pages, €21 I am not dead

72 Quadrant March 2020 How Freedom Dies

Riss is wounded, his shoulder shattered, and he Distribute it to all the victims? This question refuses to call himself a victim. For a time his life is helps to better understand the actions of some. occupied with the doctors until it is time to return Four years later, I have to make up my mind to to work in loaned space offered by the daily news- admit that within the journal the disappearance paper Libération, where the Charlie Hebdo editorial of Charlie Hebdo would have satisfied more than team had previously sheltered after their offices were we imagine. fire-bombed in 2011. “I thought of coming back to an editorial office Confronted with office back-stabbing and the talking of terrorism, of fanaticism, of caricatures, constant leaking of magazine matters to other Paris of satire, of drawings, of freedom of expression. papers by his colleagues, Riss contemplates murder. Everything that happened to us was the result of Four months after the massacre, while broken bod- these burning questions,” says Riss. Instead, many ies are still suffering, one journalist suggests, “The of the staff are more concerned in sharing in the time for tears is ended.” Riss also recalls colleagues sudden financial success of the magazine. The first who freely describe themselves as “survivors” when post-attack edition sold 6 million copies. they were nowhere near the office on the day of the Before the massacre the magazine was financially massacre. The office infighting had a happy ending: struggling. After the massacre there were two new “They had to go. They left. This is what saved them. problems—too much money, and the satire-makers So I won’t end up behind bars for the rest of my life. had been murdered. Subscriptions bounded ahead, And them in a hole.” from people who hardly knew what they were buy- Putting his life together was impossible: “Before ing and would ignore future pleas to re-subscribe. had disappeared. Before would never return. Before Charlie Hebdo, an old 1968 generation magazine, is was dead.” Seeking to build a life, Riss takes a not to everyone’s taste. holiday. He would make a delightful travelling At his first staff meeting, after being warmly companion: welcomed back, a new employee made a speech sug- gesting the magazine be reformed and shares dis- Hitler has magnificently painted the Austrian tributed between them. Then, lowering his voice to capital. Vienna really is as ugly as it is in the bad a suitably confidential level, he turned to Riss and paintings of the future dictator ... asked the real burning question, “Is it true that you Warsaw is perhaps the worst place in the are paying gift cheques into your personal accounts?” entire solar system ... Riss’s most angry pages, in a passionate and Poland is an open-air mass grave and Europe sometimes funny book, deal with the post-massacre a cemetery from the Atlantic to the Urals ... events within the magazine. The caricaturist Prague, the city that turns its inhabitants discarded his drawing pen and used a blunt into cockroaches, became repulsive ... keyboard on his new and surviving colleagues: “Before me burst into the open, like very ripe boils, he present year began brightly in France. In the the true personality of these good people: without traditional auto-da-fé New Year celebrations the slightest editorial idea to revive the paper, but 1457T cars were set alight—an enthusiastic high score driven wild by money.” over the previous year’s 1290. Early in January the While Riss was painfully recuperating, a new media slightly remembered the five-year-old massa- party line had developed and he found himself on cre and then moved on with the continuing pension the outside. Three shareholders were dead and only strikes and demonstrations which were disrupting two remained alive. “I was one of them and I had their daily commutes. the unbearable impression of being one too many.” Less than two weeks after the Charlie anniver- The magazine where he had spent twenty-five sary sixteen-year-old Mila recorded an Instagram years had changed. The dead cartoonists represented video in her bedroom. A fearless homosexual, she the history and tradition of the magazine and their was furious when a young Muslim man she had weekly dose of élan that had kept it going was gone. rejected online called her a “dirty lesbian”. Her It is hard work being a satirist. “The truth is that video reply asserted her detestation of religion, and there was hardly anyone left in this editorial room especially Islam. She was as crude and insulting in strewn with debris [pens, papers and junk embla- her language as a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. zoned with Je suis Charlie] to bring the satirical spirit Her outgoing video was shared and exchanged of the magazine back to life.” on social media and brought back thousands of Riss asks what would have happened if the mag- incoming hate messages—up to 200 a minute— azine had been put down after the attack, and what as anonymous supporters of the religion of peace would have happened to the money: threatened to rape and kill her. Mila’s home address

Quadrant March 2020 73 How Freedom Dies was published, her school was named and she was tal questions of free speech, he asked if his country warned that the writers of violence were coming for was still a secular state. her. She complained to the police and the French At the time of writing there have been 255 deaths justice system opened two inquiries—one looking from terrorism in France since the beginning of at the authors of the threats against her, the other 2015, and it is highly likely that this figure will have investigating her for “provoking racial [sic] hatred”. risen by the time you read this. Islamic terrorism An editorial by Franz-Olivier Giesbert in the is a tunnel with no way out, and extremism flour- weekly magazine Le Point asked a pertinent ques- ishes in the darkness. Abdallah Zekri of the French tion: “France, the new Pakistan?” Noting that the Council for Muslim Worship and a tireless cam- mainstream media was avoiding dealing with the paigner against “Islamophobia” says of Mila: “She case and once again avoiding discussing fundamen- asked for it, she got it.”

Climber

Since a steep winter walk crocked my left knee the leg’s stopped talking to the rest of me: nerves, muscles, brain—they hear its pains but muffled, like the wires are frozen. Stiff, it braces itself through daily paces, lets its fellow, its right-leg man and master, hustle it home with a stick, a step behind, the sound of one foot walking, one dragged, grudgingly lies down in tandem; but in sleep becomes its own limb again, goes off for holidays on its own, shins up the Eiger or Matterhorn. I dreamed, modestly, of conquering Coot-tha or, fifty years back, Scafell, the Peaks, Lyke Wake. My leg has other ideas. One night left-field toenails rip a blizzard through the sheets, dig a pit in the bed deep enough to bury us—senses, sinews, mind and all— under pillows of white, too deep to hear the cramponed foot kick away compasses, markers and maps, or to feel winter creeping like hemlock past my thighs and everything nerveless, numb, packed in ice.

Derek Wright

74 Quadrant March 2020 What memory tells me

We talked about the past, the eccentrics, the normal ones now drunk with the light of God, the wild children with stars in their hair, and the old town, both alive and dead Raising a toast in the shrine of history where dreams do kiss our eyes. To Vanity I drink and cheap hotels within whose doors I pleasured my sad loins, Father said, “Your memory and heard the mattress creak beneath me with is brilliant, you were sly laughter as dawn coloured those sad walls. so young.” I was, like dawn through the keyhole. The silence of stone met our ears. Dreaming I never told him, I recalled those times because From death men rise like ripples on the sea. I was so happy then, So rose the poet from tranquility, in Spring where happiness died. to see castles on the blue horizon, where lured sailors sleep their perfect sleep. Drunk Before the calm morn goes out with soft wings, and sunlight flames the temples of first light, The hours began to blur. vision flashed past his enshrined eyes, breathing The more I drank, life’s flame into his cadaverous clay. the less I was. Here may I leap, love and die with prudence, Even happiness fled for in this inside space all is drama, like most moments and so may pass real as the primal world, that never die, pierced with the pains waiting for me at dawn. for most do not exist at all. And myself, was mine to share alone, an unlikely pair we certainly made. So I drank to Proteus, but to myself returned, until I ceased to drink, for the drink did drink me.

Jason Morgan

Quadrant March 2020 75 Wolfgang K asper

Understanding and Misunderstanding China

Our issue is not with the Chinese people, not with the know exactly where everyone is at the moment,” amazing Chinese diaspora community we have here they joke. “China is so poor at soccer because the in Australia. My issue is with the national team consists of players with money to bribe of China and their policies to the extent that they’re the selectors,” you are told. Ordinary folk one meets inconsistent with our own values. decry openly the blocking of Google, Wikipedia and —Peter Dutton, Minister for Home Affairs, YouTube by online censorship—and show you how October 11, 2019 to circumvent the ban. America-based, Mandarin- speaking bloggers, whose political comments are he protesters should demonstrate critical and often well-informed, have hundreds of to us once and for all that the Chinese are thousands of tech-savvy, VPN-enabled followers not genetically conditioned, compliant and in the PRC. Their blogs often attract a hundred Tquietist “yellow ants”, as many in the West still times the number of viewers that the PRC’s main assume. Nor must we forget 1989 when young broadcaster gets. The professors and students of freedom protesters surrounded a Statue of Liberty Shanghai’s , whose charter contains on Tiananmen Square. About one million Beijing the motto “freedom of thought”, but who have been residents from all walks of life, including numerous officially instructed to drop it, now defiantly sing party and union officials, demonstrated for reform their campus anthem daily, extolling “freedom of and greater freedom. Most remarkably, Zhao thought and academic independence”. Many in the Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist rapidly growing middle class speak admiringly of Party of China after a long career in the Party elite, the individual freedoms they have observed in the addressed the crowds on the square. He advocated West during holiday trips or semesters of study. freedom of the press and freedom of association, The rapidly growing middle class, who aspire to free markets and parliamentary democracy. Could enjoy the freedoms and material comforts that we a leader like that again one day emerge from the enjoy, differ in one important respect from us in the bosom of the CPC? West. The Judeo-Christian guilt feeling for enjoying Of course, earlier generations of Chinese had to high living standards and taking from nature is knuckle under to survive, buy a decent apartment absent. If people can enjoy honestly acquired wealth, and give their children a good education. Many still they do so without inhibitions, guilt feelings or much do. But many of their children and grandchildren social criticism. The more opulent, the merrier! now have attained middle-class living standards or Admonitions at global climate talkfests are therefore better, together with the education and knowledge likely to have little effect on the PRC’s policies, which come with that. More and more Chinese—in except where the local environment is damaged. the PRC and the diaspora, including in Australia— With regard to improving local rubbish handling, as now aspire to civic, economic and political rights. well as air and water quality, the Chinese with their And they are prepared to stand up for their liberties. typically resolute approach to problems are making During my visits to the PRC over the past admirable progress. Only look at how quickly noisy, forty years, I have seen a pervasive shift from smoky motor-scooters have been replaced by electric unquestioning compliance and the pursuit of narrow ones, how quickly city buses and garbage removal material aspirations to demands for individual trucks are replaced by battery-operated models. freedoms. Many Chinese now complain about the While the New South Wales authorities have set oppressors in Beijing and the surveillance state. “It up a taskforce to discuss electric city buses, the skies takes the authorities a mere seventeen minutes to over China’s big cities seem, by and large, to be

76 Quadrant March 2020 Understanding and Misunderstanding China turning a little bluer. Credit where credit is due! surreptitious evening encounters, sitting on hotel When I see young Australians sporting Mao beds. The Sichuan scholars did not feel confident to T-shirts, I realise that the unmitigated disasters make their “discoveries” public throughout China. of the Mao era, the mass starvation and the utter Only through the observations of a foreigner, contempt by the leadership for the suffering of the translated into Mandarin, could the good news be masses seem to have faded from popular memory in broadcast. the West. During the 1950s and 1960s, the “Bamboo In the provinces, economic liberalisation was Curtain” kept the true face of Maoism hidden from greeted with great cheer. Yes, cheer! I will never Western view. The few Western sympathisers, who forget the haggard farmer in a Sichuan country were regime guests of Mao’s PRC, returned wilfully market whose wife and daughter had just thrown unaware of the reality or naively allowed themselves their Mao uniforms into the wastebasket of history to be duped by the Potemkin-style they and appeared before him in new flowery cotton were shown. Among those Western “running dogs” frocks stitched together by an enterprising local were, for example, British proto-communists, such tailor. The farmer exclaimed to our interpreter: “I as the economist Joan Robinson and the biochemist- had long forgotten how beautiful Sichuan women historian and UNESCO official Joseph Needham. are!” Priceless also the remark of the director of a big They acted no differently from the notorious Beatrice metal factory, when I asked him whether the need and Sydney Webb in the 1930s after their visit to to find out about demand for the firm’s products Stalin’s Soviet Union. To everyone did not cause him unaccustomed else, the PRC was closed. stress. “Yes, fulfilling plan targets The professionals one now meets any parts of was easy. Now I have to work a lot in China mourn the passing of the M harder. But I arrive at work every “Golden Years” of economic reform the huge and diverse day with anticipation and go home and opening. It had all begun so Chinese economy happy!” During the reform era, local forcefully and pragmatically after officials often acted with resolute Mao’s death, as and display symptoms of a autonomy in the knowledge that Zhao Ziyang launched economic middle-income trap: “tiān gāo, huángdì yuăn—Heaven is reforms. When I travelled estimates of what high and the Emperor far away”— throughout China on an official and got away with it. tour in 1981, I was taken aback by the economists call “total The thin-skinned neo- pervasive and prompt productivity factor productivity” of recent years increases evident in those provinces has not only led to incidences of where agriculture and industry had have plummeted cowardly self-censorship, but also been privatised and given a free in recent years. provokes expressions of dejected hand. The end of central planning resignation, sadness and anger. and commissar control came as The mood began to change after a surprise to me, and to most of my new friends. 2012, when Xi Jinping became General Secretary Western journalists and “China experts” were of the CPC and Chairman of the Central Military still singing sotto voce the praises of the disastrous Commission, and 2013, when he became President people’s communes and central industry planning. of the PRC. When Comrade Xi assumed the title of In the early 1980s, it was difficult for officials in “core leader for life” in 2018, everyone realised that reforming provinces to broadcast the happy news. the “Golden Years” were definitely over. Censorship Allow me to admit to a personal involvement: has been stepped up. University education is I was invited in 1981 as a guest of the Chinese again officially made an ideological battlefield, Academy of Social Sciences on a lecturing and “studying, researching and propagating Marxist industry-inspection tour. Professor Jock Anderson scientific socialism”, rather than evidence-based, (University of New England) and I were the first critical inquiry and teaching. A campaign against Western economists since the Revolution to visit “Western values”—specifically constitutional partially privatised industries in Sichuan province, democracy, universal values, civil society, pro- which had long been hermetically closed. Our market neoliberalism, media independence, colleagues in the Sichuan Provincial Academy historical nihilism (that is, criticism of past errors) of Social Sciences were eager to feed me detailed and doubts about Chinese socialism—has gained information about the reforms and the (for them) momentum. In 2013, Xi Jinping even spoke of a surprisingly positive consequences. This did not Communist-led “post-Western world order”. The occur during the formal, official meetings and in “win-win relationship” with the West that inspired the presence of our official minders, but during observers during the reform era has turned into a

Quadrant March 2020 77 Understanding and Misunderstanding China

“you win, I lose” antagonism culminating for now and printing, purloined from China. They see the in the continuing US-China trade war. emergence of the Chinese economy over the past Despite a new personality cult, a renewed quarter-century as a return to its traditional place centralisation of power and a resurgence of on the world income pyramid. While the relevance assertive nationalism, Xi is a far cry from the Mao’s of this long-term perspective seems debatable, it is totalitarian, revolutionary fervour. He is holding on politically relevant. to many of the reforms implemented since Mao’s The economic growth of the past four decades demise. However, no one can be sure how far the has lifted unprecedented numbers of people out of clock will be turned back. What we now know with grim poverty. Although the statistics are dubious certainty is that most Chinese people, when free to and although it is problematic to describe as diverse vote—whether in Hong Kong or Taiwan—or able a nation as China—from Shanghai glitz to dirt- to move to the West—whether from Hong Kong or poor back-country villages—as a “middle-income the PRC—prefer Western values to being ruled by country”, I risk saying that China has become one in “Xi Jinping Thought”. record time. The economy is now no longer dominated by agriculture and the few heavy industries that the new communist regime tried to plan centrally in the The danger of a middle-income trap 1950s. It is now a complex, dynamic economy reliant rguably, only a few thinkers in China—such as on widely distributed, changeable knowledge and the nonagenarian economist Mao Yushi and his sophisticated, specialised logistics channels. Even colleaguesA at the now suppressed Unirule Institute if interventions are less direct, a return towards the of Economics in Beijing—fully understand why re- Stalinist-Maoist mindset among officials would Maofication and the campaign against “Western therefore be infinitely more damaging to incentives, ideas” are so tragic at this phase of the nation’s eco- risk-taking and further innovation. nomic development. Let me explain why. The pre-conditions for rapid “catch-up growth” In the early years of reform, it was relatively cannot last in any NIC. Wages and taxes rise— easy to reap rapid economic gains. After the the growth of private and government incomes is demise of Mao’s economically suicidal regime, after all the very purpose of economic development. imported ideas and technical equipment could Space becomes scarcer. Local pollution problems produce great productivity gains. They were become more costly to rectify. The scope to reap used intelligently and competently by many productivity gains by copying imported concepts Chinese firms, who had access to free markets at and equipment gradually narrows, even when the home and abroad. China’s was not a completely workforce becomes more skilled. Economic success underdeveloped economy where “take-off” had to normally induces national leaders to become more rely on textiles and footwear. Notwithstanding assertive and meddlesome, frequently also more official propaganda, industrialisation had begun corrupt. These changes can be considered part of long before the Revolution. In particular, foreign- the standard pattern of industrialisation. Once governed enclaves—such as Shanghai, Tianjin, middle-income levels of productivity and income Wuhan and Chongqing—had acquired substantial are reached, further growth requires clearer, more and sophisticated industrial and financial capacities competition-friendly rules, more secure property during the first half of the twentieth century. After rights, less prescriptive intervention, freer markets 1978, low wage, tax and land costs attracted foreign and above all the freedoms that facilitate creative investors eager to cater to China’s huge markets or set risk-taking by entrepreneurs. All too often, NICs up a low-cost base to supply world markets. Massive then slither into a “middle-income trap”. As of improvements in infrastructure (transport, energy 2020, many parts of the huge and diverse Chinese and water supply and development of industrial economy display symptoms of a middle-income estates) have facilitated unprecedented economic trap: estimates of what economists call “total factor growth, first in coastal regions, then throughout the productivity” have plummeted in recent years, a country. fraction of the contributions to growth attained Most Chinese observers do not see their country after the reforms began. as a newly industrialised country (NIC), comparable It was of course clear that China would become for example to South Korea or Mexico. Rather, they a huge challenger to the established global pecking tell you that China had long been the technically order and probably the global rule system, not only most sophisticated and affluent country on Earth because of its sheer size and the competence of many before Western Europe took off into sustained Chinese producers, but also because the government growth, partly thanks to inventions such as the was an ambitious one-party dictatorship with little compass, gunpowder, the wheelbarrow, paper respect for the established and successful global order.

78 Quadrant March 2020 Understanding and Misunderstanding China

Besides, China was never destined to become your democracy. In addition, we must understand that standard NIC. First, it was by far the biggest newcomer the current dynasty of “Red Emperors”—despite on the global economic scene. Second, unlike most the calls for freedom discussed above—can for now NICs facing the middle-income transition, China claim a considerable degree of legitimacy: economic has a rapidly ageing population, and demography is growth (the equivalent of the good harvests for half the story of economic development. Over the which earlier emperors used to pray) confirms for past four decades, the costs of labour, land and other many that the Beijing rulers of 1.4 billion people local inputs have risen faster than in comparable enjoy the “”. As a consequence, cases. More and more Chinese industries have now the extremely difficult task of adapting Confucian reached world best practice and what economists call cultural notions to the necessities of the modern the “productivity frontier”. China-based producers world in a middle-income contingency will have now have to discover new solutions and test their to be mastered by the Chinese themselves. Being own innovations, which is much more difficult than judgmental or dismissive from a Western stand- simply importing knowledge. point shows disrespect; it is rightly resented by Over the past decade, the national government most Chinese. We can only watch and act when the has tried artificial demand stimulation to stem the emergence of the PRC on the world scene inflicts consequences of these emerging undue and unacceptable conse- constraints on the supply side of the quences for our legitimate interests. economy. This has led to distortions: mperial governments We would certainly be poorly transport infrastructure in part far I advised to persist with mere antag- exceeds prospective demand, and stayed mostly aloof onism to, and stereotyping of, belts of unsold high-rise apartments from ordering all things Chinese, let alone be surround every city and town. gripped by “yellow peril” hyste- These “Keynesian stimulus ruins” people’s private and ria. There is much to admire and also weaken the national financial economic affairs. respect in modern China. Let us system. Alas, the most important That was deemed not forget that even high-ranking source of genuine further growth— Communist Party leaders, such as Western ideas and creative thinking mainly the task of Zhao Ziyang, and eminent econo- by free people who compete in open moral education and mists have castigated the damag- markets—is now being politically ing consequences of centralisation stymied by the woolly ideology of privately enforced and top-down control. The proper “Xi Jinping Thought”. conventions. attitude for us to embrace is, in The Chinese are thus in danger my opinion, concisely expressed of becoming old before they by Peter Dutton at the top of this become really rich. Such a fate is not inevitable, as essay. China is not a monolith; we must learn to is demonstrated by those of their countrymen who differentiate. have attained more economic, civic and political First of all, there is an urgent need to study the freedom, namely the Taiwanese, the Singaporeans rich and varied history and civilisation that most and (till recently) the citizens of Hong Kong. call “Confucian”, but some of my friends prefer The Chinese economy will continue to narrow to label “the chopstick-and-soy-sauce culture”. I the gap between it and the West, but at a much am always ashamed to discover how little most reduced pace. By the middle of the twenty-first educated Westerners know about China’s history, century, “” (the “Confucian orbit”) is mores, philosophy, regional diversity and recent likely to produce and consume about half the world’s technical achievements. It is, on average, much production. This will not mean that the average East less than what educated Chinese know about the Asian will work with First World productivity and West. It is estimated that about 10 million people enjoy the same per capita income that Westerners in China are fluent in English and about 450 mil- will have. lion learn some English. By contrast, a mere 10,000 to 20,000 Westerners, who are not ethnic Chinese, are estimated to have fluent Mandarin. How lit- Beware of the terribles simplificateurs tle do our schools teach about the four millennia n this situation, we in the West are confined of Chinese civilisation! Yet, the future of mankind mainly to the role of bystanders. It would be over the next few generations will be shaped by the naiveI to expect that the cultural values deeply world’s two most outstanding, most durable civili- embedded after 4000 years of high civilisation will sations (which I will persist in calling Confucian be pushed aside in favour of a Westminster-style or Eastern, and Christian or Western respectively).

Quadrant March 2020 79 Understanding and Misunderstanding China

And nowhere are these two great traditions likely to on the currently ruling Red Dynasty. come into more intimate contact than in Australia, The 2500-year-old philosophic traditions—in thanks to our geography and immigration. Yet, all particular the teachings of —have a per- the time one encounters fellow Australians who vasive influence in Chinese society. I have visited confuse the Qín and the Qīng or who could not many such temples and come to the conclusion name China’s ten biggest cities, but who hold forth that they are not strictly comparable with Western about what a threat the Chinese are and how gov- synagogues, churches or mosques; rather they mix ernments and businesses must now act. the attributes of a chapel with those of a think- Even a cursory acquaintance with China’s his- tank, where great intellects and leaders are vener- tory and civilisation will dispel the widespread ated and their ideas conveyed to ordinary people. notion that this vast, diverse country was ruled A great variety of moral insights are thus kept alive from the top down by despots, before whom eve- in popular memory. There is nothing quite like it ryone had to kowtow. In reality, imperial govern- in the West. It is as if we had chapels in which ments stayed mostly aloof from ordering people’s the ideas—dare I say?—of or Darwin were private and economic affairs. That was deemed kept alive in popular opinion! mainly the task of moral education and privately The most important Western response to the enforced conventions. now more confrontational tenor in the systems Three great philosophical traditions dealing competition between China and the West ought to with good government originated in China more be a renewed assertion of the values and institutions than 2500 years ago: Daoism, and that have facilitated the West’s ascendancy since the Legalism. The Daoist tradition has a decidedly Enlightenment. Alas, Western civilisation looks individualist bend. “Lao-tzu … anticipates the fragile on that front, given the many attacks on our theory of spontaneous order by teaching that core values and strengths. Beyond enabling us to harmony can be achieved through competition. better cope with the China challenge, analytical [He] … advises the ruler not to interfere in the comparisons between the Eastern and the Western lives of the people.” To be sure, the Daoist maxim traditions would add depth and a sharper profile of wú wéi (which might be translated as “masterful to understanding our own civilisation. They would inaction”) does not mean total laissez-faire, but also enable us to better project those of our quali- guidance by example and abstaining from utopian ties and strengths that are admired, and aspired to, objectives and micro-management. Confucianism, by many in East Asia. which is not a religion, but rather a Weltanschauung combined with certain rites, has over the centuries given rise to as many variants of social theory as The China challenge Christianity. Good government generally relies on ithout doubt, China is now posing the big- morally educated gentlemen (jūnzí) and on social gest challenge to the global order that has discipline. Only the Legalist tradition advocates Wunderpinned unprecedented prosperity and peace the iron hand of despotism. It was favoured by Mao in the world since 1945. In a way, the China chal- Zedong and now seems on the rise again. lenge is reminiscent of what ascendant Wilhelmine While studying books is for most the main Germany did in the late nineteenth century, source of understanding another culture, specific, Imperial Japan in the early twentieth century, and singular observations of reality make certain fea- the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1970s. tures plausible and deepen one’s understanding. So, These episodes are part of a broad pattern it was for me when—on a visit to the Confucius of long waves of accelerating and decelerating temple in the historic financial centre of Pingyao economic growth (economists speak of “Kondratiev in Shanxi province—I observed a grandfather with cycles”). Every thirty to fifty years, it seems, three youngsters bowing in front of an “altar” niche innovations appear that create new industries, and then spending a long time in front of it in ear- boosting economic activity. When global growth nest conversation with the children. After they left, accelerates, industry spreads to new locations, so I inspected the niche, which contained a tablet with that new industrial countries appear on the scene. a helpful translation into English. It read: “The peo- A generation into the upwave, the socio-economic ple are the most important element in a nation; the system in the old industrial countries typically spirits of the land and grain [agricultural produc- develops signs of sclerosis, so economic growth tivity] are the next; the sovereign is the least.” This slows. But the NIC economies keep growing. assertion of the second-most important Confucian Thanks to new industries and being as yet without thinker is embedded in popular thinking. It will, I entrenched producer lobbies, they do not have to trust, eventually exert a moderating influence even struggle with “creative destruction”. The disparity

80 Quadrant March 2020 Understanding and Misunderstanding China in the resulting pace of economic growth between to know about the world and want to eat the same old and new industrial countries is then often good meals and enjoy the same drinks as we do and projected into the future and ascribed to some maybe sing a song together, just as some of us do. superior regime in the NICs. For example, during When I hear Australian students complain the Great Depression unabated economic growth that students from China occupy the front rows in the Soviet Union was widely seen as a result of in lecture theatres and work too hard, I tell them socialist planning, and not the result of a “one-off that this is legitimate competition of the sort that NIC advantage”. When the 1970s global slowdown they will face all their lives. They might as well came around, Soviet suffered from get up a bit earlier and study a bit harder. I also a protracted “sclerosis crisis”, in this instance a wish more of my fellow countrymen knew about terminal one. Likewise, the still healthy pace of the the thousands of young Australians who are hav- PRC economy can be ascribed to the fact that many ing the time of their lives contributing to the of its parts still enjoy that “one-off NIC advantage”. exhilarating and cosmopolitan “Shanghai boom”. It will not last forever. They know that co-operation pays off. Australians When the pace of global economic advance cannot complain that the Chinese are spreading decelerates, as has been the case lately, economic their influence and enjoy a higher living standard and political pecking orders are inevitably over- and at the same time show satisfaction about our turned. It is then tempting for record sales of minerals and serv- producers in the established, com- ices to China. Admittedly, Chinese fortable and more mature econo- also wish more of producers often suffer from fewer mies to revile the upstarts. And it is I regulations, less excessive concerns then difficult for an ignorant public my fellow countrymen about the environment, health and and an ignorant political leadership knew about the safety, and fewer industry lobbies. to tease apart what is economic- Instead of complaining about this, competitive and hence legitimate thousands of young we should streamline our cumber- and what is political-intervention- Australians who are some regulatory order and compete ist and hence should be resisted by by competition-friendly institu- the old industrial countries. It is having the time of tional change, and not protection- then tempting to fall back on pop- their lives contributing ism, the virus that only raises the ulism and embrace might-is-right to the exhilarating potential for conflict. attitudes. Yet history and economic Around 2001, when the logic tell us that it is always more and cosmopolitan PRC joined the World Trade conducive to peace and progress to “Shanghai boom”. Organisation (WTO), there was be well informed about the rising much optimism that the Chinese challengers, their history, culture government would be cured of and aspirations and to differentiate between what mercantilism. That was not justified. It is unclear is compatible with an open global order and what whether the Beijing authorities really intended to is illegitimate. comply with the strict WTO conditions on trans- The potential benefits from the open exchange parency and the protection of intellectual property of people, goods, investments and ideas between as understood in the West. Nor is it clear by how the free, affluent West and a progressing China are much they kept the currency artificially underval- great, even if that requires major structural adjust- ued. In any event, the political reversals in Beijing ments in the West. For starters, we must accept since 2012 have raised growing concerns and the that more Chinese people from the PRC and the relationship with the West has turned to confron- periphery have now reached income levels that tation. The old hegemon America rivals openly make them visible in those parts of the world which with ascendant China in numerous fields, rang- we have claimed as our space. This is part of global ing from trade and political influence to military population growth and the fact that affluent Asians position. In this new win-lose climate, Australia’s are able to consume what we have long taken for elites find themselves in an uncomfortable, maybe granted. When Chinese tourists now add to long an inevitably clueless, position. queues in front of the Vatican, when tour groups The PRC is not a normal competitor. The one- from Beijing push through the Getty Museum and party state often backs up Chinese producers, bus tours disgorge more Asian selfie-shooters into whether state-owned or not, with sly or even the grounds of Angkor Wat, we—long the top dogs openly coercive political means. Investors from in tourism—may not be amused. But these peo- the PRC often encounter justified concern in the ple have worked all year to earn a holiday, want West because they are not like foreign investors

Quadrant March 2020 81 Understanding and Misunderstanding China from Switzerland or the US. In these countries, does not mean that we always will agree with them. Australians or Canadians are not taken hostage, We must beware of summary “yellow peril as may be the case in China when Chinese officials hysteria”, including the Chinese who live in our or investors with government links feel like it. midst and abhor what can be observed at present in Western investors in the PRC may be forced to the PRC and Hong Kong. Facile, simple-minded share technical secrets or may find that the stealing anti-Chinese postures, let alone paranoia, only of valuable commercial secrets is not properly strengthen the hand of the bad guys, similar to what punished in the courts. The official Belt-and-Road occurred in Wilhelmine Germany, 1930s Japan and initiative—an outlet for China’s surplus capital— Stalin’s USSR. We must avoid pushing the West’s often comes with hidden political ties. Although potential friends and admirers in China, who in this project began by relying on age-old cultural essence think like we do, into the embrace of the relations with central and western Asia through the nationalist-communist hardliners. That could have Silk Roads, it has promptly stoked resentments in tragic consequences all round. nations that have received infrastructure assistance. The antidote is to learn more about long-term In short, the preponderance of a mighty state economic history, to decide where China’s aspira- looming behind traders and investors from China tions deserve to be respected and to concentrate on means that the time-tested rules of international pushing back resolutely against rule violations that economic relationships cannot be automatically undermine the free global order. Let’s not repeat applied. To determine where the rules of equal history out of ignorance or spite! exchange must be enforced requires knowledge, clear-sighted policies and political will. Theterribles Wolfgang Kasper is an emeritus professor of economics simplificateurs who simply demand across-the-board (University of New South Wales) with a long-standing bans on all Chinese undertakings do not serve our interest in China. He wishes to express his gratitude to purposes well. We need to know enough to be able those who helped him in the writing of this article. A to put ourselves in our opponents’ shoes, which footnoted version appears at Quadrant Online.

Suburbia

Next door in the new apartments, a Chinese man sings opera to the stars, but everyone must be listening. Out back, the tenant shouts with triumph. His team has won and so has his bank account. One more beer carton awaits. From the supermarket come more industrial sounds, greased motors, warning bells pedantic as old men. The wind swoops, flapping clothes strung like flags of defeat on the crumbling clothes line. Perhaps these breaths from the sky, carry gasps of powerful ones, glamorous and wealthy souls. The night presses at my window, and the opera singer soon retreats, for even songbirds must sleep.

Jason Morgan

82 Quadrant March 2020 Tony Grey

The Growing Support for Nuclear Power

ustralia is a treasure trove, a vast Aladdin’s after Jabiluka. cave of energy resources, virtually unique Some of the policies were bizarre, even in the in the world. We have huge deposits of Coalition, which supported uranium. Here’s one. Apetroleum and coal and the world’s largest uranium Under the Fraser government, Pancontinental’s resources. With production of about 7000 tonnes Jabiluka ore body had achieved all the domes- last year, Australia ranks third among uranium pro- tic approvals required for development, including ducers, behind Kazakhstan and Canada. an agreement with the Aboriginal people. But we But something’s amiss. We can never agree on needed export approval under the Atomic Energy how the blessing can be enjoyed. On the contrary, Act. subversive voices constantly rail against it. Uranium I approached the Minister for Natural Resources, used to be the devil; now it’s coal’s turn. Even natu- Doug Anthony, who was empowered to grant ral gas has one foot in hell. Wind and solar are the approvals. At the time, we had marketing arrange- new saints but, alas, they’re asleep in heaven too ments with Japanese, Korean, American and various much of the time. European utilities—enough to finance the mine. Contradictions abound. We export uranium We thought it politic to present the British contract all over the world but have legislation prohibiting first, which we did. nuclear power at home. Is it really a virtue to send The minister said basically it was fine but that fuel to the rest of the world for power plants we’re government policy required three price re-openers. too pure to have ourselves? For a nation dedicated to Uranium contracts were usually for a term of five the rule of reason, or so we think, it’s time to repeal years with a pricing formula that gave some security that absurd legislation. to both buyer and seller. Doug Anthony disagreed, The opposition to nuclear power, and its domes- insisting there must be at least three times in the tic proxy, uranium, reaches back a long way, to the contract when the price had to be re-negotiated. 1970s when the great Alligator River ore bodies were When I told the British that, they erupted, discovered. It started in the United States, arising aghast at the uncommerciality of it. Nevertheless from the aftermath of the Vietnam War, although they agreed under sufferance to one price re-opener. its roots were in the British “Ban the bomb” protests When I took it to Doug Anthony he said, “Tony, I of the 1950s. Ralph Nader declared 1975 as the inau- told you we need three.” gural year of the nuclear debate. So I had to go back to the British. They were The debate in Australia, which took the form of apoplectic, using epithets to describe the Australian whether uranium should be mined, shook the nation government’s understanding of how business is done for several years. The anti-uranium lobby didn’t stop that would astonish even a foul-mouthed comedian. mine development entirely but it did lead to govern- But they agreed to a second re-opener. ment policies that prevented Australia from being I remember well the day when I went to a phone the world’s number one uranium producer, which it booth in Canberra, put my coin in the slot and could have been. dialled Doug Anthony. He picked up the phone The delays it caused enabled Namibia and and listened to me saying, “Doug, I can get you two Canada to develop deposits that took our place. price re-openers but no more. The British say if our Rossing in Namibia had a grade of 0.7 of a pound, government does not accept that they will complain less than a tenth of the grade of Jabiluka, which to their Foreign Affairs Department about how was then the largest uranium ore body in the world. uncommercial we are.” Saskatchewan’s Key Lake was discovered four years After a pause he said, “OK, we can accept that.

Quadrant March 2020 83 The Growing Support for Nuclear Power

I’ll instruct my departmental officers to prepare the changed over the years. However, much has approval papers for my signature.” changed in the industry itself, and that has lessened Hooray, I thought; we have it. No Australian their force. government would dishonour an international con- Old fears that civil use could lead to nuclear weap- tract, not even a Labor one that opposes uranium. ons proliferation have proved baseless. Proliferation However, before Doug Anthony had a chance to has occurred, but through technology transfers from sign the approval, Malcolm Fraser called the March existing weapons states at government level. 1983 election and lost. The incoming Hawke govern- Progress is being made in high-level waste stor- ment imposed the infamous Three Mines policy and age. The technology has long since been proven but Jabiluka was stymied. it’s the NIMBY politics of selecting sites that’s the Later, at a dinner with Doug Anthony at his problem. Finland appears to have solved this—the apartment in Canberra, he told me the reason for first in the world to do so. It has a site on its west the price policy. His government was afraid that if coast and a construction licence, and is building the uranium price soared, as it had done in the past, away. Labor would accuse it of flogging off the nation’s Australia is well endowed with stable geologi- resources at bargain basement prices. cal formations that would be eminently suitable. In I went to Paris to tell Electricite de France that 2015, ’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal the new Labor government would not let Jabiluka Commission released a report with the opinion that go ahead. They were our biggest potential custom- nuclear waste could be safely and profitably stored ers, willing to sign a contract worth hundreds of in that state. millions of dollars. I told my friend Jean Feron, Despite Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear’s the number two at EDF, of the news. After a brief safety record compares unmistakably well against silence, he shook his head sadly and said, “Vous etes other industries, particularly coal and gas. And trop riches”—you are too rich. significant improvements have emerged over the years—for example, passive cooling systems that cut hat was a long time ago. Uranium is not so con- in if the cooling circuit fails. That was the proximate tentious now. Both sides of politics support it, cause of the damage at Fukushima. Tmore or less, at least at the federal level. It’s ironic Misunderstandings about radiation need to be that the new Satan is coal, for the American coal corrected, however. For instance, of the 2000 deaths industry was a major funder of the early anti-nuclear at Fukushima, only one was attributed to radiation movement. exposure. The rest were due to panic during evacua- The world is shunning fossil fuels in preference tion. And nuclear plants emit no more radiation than for clean energy forms. Nuclear power is one of the granite at New York’s Grand Central Station. these. It has the potential to be the world’s largest Capital costs however are a concern. They account base-load power supply that has zero carbon dioxide for 60 per cent of the levelised cost of electricity. But emissions. operating costs are low. And uranium, as fuel, con- After the public acceptance setback of Fuku­ tributes only about 8 per cent. shima, nuclear is powering ahead. It generates 11 In the 1970s, nuclear was cheaper than coal, per cent of the world’s energy from about 450 reac- except where coalmines were near the power sta- tors in thirty countries. And thirteen other coun- tions they fed. That changed when activists began tries are building new capacity. attacking nuclear’s economic advantage. Legal Nuclear is growing remarkably fast in China, actions, regulatory over-reach, and interruptions of with generation increasing by 25 per cent in 2016 and construction schedules were successful in driving 15 per cent in 2017. An additional forty-seven reac- costs up. tors are under construction or planned. Throughout Currently, steps are being taken to drive them the world more than 400 new nuclear power plants down. Since, in the West, plant designs tend to be are in that category or proposed. customised, the normal learning curve in technol- The French president, Emmanuel Macron, felt ogy has not applied to its fullest extent. Standardised it necessary to promise in his election campaign designs could remedy this, as is happening in China, to reduce France’s reliance on nuclear from 75 per where levelised costs are less than half of what they cent to 50 per cent by 2025. However, he has since are in the West. announced a ten-year delay in its implementation. The efforts to reduce costs are achieving success. That’s effectively a reversal. Pressure is building The World Nuclear Association in its update of on Germany to reconsider the phase-out policy it nuclear economics says, “Nuclear power is cost com- imposed after Fukushima. petitive with other forms of electricity generation, The arguments against nuclear power haven’t except where there is direct access to low-cost fossil

84 Quadrant March 2020 The Growing Support for Nuclear Power fuels.” And the recent report of the International be no possibility of achieving the IPCC’s objec- Atomic Energy Association says nuclear’s cost is tive. The authors must have decided the arguments competitive with solar and wind. against nuclear are overwhelmed by the urgency of its need. Otherwise they would have condemned it n exciting area of innovation and one where as they condemned coal. meaningful potential for cost reduction exists is The report states that nuclear’s “health risks inA small modular reactors (SMRs). They’re defined are low per unit of electricity production and land as reactors of less than 300 megawatts. Their tech- requirement is lower than that of other power nology arose from nuclear installations in ships. sources”. Land requirement is noteworthy because Because the modules are made in factories to both wind and solar take up huge amounts of acre- standard designs, economies of scale apply, design age. To match the electricity output of a 1000 mega- improvements are facilitated and the regulatory watt nuclear station, which needs one square mile, process is simplified. Passive safety systems requiring solar would require seventy-five square miles and less redundancy further reduce costs. And shorter wind 360 square miles. on-site construction times offer fewer opportunities Today, much publicity is being given to the dev- for obstruction by activists, one of astating effect on electricity prices the major cost issues in the West. and availability caused by the rush Also, their small size makes them he IPCC’s report to renewables due to the intermit- less scary to the public. T tence of their energy supply. With Since they have lower require- states that nuclear’s its steady, reliable and clean base- ments for access to cooling water “health risks are low load, nuclear offers the ideal solu- and are deliverable on trucks they tion. The two sources are natural can be used in remote areas. They’re per unit of electricity allies. more easily financed than large production and land plants, and can be readily placed in requirement is lower ranium is a cyclical commod- brown-field sites where coal-fired ity with high price volatility. In plants are decommissioned. than that of other Uthe early 1970s, uranium producers The Americans are taking SMRs power sources”. were so despondent they banded seriously. Research is being gener- together to form “The Club” in ously funded by the Department London, which was accused of of Energy, and Silicon Valley is abuzz with entre- being a cartel, although such a cartel would have preneurs starting up companies to commercialise been legal at the time in its member countries. the technology. Eight companies forecast targets of Its purpose was to manage production in order nearly half the cost of conventional nuclear plants, to encourage economic uranium prices. It led to on a proportionate basis. the Uranium Institute, now the World Nuclear Association. Since the Uranium Institute was ate in 2018, public acceptance of nuclear power established there has been no suggestion of anti- received a dramatic boost from an unexpected trust activities. Lawyers present at meetings ensure quarter—endorsementL in the special report of the that. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This In 1978, when Westinghouse was caught in could be a game changer. a short squeeze, the price skyrocketed. They had Contrary to expectations from this spicy broth foolishly sold short 65 million pounds at $12 and of green politics and allied science, the report gives the price went to several times that, forcing them to a resoundingly supportive view of nuclear’s role in seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. mitigating global warming. It’s particularly refresh- Ultimately the price collapsed, reaching an all- ing because the Green lobby, so influential in the time low of $7 in 2001. It rose again in 2007 (helped IPCC, has been such an ostrich in the presence of by the flooding at Saskatchewan’s Cigar Lake) to nuclear. $138 and then fell into an abyss where it’s currently In calling for a heroic reduction in global warm- languishing. At a spot price of $25 per pound it’s ing of 1.5 degrees, the IPCC outlines pathways that well below the $60 needed to develop most new could lead to it. It states, “Nuclear power increases mines. And mines throughout the world are being its share in most 1.5 degree pathways to 2050.” The forced to cut production. growth is based on an estimated two-and-a-half- While I’m mindful of the adage, “Predictions times expansion in nuclear generation. are hazardous, especially about the future”, I’m The inescapable conclusion from the report is confident that if nuclear power grows as reasonably that without nuclear’s contribution there would expected, especially in China, future uranium prices

Quadrant March 2020 85 The Growing Support for Nuclear Power are likely to enter positive territory again. Given mate change debate. the inhibiting effect of low prices on supply, which Already the report is having an effect. Last has been dramatically curtailed, the market will May a group of about 100 Polish environmentalists be mainly demand-dependent. A turn in the cycle and scientists, relying on the climate-change basis would send a long-sought signal to the Australian of the findings, wrote an open letter to Germany uranium industry and its patient investors. asking it, as a neighbour, to reconsider its nuclear Nevertheless, the big challenge of improving phase-out policy. And, more recently, 80,000 inter- public acceptance is still before us. Arduous though national scientists joined in a declaration stressing the task is to win hearts and minds, it must be the need for nuclear to combat climate change, cit- undertaken. If not, a rollback we see threatened ing the IPCC report. in some parts of the world, notably in Europe, will stall nuclear progress. In the USA, as many ll this exciting progress in the nuclear indus- people oppose nuclear as support it—not a situa- try—in safety improvements, waste disposal, tion for complacency. Because the polls show that costA reduction, small modular reactors—is passing women in the aggregate tend to be less supportive us by in Australia. Technology doesn’t stop just of nuclear than men, it would be wise to encourage because a government doesn’t like it. At the very more female advocacy. least, the Luddite prohibition that has denied us The IPCC’s endorsement should be central to the torch of progress for twenty years should be nuclear’s case. It has the potential to recast the repealed. entire energy debate. If the world’s premier organi- We should no longer allow our government to sation on climate change says its target cannot be say to us about a science that most of the world has met without nuclear, how could anyone concerned embraced, “Thou shall not benefit from it, ever.” about global warming oppose it? Let science dispel ill-placed fears and wild imag- Those who disapprove of nuclear will have to inings, and let our politicians give us the freedom rethink their position. They may not like nuclear to advance, along with the rest of the world. but at the very least they would have to see it as the lesser of two evils. This is an edited version of the keynote presentation The task then is to spread awareness of the Tony Grey made to the Australian Institute of Mining report. Acceptance of its nuclear conclusions could and Metallurgy International Uranium Conference in even reduce somewhat the toxic polarity in the cli- Adelaide last year.

Threesome Mistakes

in the beginning I have been counting it was a way the mistakes in my life of filling gaps in the conversation I count eight big ones between 1970 and 1980 he’d lost interest in her pottery but then only four in she in his poetry the following twenty years they both and four minor errors adored Felicity in the last fifteen she wasn’t interested it’s encouraging in anything John Ellison Davies

86 Quadrant March 2020 BOOKS, ARTS & LIFE

Imaginary History Alistair Pope

Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal We have seen the revisionists attack Anzac cour- Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu age and mateship, the achievements of the Australian by Peter O’Brien explorers and pioneers, the nation-builders who con- Quadrant Books, 2019, 240 pages, $34.95 ceived and completed projects like the Snowy River Scheme and the Ord River Dam and the develop- evising history is not a new phenomenon; it is ment of our rich mineral resources, on which our as old as history itself. The reasons for doing so economy and standard of living now largely depend Rvary, but one of the most common is to support a since the collapse of our manufacturing sector. Yet political agenda (often by denigrating the reputation the relentless and often fabricated revisions continue of those previously in power, such as a dead king or unabated and have long since penetrated the educa- his dynasty). tion sector from kindergarten to university level and George Orwell was not the first to note the all shades of political thought. importance of history, but he was the most articu- Were it not for Peter O’Brien’s comprehensive late at documenting its misuse. In his depressingly analysis of Dark Emu, Pascoe’s faux history would magnificent book Nineteen Eighty-Four he stated, enter the mainstream uncontested and, thanks “He who controls the past, controls the future: to the “Iron Law of Intended and Unintended who controls the present controls the past.” Orwell Consequences”, a new round of spurious claims also understood the power of changing the mean- concerning the legitimacy of our Australian nation ing of language to suit nefarious political pur- as a rightful sovereign state would begin. By tak- poses, a process he demonstrated in the language ing the flimsiest of evidence and exaggerating it to of “Newspeak”. Orwell showed that language could monstrous proportions, Pascoe falsely builds a case be controlled, changed and used to further the aims that there was an Aboriginal “nation” that met the of the revisionists. Thus common terms were often recognised criteria of what we call “civilisation”. His reinterpreted to mean something different, or even claim is that the Aborigines built the foundations the opposite of our normal understanding of them. of institutions that form a governable nation. What

Quadrant March 2020 87 Books he cannot provide is any realistic evidence, so this to replace and invalidate a very high percentage of is where Newspeak comes in. Rudimentary collec- Pascoe’s Dark Emu fantasies. The rebuttal by Pascoe tions of plants near temporary camps (possibly from to Bitter Harvest, if such a thing is possible, should dropped seeds) become the Elysian Fields of an make fascinating reading. agrarian paradise of plenty. The paucity of evidence Bruce Pascoe’s fairy tale of an Aboriginal Camelot is no problem, as Pascoe can simply misquote explor- that never existed is reputed to have sold 100,000 ers, distort, misinterpret, omit and invent anything copies. I wonder how many of those purchasers will he wishes in support of his purported Aboriginal buy a book that debunks the false premises and idyll. The corollary is that he can also ignore what- fanciful fictions for which they paid their money, ever is inconvenient or does not support his fiction. and how many would refuse to read a properly- I think Dark Emu has been popular because it researched book challenging their misconceptions? allows postmodern Australians to hate themselves Although it deserves to be more successful than and their wealth without leaving the comfort of their Pascoe’s fictional history, any book written with the armchairs. That it will be read by children vulner- aim of critiquing another book is unlikely to exceed able to accepting what they are taught by politically the sales of the first, no matter how true or good motivated teachers is a real concern and one of the it is. I would recommend that Bitter Harvest’s core best arguments I can think of for home-schooling, should be excerpted (without ever mentioning the or for more private schools with their own “truth, Pascoe parable) and turned into a book called The warts and all” curriculum. True History of the Aboriginal Nomads. That is the book our children should be reading. t is worth noting, as Peter O’Brien points out, Pascoe was recently referred to the Federal that if Pascoe’s tortured view of reality were to Police (by a real Aboriginal person) for investigation Ibe accepted then the legitimacy of the ownership of concerning his claims to be Aboriginal. Should his large parts of Australia could be a bonanza for rent- Aboriginal turn out to be faked, it will seekers funded by those they sue. Perhaps that is be interesting to see how my taxpayer-funded ABC Pascoe’s semi-hidden objective? And perhaps hand- will deal with the situation. Just my little joke—we ing back their spears and boomerangs, ripping up already know they have no need of reality, as they all roads, tearing down all buildings, stopping their have an agenda to pursue. whitefella money and leaving them to re-establish their own version of Eden would be worth the Alistair Pope is a frequent contributor. price. What more could they want? I think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may give a clue. The kiss of death for any book wishing to make the best-seller list is to categorise it as “scholarly”. Generally, this is a euphemism by a reviewer to Michael Green praise the academic author for their studious toil in producing an obscure, boring, incomprehensible High-Energy Dreaming work that is unreadable and masked by extravagant prose designed to prove the author’s intellectual Superpower: Australia’s Low-Carbon superiority. Well, Bitter Harvest is certainly scholarly, Opportunity as it is thoroughly researched (much more so than by Ross Garnaut the book it analyses), but it is none of the above. It La Trobe University Press/Black Inc., 2019, is well written in a readable, flowing style that is 210 pages, $29.99 quickly engaging. Given the subject matter this last facet is essential. n Superpower Ross Garnaut stakes his reputation The subject lacks appeal to the general public, but on renewable energy in Australia becoming cheap it has an underlying theme which, when combined Iand reliable enough to supply Australia and power with its readable style, makes it worth the purchase a heavy-industry renaissance in our regions. But is price and the small effort required to read it. In a it credible? broader sense it is really the book that should have It’s an important question, because Labor leader been written as the core of understanding how Anthony Albanese echoed Garnaut in his Perth Aborigines lived before (and in remote parts for a headland speech in October 2019: century after) the arrival of Europeans. Peter O’Brien has checked Pascoe’s references and properly quoted We have the highest average solar radiation per them in context. His “Appendix: Journal Extracts” square metre of any continent … We also have of a mere twenty-five pages is by itself sufficient some of the best wind and wave resources …

88 Quadrant March 2020 Books

Australia can be the land of cheap and endless icy may have played in the rejections Labor suffered energy—energy that could power generations of in the 2013 and 2019 elections. He says a 2013 exit metal manufacturing and other energy intensive poll shows carbon pricing was not an electoral nega- manufacturing industries. tive for the Labor government. In the 2019 context he thinks: Ross Garnaut is a high priest of Australia’s eco- nomic and public policy establishment. He was by making the Adani mine emblematic of Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s economic adviser, attitudes to climate change, environmental was ambassador to China, and the list in his CV groups on the one hand and the government on of policy, academic, diplomatic, business and other the other succeeded in making [Labor’s] position roles goes for pages. He founded renewables com- on climate change appear weak or equivocal. pany Zen Energy. It is now controlled by Greensteel This undermined what otherwise would have businessman Sanjeev Gupta, who owns the Whyalla been an advantage among voters who favoured steelworks and is developing a pumped-hydro and strong action on climate change. solar power project to help power it. Garnaut does not make the mistake of pretend- Garnaut absolves renewables of any blame ing that Australia can solve its climate challenges by for Australia’s rising electricity prices, saying, its own efforts. In a succinct encapsulation of what “expanded supply from solar and wind could only he called the “diabolical policy problem” of climate reduce and never increase market prices in the short change, Garnaut emphasises that the “relevant miti- term”. Instead, he lays the blame on major regula- gation is global”, but the “costs of various levels of tory mistakes in electricity privatisation and cor- mitigation for a single country depend mainly on the poratisation, the export of east coast gas raising extent of its own mitigation”. prices to Australian generators, and oligopolistic Garnaut solved the diabolical problem for pricing in each state market by a small number of Australia with his Climate Change Review for dominant generator-retailers. He also fingers “policy Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the premiers in uncertainty inhibiting investment in generation and 2008. He updated his approach in 2011 for Prime transmission” following the repeal of the carbon Minister Julia Gillard, which her minority govern- price regime. ment passed as the Clean Energy Futures package. Naturally, the economist Garnaut remains fully Carbon pricing at $23 per tonne started on July 1, committed to a comprehensive carbon price, but rec- 2012. Tony Abbott’s Coalition campaigned against ognises the time is not right: the package, dubbing it the “carbon tax”, and win- ning the 2013 election. Although his government Comprehensive carbon pricing is the centrepiece axed the tax, substantial elements of the pack- of any environmentally and economically age remain, including the Australian Renewable efficient program to reduce emissions … Energy Agency, which finances renewables research But the politics of the past decade have for and development, and the Clean Energy Finance the time being poisoned the well for carbon Corporation, which finances deployment. pricing … I would not support going back to such a he first part ofSuperpower rehashes this history. system without unequivocal bipartisan support in Garnaut then tells us that nothing of strategic the Australian parliament. Timportance has changed since then. The projections of climate change are clearer, improving the esti- bsent such a comprehensive carbon price, for mates of the benefits of reducing emissions. And the the moment, Garnaut sees the continuation and costs of action are lower, because renewable energy maximumA use of established institutions such as the and storage equipment costs are falling and interest Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Clean rates are at record lows. Energy Finance Corporation and the Clean Energy The economic rationalist Garnaut even invokes Regulator, with the Climate Change Authority Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato to support restored to advise on emission reduction targets. the moral, but unquantifiable, “value of conserving Superpower then assesses possible strategic com- our common planetary home and its biological her- petitive advantages for Australia in a carbon-con- itage, and of climate change as a social justice issue”. strained world—we’ve got the land, the sun, the Garnaut’s tone is: I was right then, we’d be better wind and the resource inputs that others haven’t. off if we’d stuck to the Clean Energy Futures pack- The economic core of Garnaut’s argument is age I devised, and I’m even righter now. based on unprecedentedly low interest rates mak- Garnaut minimises the role climate change pol- ing capital cheap, renewable equipment such as

Quadrant March 2020 89 Books solar panels, wind turbines and batteries continu- coalition of the willing. There are some signs that ing to become cheaper through increasingly massive point to this possibility: Kawasaki Heavy Industries production, and meaningful global restrictions on is piloting a liquid-hydrogen supply chain from carbon dioxide emissions with an attached emissions Victoria’s Latrobe Valley to Japan, Mitsui is invest- trading regime. ing record amounts in Australia, and a consortium These factors, Garnaut says, together with is looking to build a 4500-kilometre transmission Australia’s large land mass with good solar, wind, line connecting Singapore to a massive solar farm biomass and mineral resources, and the difficulty proposed for Tennant Creek. and cost of transporting over long distances elec- Nevertheless, I am sceptical about whether there tricity, or the energy-carrier liquid hydrogen, make will be enough incentive to power Garnaut’s renew- Australia a natural place for Japan, Korea and other ables-driven industrial renaissance in Australia. The countries to base their heavy industries such as steel, industries involved, particularly steel, aluminium aluminium and energy-intensive chemicals. and explosives, are strategically important, both Garnaut sees Australia growing a renewables- industrially and militarily. But Garnaut only sees powered, export-oriented, liquid-hydrogen industry them as commodities: in “a zero-carbon world econ- despite the technical and cost chal- omy, there would be no economic lenges. This would compensate for sense in any aluminium or iron the loss of fossil-fuel exports. smelting in Japan or Korea”. Nor Australia also has the agricul- Garnaut imagines does Garnaut discuss the implied tural expertise and land to develop a renewables-only job losses and political difficulties biomass as a feedstock for chemicals, electricity system de-industrialisation might pose for replacing fossil fuels, and to store those countries—perhaps because carbon in the landscape. Compared generating twice as he doesn’t countenance the possibil- with 2008, when Garnaut thought much electricity as our ity that no global regime of emis- Australia would be a buyer of inter- sion limits coupled with a trading national emissions permits, he now current one to meet scheme will be agreed. In his mind thinks we can be an exporter, sell- the needs of minerals- they’ll have no choice, because ing permits into an international processing and they’ll have to reduce emissions, emissions trading regime. don’t have domestic access to large- For Garnaut, it’s all positive— electrified transport. scale renewables, and nuclear power cheap electricity from renewables, seems to be off Garnaut’s menu. a renaissance for regional heavy Overlooked too are any pesky industry, new energy exports, a rebirth of Australia’s local difficulties Australian governments might agriculture and land sectors, and lower emissions. face implementing his vision. Garnaut imagines a renewables-only electricity system generating twice arnaut’s confidence in globally enforceable as much electricity as our current one to meet the limits on emissions and a workable emissions needs of minerals-processing and electrified trans- tradingG regime seems misplaced. No binding tar- port. This implies many hundreds of big wind farms gets have been agreed since the Kyoto protocol of and solar farms, many pumped hydro and other 1997, amended in 2012 at Doha. But its 2020 targets storage schemes, and big, long-distance transmis- cover only thirty-six countries (including Australia) sion lines. Garnaut does not countenance that these collectively responsible for less than 20 per cent of projects might face local or other opposition, or global emissions. After 2020, there are only the vol- regulatory challenges arising from, say, threats to untary national pledges made under the 2015 Paris endangered birds, or to human health and amen- agreement. The Madrid conference in 2019 failed to ity. He appears blind to the challenges illustrated by agree on global rules for emissions trading, its key Bob Brown’s objections to a “mega wind farm” on objective. The three largest emitters of carbon diox- Tasmania’s Robbins Island, with a transmission line ide—China, America and India—have not agreed through “wild and scenic countryside”. In New South to binding targets. These three countries account Wales, the Independent Planning Commission has for about half of global emissions. Understandably, upheld the rejection of the Crookwell 3 wind farm, China’s and India’s emissions continue to rise, as do stating, “visual impacts of the project are unaccept- emissions from scores of developing countries. able given the significant visual impacts on multiple Absent a global agreement, it is possible that residences”. bilateral ones, for example by Australia with Japan, Similarly, Garnaut’s vision for biomass industries Korea and Singapore, or with the UK and Europe, and carbon storage in the landscape flies high could to some extent support Garnaut’s vision—a above any considerations of regional histories,

90 Quadrant March 2020 Books traditions or competing interests that might [National Electricity Market]”. Thus, the Australian resist change. Garnaut’s large-scale landscape government, through the SNEG, would be the final interventionism might also encounter resistance guarantor of electricity supply. from environmentalists. Garnaut goes to some trouble to say of places that arnaut’s other policy recommendations to trans- will suffer job losses in the coal and energy genera- form the grid include: the government helping tion sectors that there “will be special advantages at developersG of appropriate new generation projects first in the old transmissions nodes for coal genera- secure finance by guaranteeing long-term revenue tion: the Upper Spencer Gulf, Collie, the Latrobe through energy offtake agreements; and allowing Valley, Newcastle, Gladstone … Northern Tasmania the development of unregulated transmission infra- and Portland present variations on the theme”. But, structure that would connect load centres to regions through omission, he leaves the impression that the with high-quality opportunities for renewable gen- new jobs he envisages will come on stream at the eration, or for storage, and paying operators for the same time, and with similar wages and conditions, security and reliability benefits to the grid. as the ones that might be lost. Or perhaps from his Though apparently modest, these proposals all economist’s perspective he views any mismatches involve a notable increase in the Australian govern- as a process of economic structural adjustment that ment’s involvement in the electricity grid and mar- people will just have to accommodate. ket. It would be underwriting demand for the output Garnaut does point out that to realise his vision of renewables projects, rewarding unregulated trans- Australia needs to tackle its “disadvantages in high mission infrastructure investors for “grid benefits”, construction costs … and in many transport, energy and would be the ultimate guarantor of grid supply. distribution and other infrastructure services”. He The last one is quite a sleeper, because the cost of blames “oligopoly, high costs and inflexibility in storage, and therefore supply security in a renewa- supply chains”. This poses something of a quan- bles-only grid, rises as the requirements for capacity dary for Labor, challenging the interests of the big and duration increase. The government would be on Australian constructors and the powerful CFMEU. the hook to cover the costly risk of a calm or cloudy Governments are highly involved with these players week, with the private sector only having to cover through massive, long-term infrastructure agendas. the less costly, shorter-term and lower-capacity stor- I can’t see taking on the major constructors and the age requirements. CFMEU to deliver low-cost renewables, storage and Garnaut’s key initiatives for the land sector are transmission infrastructure being as easy as Garnaut further research and development, and an expanded seems to imply with his breezy call for “new entrants Emissions Reduction Fund (now the Climate with more positive attitudes to innovation and glo- Solutions Fund), in which projects that can dem- bally competitive pricing”. onstrate emissions abatement earn carbon credits, Garnaut is also very optimistic about the costs of which can be sold to the government or to oth- storage to firm supply from intermittent renewable ers wanting to offset their emissions, and links to electricity generators, saying that today, “the cost international carbon trading schemes. Most of the of firming would typically add $5 to $20 per mega- projects so far have been landscape projects, such as watt hour to total costs”. This is unreferenced, and forestry or soil carbon. I can only assume it relates to modest capacity stor- His agricultural futurism also foresees livestock age for up to a few hours. The estimate may be fine industries downsizing. He predicts, “Products from when renewables are contributing into a grid that processes using animal stem cells to grow chemically remains dominated by reliable generators, but larger indistinguishable meat substitutes from biomass capacity, longer duration storage is needed for the will also become indistinguishable in taste, texture renewables-only grid Garnaut envisages. Recent US and nutrition to meat from the killed animal …” research concludes that the levelised cost of longer Moving to transport, the sweeping scale and the duration storage is much higher—on the order of optimism of Garnaut’s vision for change are clear: US$186 per megawatt hour for pumped hydro, and US$285 per megawatt hour for lithium-ion battery Battery and hydrogen electric vehicles will facilities, over a forty-year operating life. sooner rather than later be highly competitive This may be the key reason Garnaut suggests with and replace internal combustion engines. dividing Snowy Hydro into a generator-retailer and The expansion of rail and more compact cities a separate pumped hydro storage capacity, which with greater opportunities for public and active he says could be called the Snowy National Energy (walking and cycling) transport are valuable Guarantee (SNEG). The SNEG “would be given in themselves, but also important to emissions the sole purpose of guaranteeing the reliability of the levels for the period before the full electrification

Quadrant March 2020 91 Books

of motor transport … renaissance of Australian manufacturing. The regulatory authorities would need to TheAustralian ’s Adam Creighton reminded us in insist upon time-of-use pricing that shifts the December 2019: “Economists such as Ross Garnaut charging of vehicles away from the peaks in grid … once promised a hi-tech manufacturing future use and wholesale prices … if we opened ourselves up to the world. That has not happened.” Nevertheless, Garnaut’s vision clev- It also perfectly illustrates Garnaut’s techno- erly mixes plausible reorientations of long-standing cratic approach. Time-of-use pricing of electricity Australian themes, transferring Australia’s tradi- has proved a hard sell. Only Victoria has rolled out tional competitive advantage in cheap electricity the necessary smart meters and allowed a choice from coal to a similar competitive advantage in a between “flat rates” and “new, flexible” pricing. carbon-constrained world in cheap electricity from Relatively few Victorians have opted for it. Urban renewables. He builds on that with the familiar goal densification has been politically contentious almost of using cheap power to value-add to Australia’s everywhere. Walking and cycling have proved dif- mineral resource endowments. And he reorients ficult to develop on a large scale—the 2019 National Australia’s competitive advantages in food and Cycling Survey found that “Australian cycling is in fibre towards biomass to substitute for fossil fuels free-fall, and has been since the National Cycling as a chemicals feedstock, and to store carbon in the Participation strategy was launched in 2011.” landscape. Superpower is a seductive cocktail of strategic arnaut seems aware that the relentless opti- economic visioning, the Pope’s climate morality, mism of his tone in Superpower strains cred- faith in a global agreement to limit emissions and ibility,G because he goes to the trouble of defending it: trade carbon credits, and Wellsian techno-futurism. But the bottom line is that Garnaut has con- The awful reality is that we may fail to change vinced himself that zero-emissions, renewable elec- far and fast enough, and that our grandchildren tricity can be reliable and almost free. And with that will inherit a parched and disordered country miracle in hand anything is possible. in which a past time of prosperity, democracy Garnaut’s Superpower is a renewables romance. and good order is a myth of origin. Yes, that is a possibility. And yes, sometimes I do think Dr Michael Green has a PhD in Systems Engineering. that the time of hope has passed. But there is still a path to a manageable outcome. And I see no good purpose in acceding to despair while the path to a manageable outcome remains open to us. Ivan Head In outlining the path, Garnaut gives no consid- Understanding Jihad eration to potential resistance from the Australian electorate for any of the initiatives in Superpower— Violence in the Name of God: The Militant emissions targets, joining global trading schemes, Jihadist Response to Modernity hundreds of massive new wind and solar farms whose by Joel Hodge intermittent output is underwritten by government, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 284 pages, $153 subsidies for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, time-of-use pricing for electricity, urban densifica- r Joel Hodge, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty tion, landscape interventionism, a clear agenda to of Theology and Philosophy at the Australian reintroduce a comprehensive carbon pricing regime, DCatholic University, has written an extremely impor- the list goes on. Nor yet any resistance to his top- tant book on the threat to the stability of the global down, totalising transformation of Australia’s econ- human city posed by terror, violence and militant omy and the lifestyles of Australians. jihadism. The book is a masterly dissection of this Neither does he consider implementation chal- complex and disconcerting topic: a deeply trauma- lenges—the potential for large-scale blackouts if the tising topic when encountered in the flesh. Part of transition to a renewables-dominant grid is mis- the deep puzzle arises from our incapacity to begin managed, or poor acceptance of load shifting; prob- to understand the inversion of values that redescribes lems with renewables equipment or electric vehicles, the death of innocents as not only a good thing, but or with industry and regional transition, or with mandated and required to bring about some further fraud or failures in schemes to sequester carbon in maximally desirous end. the landscape; or with failure to realise the promised Hodge provides a lucid analysis of the core drivers

92 Quadrant March 2020 Books that lead to terror, and offers carefully thought- partially and over time. out pathways in response; pathways that carry an The book also cautions against drives to the use illumination for the good of those who travel them. of terror in the (mistaken) belief that this will cre- His book is ultimately about values and order in the ate a utopian future, or that indiscriminate violence sense of Eric Voegelin’s metaxis—the participatory against the individual and against many can instan- realm of existence in which all humans share and tiate a kingdom of heaven. Such movements are which is subject to distortions and inversions. not new and not confined to one tradition. Hodge Hodge introduces overlapping themes via theo­ discusses trends in the West that have seen such retical reflection to explore the core topic. He irruptions, and his discussion of historical trends focuses on extremely religious adherents or practi- from Napoleon to the present must be pondered. tioners engaging in new forms of normative violence (In reading Hodge, I was reminded of Churchill to achieve supposedly desirable ends. He explores in 1925, warning that the time was coming when a the character or inner form of the god in question, bomb the size of an orange could destroy a whole the god appealed to, and whether or not violence city block.) and terror are drivers emerging from that inner form To that end, Hodge’s discussion of the nation- (what St John in his foundational gospel text calls state and nationalism, a term to which he is sensitive, the bosom or depths of the Father). He also sur- is particularly useful to the wider study of terror veys with minute accuracy a number of advocates of and any dependence it may have on scapegoating terror-violence in the last hundred years. the person or people defined as “not us”, the “other”. There is much more than these three themes to He uses it to account in part for the collapse into Hodge’s masterly work, which is Volume 10 in the rivalrous conflict of an increasingly disastrous impressive series “Violence, Desire and the Sacred” scale that plagued Europe from the time of the edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming and Hodge. French Revolution and Napoleon and on to the He comes equipped with a thoughtfully researched conclusion of the Second World War. Perhaps it can interpretive framework in the multi-disciplinary be tracked to 1648 and the end of the Thirty Years work of the late French Catholic intellectual War. Nineteenth-century French-German rivalry René Girard. Hodge’s scoping of Girard’s schema is a goldmine for further exploration of this view (mimetic theory, mimetic rivalry, co-relational rival- of national identity and conflict. Specifically, the rous desire, the scapegoating of the “other” as the work of Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general cause of all problems, and even the murderous desire and admirer of Napoleon, is prominently in the to remove one’s rival who stands between oneself background in Hodge’s notion that the pendulum of and the object of desire) provides a powerful explor- conflict swings to extremes as enmities are informed atory tool for the study of terror, and specifically by leaps in the machinery and technology of killing. religious terror. Hodge notes that this combines with Napoleon’s If we are to have a grand narrative, we must get mobilisation of the whole French people as a national it right and be able to show why terror, no matter entity, a grand army in a morally justified crusade worked by whom, can have no part in it—despite against others as yet unliberated and living in the those for whom it has become a legitimating passion. delusions of the unreformed world. On this view, two hundred years ago, Napoleon’s odge gives the reader a synthetic response that libido dominandi could be hidden behind a new moral draws on multiple sources, each of which is a imperative to go to war. In some ways, Hodge iden- demonstrationH of his commitment to scholarship tifies here an early part-analogy for the later jihad- and research. He exemplifies modern, informed ist concern for the Islamic faithful as victim of “the Catholic scholarship at its best. His book opens national other” who need by force to be brought into doors all over the place and enables the reader to the better total order of things and saved from the better track a deposit that began with the incarna- age of ignorance. tional victim who was innocent, and who stands However we approach the European questions, with the innocent victims of every age from Abel the reader does well to add the study of the works to the present. Hodge’s work helps all who seek to of Elie Kedourie on nationalism to further open up recover the Abrahamic heritage as the religion of the application of flawed Euro-American notions of the innocent victim and whose God is the God of nationalism and nationhood to the older existing forgiveness and self-giving grace, uniformly and power structure of the Middle East. unambiguously. He notes (specifically on pages In this respect, Hodge is astutely correct when 194-95) that this breakthrough insight in human he notes the effects of the abolition of the Ottoman civilisation does not emerge absolutely all at once caliphate in 1924 as part of the detritus of the First and is often received and intuited developmentally, World War and since the extended Turkish-Greek

Quadrant March 2020 93 Books conflict. This powerful religious-political symbol of in the original meaning of that term. a meta-region or meta-nation is alive again today One of Hodge’s most challenging insights lies in and has been claimed by those who take offence at his apprehension that jihadists may have reverted to what they see as the excesses of the secular or god- explicit notions of pre-Abrahamic human sacrifice less West and its obsession with money and wealth. in the domain of archaic religions where the loss of It is a short step to symbolise a Western nation the human becomes a “good to bring about good” as Satan visible, to be opposed by all means. The or avert the displeasure of the deity. (I add that in caliphate remains as the symbol of authority prior to my opinion there are elements of human sacrifice in and different from pan-Arab nationalism considered the Roman triumph following the Jewish War, as a as a mirror of the secular West. close reading of Josephus’s The Jewish War uninten- tionally discloses.) odge usefully discusses the Egyptian “intellec- In all, this leads Hodge into the more explicit tual” . I recommend close read- identification of the core Christian faith that reveals Hing of Qutb in English as a tester to one’s Christian a God of mercy and love, even in and through the theology and to what one really thinks about God incarnation and death of the Son; which death is and how God might act in the world, and what seen as sacrifice, or even mysteriously as the sacri- God preferences, and what “I” might do to aid the fice that ends sacrifice and says to humanity, “We cause. The challenge, as Hodge discerns, lies where need have no more of this.” This victim rises from a vanguard or exemplary community is created to the dead, not to seek vengeance or even justice for act and must act, to make the total system of a faith the wrong done but to lead humanity as the first- active and visible in this life, even as the form of a born of many brothers and sisters who can hope for reformed society. To put a Qutb-like question to a a syndoxa (co-participatory glory) that begins in this Christian, one might ask, “And what do you think life and leads into a life to come that is freed from might happen if you pray the Lord’s Prayer daily death and decay. and wait for God to change the world?” The issue We are left to ponder more fully the core realities then arises of what a vanguard or exemplary com- of the sacrifice of the Mass that now averts human munity of Christians might engage in to make the bloodshed, eschews and turns from violence and Kingdom of God more real on earth—why acts of leaves us with the call to love our (meta-national) violence are excluded and supplanted by what were human and enables us, who are not wor- once called “works of corporal mercy”. Different thy, to offer a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving models and exemplars have emerged at different and live in love and charity with our neighbours. times in the Christian domain, some with greater I think Joel Hodge’s book will be one of the best claims to success than others: and at times betrayals theological texts of 2020. of these gospel insights have occurred, as Pope John Paul II attempted to acknowledge at the end of the Ivan Head is the former Warden of St Paul’s College second millennium. Sydney. His “Thoughts on Sayyid Qutb’s Jihad” This striving is different from the jihad of some appeared in the July-August 2019 issue. of Qutb’s followers who embraced a martyrdom in works of terror as a newly legitimated vanguard activity against the “Satan” as enemy. This seemed to arise in part from a reading of the Koran that for- bids anything to stand alongside the one true God Greg Walsh or stand between God and the believer. “Secularity” can in some senses move into that sacred space and Religious Liberty for All function as self-referencing. Some might begin to see this as hostile to the One God and to express Free to Believe: The Battle over Religious a self-referencing, self-contained mindset. The Liberty in America enlightenment in the principal nations of the West by Luke Goodrich can get drawn in here. These nations were encoun- Multnomah, 2019, 288 pages, $15.99 tered by the Islamic world through the ages of empire (Britain and France and Germany) and lat- xpert religious liberty litigator Luke Goodrich terly through their heir in the United States. More provides a compelling account of the impor- comprehensively of course, one must study this Etance of religious liberty in Free to Believe. Goodrich encounter all the way back to the irruption of Islam, is vice-president and senior counsel at the Becket initially in the person of Mohammed, and then in Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm dedicated to the movement that spread with ecumenical intent— protecting religious liberty for all. His expertise in

94 Quadrant March 2020 Books religious liberty has been developed through liti- ion, allowing for the merits of ideas to be continually gating some of the most significant religious liberty tested, social diversity to flourish and social conflict cases in recent history, making him an ideal author to be reduced. It is also closely associated with other to explain why religious liberty must be protected fundamental rights such as free speech, freedom of and how this should be done. association and freedom of assembly. Government He begins his book with a discussion of the action that violates religious liberty will often vio- Christian view that God grants individuals the abil- late these other rights, and such actions can make ity to freely choose or reject a relationship with God. it easier for governments to engage in future rights Relying on this understanding, Goodrich argues violations. that if even God respects our freedom in religious Goodrich further observes that a core element of matters then there is a clear obligation on Christians religious liberty is the understanding that the state to respect religious liberty. This understanding, he is not the ultimate source of authority for individu- explains, also supports appropriate limits on gov- als. This conviction supports important conclusions ernment power, as a failure by the state to uphold about the limits of state power such as the view that religious liberty would be an unjust attempt by the rights are not gifts of the government that can be government “to invade a realm that belongs only to granted and removed at the whims of politicians God” and “a denial of something that every human and judges. being deserves—the opportunity to freely embrace After explaining why religious liberty should or reject relationship with God”. be supported by all, Goodrich addresses some of Although Goodrich has a central focus on per- the more controversial religious liberty challenges suading Christians why they should defend religious in areas such as free speech, abortion, euthanasia, liberty for all, he also addresses why people of every same-sex relationships and government funding. faith and none should support religious liberty. To He notes that many of these challenges have only help overcome the doubts many have about religious recently arisen due to major social changes including liberty Goodrich proposes that religious liberty a widespread rejection of absolute truth, the insis- simply means that “government, within reasonable tence that abortion and sexual autonomy must be limits, leaves religion alone as much as possible”. approved by everyone, the decline in religious affili- This definition importantly recognises that religious ation and an increase in religious diversity making it liberty can be limited when its expression is harmful harder to accommodate claims for religious liberty. to society. He provides child sacrifice and religious The book concludes with specific advice to indi- terrorists as obvious examples while recognising viduals and organisations on how to navigate the that in many other situations knowing when limita- threats to religious liberty that lie ahead. Goodrich tions are justified is more difficult. emphasises the importance of religious organisations One of the central reasons Goodrich proposes having clearly defined objectives, hiring employ- for why religious liberty should be protected is that ees who support those objectives, and being clear it respects the ability of all individuals to reach their about their expectations for their employees. He own conclusion about the transcendent and to order also stresses the need to obtain quality legal advice their lives in accordance with their conclusion. Such before conflicts arise and to be politically involved to protection applies to all people and is not limited ensure government respects religious liberty. to Christianity and other theistic worldviews. The Perhaps surprisingly for a lawyer, he urges United States Supreme Court and international believers not to be fixated on winning religious human rights bodies, for example, clearly affirm liberty conflicts but to focus on being Christ-like, that religious liberty protects the beliefs of atheists, to treat those on the other side of a disagreement such as a conscientious objection to military service with respect and to search for ways, without moral grounded in humanist convictions. compromise, to amicably resolve religious liberty Properly limited religious liberty also allows reli- conflicts. gion to play a central role in producing the virtu- Free to Believe is an important contribution to the ous citizens essential for successful democracies and religious liberty debate from one of America’s lead- safeguards the extraordinary voluntary contribution ing religious liberty attorneys. It is essential read- that religions make to social welfare. This contribu- ing for anyone interested in how best to address the tion in the United States was estimated at over $1 challenging religious liberty conflicts that will arise trillion a year in a 2016 study conducted by Brian in the years ahead. Grim from the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation. Greg Walsh is a law lecturer at the University of Notre An additional benefit of religious liberty is that it Dame Australia and the author of Religious Schools protects individuals who dissent from majority opin- and Discrimination Law.

Quadrant March 2020 95 Joe Dolce Ride Like a Girl: The Making of a Champion

It felt pretty good to wake up on the Wednesday died from a hole in the heart three days after he was morning knowing there was a little Melbourne Cup born. When Michelle arrived, seven years later, in next to the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen 1985, on Michael’s birthday, September 29, she was table. named in memory of him. Michael and Michelle —Michelle Payne mean “gift from God”. Michelle’s mother Mary was killed in a car ide Like a Girl (2019), tells the true story of crash when Michelle was six months old, and Michelle Payne (played by Teresa Palmer) the ten Payne children, Brigid, Therese, Maree, the first, and only, woman jockey to win Bernadette, Patrick, Margaret, Andrew, Cathy, Rthe Melbourne Cup in its 160-year history. It was Stephen and Michelle, were raised solely by their directed by Australian actress Rachel Griffiths, father, Paddy (played in the film by Sam Neill). who also co-produced it with Richard Keddie and Coming from three generations of horse train- Susie Montague, with a script by Elise McCredie. ers, she grew up with horses: “Horses were part of There were 100,000 people at the 2015 Cup, us and being with them was as natural as breath- where the Japanese entrant Fame Game had been ing.” With her brother Stevie, who was born with the favourite. Payne was also competing against Down syndrome, and also had a gift for under- her own family members. Her sister Maree’s hus- standing horses, she said, as children, they watched band, Brent Prebble, was riding Bondi Beach and the movie Phar Lap hundreds of times. Stevie plays her sister Cathy’s husband, Kerrin McEvoy, was himself in Ride Like a Girl and is a seamless and riding Excess Knowledge. natural actor. Michelle Payne had been nearly killed by a fall, The Payne family originated in New Zealand, riding at Sandown in 2001, but ignoring medi- where Paddy worked as a horseman and owner- cal advice she continued to compete. In 2013, she trainer, which she says is a role far more common discovered a six-year-old gelding thoroughbred, in New Zealand than Australia. The family emi- trained by Darren Weir, named Prince of Penzance, grated to Australia during a visit to compete in who, due to accidents and illness, had pretty much the Brisbane Winter Carnival, and bought prop- been written off. Together, this unlikely and dam- erty outside Ballarat, a one-acre block as a fam- aged duo overcame odds of 100-1 to win one of ily home in Miners Rest, and a forty-acre paddock the most prestigious races in the world. Out of the that backed onto the Ballarat Racecourse. Michelle twenty-four horses racing, only one, Sertorius, had said, “By the time I was thirteen, I was riding on longer odds. the training tracks at Ballarat.” She left school at Ride Like a Girl is an inspiring story about an fifteen to become an apprentice jockey. authentic champion. It is rendered faithfully in this Paddy also became a farmer, acquiring a 250-acre film adaptation, and is likely destined, in the tradi- dairy farm, and moving himself and the younger tion of Phar Lap, to become an Australian classic. children to work the farm, leaving the older kids at Richard Keddie, known for his television biopics their home in Miners Rest. on Bob Hawke and John Curtin, said he wanted There was a book about the family in 1996, writ- the film to have “that old-fashioned, matinee feel”. ten by Tony Kneebone, The Paynes: The Struggle, the When she was five years old, and asked what she Pain, the Glory, but Michelle Payne told her own wanted to be when she grew up, Michelle Payne story in 2016, with John Harms, to expand on her said, “I just want to win the Melbourne Cup.” Her Melbourne Cup win and to talk more intimately parents had earlier lost a child, Michael, who had about her views on racing, called Life As I Know It.

96 Quadrant March 2020 Ride Like a Girl: The Making of a Champion

Her book served as the primary reference for the Sydney Olympics.” film script. But after watching the film and reading Payne’s The Payne genealogical tree is peppered with frank and enthusiastic account of her life, I find extra-large families. Michelle’s grandfather was this “working title” a bit press-ganged onto a much born on the North Island of New Zealand and deeper story of a true Australian champion whose came from a family of ten children. Her grand- main motivation was not to make political state- mother, born in Ireland, also came from a family of ments about inequalities between the sexes, but to ten. Her mother Mary was also one of ten children. surpass her personal best every time she raced. All were devout Roman Catholics; Michelle said The Melbourne critic Jim Schembri wrote: they had a “good Catholic home”. Rachel Griffiths, born in 1968, was raised in We see Payne receive guffaws of sexist exclusion Melbourne as a Catholic but, in 2002, stated she in the film but they’re never more than was an atheist. In 2015 she declared that she was expressions of ignorance. Once the ignorance is once again a practising Catholic. Ride Like a Girl is addressed by her performance on the track, the her motion picture directorial debut. hot air evaporates.

n spite of the loaded overtones of the title, Ride In truth, Michelle Payne has been surrounded Like a Girl, Griffiths says, “It is not a man- by strong and kind men her entire life. She said, Ishaming movie.” It began as simply a working title “We lived in a crazy house of unsated affection and she said, “I always loved it. It was never sure where there was love in the dust.” After her mother whether we’d get a better one. We never did.” died, her father raised their ten children by him- Michelle Payne’s book is called Life As I Know self, most of them becoming champion riders. She It, so the title of the film wouldn’t have been her said her father taught her: suggestion, although she did say, in an interview with Bridie Jabour of the Guardian: how to live with horses, in the same place as horses and to look after them. To treat them It’s such a chauvinistic sport, a lot of the with respect but to also win their respect, to be owners wanted to kick me off … it’s a very part of their day and to ride them. He taught male-dominated sport and people think we me to believe in the relationship between horse are not strong enough and all of the rest of it and jockey. ... It’s not all about strength, there is so much more involved, getting the horse into a rhythm, Her brother Stevie was, and probably remains, getting the horse to try for you ... I’m so glad her best friend, and her two older brothers, Patrick to win the Melbourne Cup and hopefully it and Andrew, were racing long before she was will help female jockeys from now on to get (Patrick was the first family member to ride in more of a go. the Melbourne Cup, in 1991) and were family role models for her. Not to mention the male trainers The title of the film suggests the “Like a Girl” who stood by her, and guided her, on her way to ads that were broadcast during the 2014 American glory. Superbowl. Variations of the classic swipe include “throw like a girl” and “hit like a girl”, with the ichelle Payne initially had some resistance implication that to do something “like a girl”, is to from her family about assisting with the do it badly. Predating all the Twitter chatter, back Mmaking of the film, some of them arguing, “We in 2013, the term “play like a girl” was banned by the don’t want to talk about our family, we’re private Liverpool Football Club, who issued a handbook people.” She also wasn’t keen about having a movie of phrases and words whose usage was no longer made about her life but came to trust Griffiths. acceptable, either on the playing field or from fans, Michelle was the youngest in her family, as was including: man up, wog, yid, raghead, fag, ladyboy, Griffiths, who remarked, “I think the youngest midget and retard, amongst many others. The film children are very tenacious.” title was no doubt an attempt to reclaim this worn Griffiths had been looking for an Australian phrase and recast it as a term of empowerment. story to direct, reading a lot of books and manu- Jessica Montague of Vogue said: “When scripts but, she says, “I happened to be watching Michelle Payne won the Melbourne Cup wear- the Melbourne Cup the day Michelle won and in ing the colours of the suffragettes [purple, green just five minutes I knew.” It took her four years to and white] and Paspaley pearl earrings, it ranked realise the project. up there with Cathy Freeman taking gold at the Although well known and successful as an

Quadrant March 2020 97 Ride Like a Girl: The Making of a Champion actor, in films such as Muriel’s Wedding and Hilary her to a racehorse. After three weeks of struggle, and Jackie, Griffiths’s only previous experience as a she said that something just “clicked”. She enjoyed director had been on several episodes of the won- working with Michelle’s brother, Stevie: derful television series Indian Summers, in which she also acted. he is so funny. Of all the actors on the show There is an extraordinary recreation of the he’s the one that cracked me up all the time. Melbourne Cup race in the movie, and an equally He had these brilliant one-liners that he would stunning description of it, from Payne’s perspec- pull out all the time and just had me on the tive, in her book. The main impression that her floor laughing. written personal account gave me was that racing is a vastly under-appreciated and extremely high-risk Stevie wasn’t sure he would be able to act, but sport. She writes: he turned out to be a natural. Sam Neill met Michelle’s father, Paddy Payne, Racing is dangerous. There’s no point dressing and studied his mannerisms in order to play him it up or trying to suggest otherwise. Horses accurately. Paddy Payne confessed to Neill that are beautiful animals but they are much bigger he had never seen any of his films, to which Neill than you think they would be. Racehorses look good-naturedly replied, “Well, I’m not very good.” so sleek and fine, yet they weigh over 500 kgs. But Michelle commented after watching him por- They have delicate legs that are surprisingly tray her father, “He’s so my dad.” Stevie agreed. skinny with hard hooves. They run very fast— In an interview with Karl Quinn of the Courier, at about 60 to 70 kms per hour. That’s 100 Teresa Palmer said: metres in six seconds. after I’d been working with Sam for a couple of Richard Keddie said they broke a lot of cameras weeks, I met Paddy, and I just could not believe shooting the racing sequences: “It’s an unbelievably how perfectly Paddy was being portrayed by dangerous sport. I had no idea how dangerous it Sam. Even the way he holds his hands behind is. So it was really hard filming it and protecting his back, and his intonation on certain words, everyone.” it’s exactly the same as Paddy. A year after winning the Cup, Payne had another serious fall at Mildura, where she suffered Jim Schembri wrote that the role fitted Sam a torn pancreas. She told the media that after the Neill “like a favourite cardigan”. accident she could not even remember winning Reviews of the film have been mixed. Luke the Melbourne Cup and “had to Google it”. Four Buckmaster of the Guardian said, “This is play- months later she returned to racing, but soberly to-the-bleachers entertainment, loaded with remarked: Hallmark sentiment and configured with an atmospheric integrity a cut above a soft drink com- Increasingly reports were coming out mercial.” Francesca Rudkin of the New Zealand in America about sportspeople and the Herald, wrote, “If you’ve got a daughter who is too neurological and mental health issues that old for animations, but too young for many teenage were plaguing them. Boxers to footballers. films, Ride Like a Girl is the perfect film to fill the Anyone in collision sports. Medical science was gap.” Stephen Romei, in the Australian, called it “a developing its understanding that concussion winner … largely because Griffiths makes it less had serious implications. I had to live with about the racetrack and more about family, friends, that. gender bias in sport and elsewhere”.

Payne planned to ride Prince of Penzance again n 2017, Michelle Payne tested positive for an in the 2016 Melbourne Cup, but the racehorse frac- appetite suppressant forbidden by the Australian tured a leg the month before at Caulfield, and three racingI rules, and was banned from racing for four screws inserted into its foreleg ended that dream, weeks. She admitted taking the drug and apolo- and, most likely, its racing career. gised publicly. Teresa Palmer, who played Payne in the movie, In 2019, trainer Darren Weir was charged with visited Payne at home, watched her ride and train animal cruelty offences for possessing electric and asked her many questions about her life grow- shock jiggers—devices, often used with a whip, ing up. Palmer had limited experience with horses, that deliver an electric shock to the horse—includ- and was given two trainers to help her prepare for ing three counts of engaging in the torturing, the role. They started her on a pony and then moved abusing, overworking and terrifying of a racehorse,

98 Quadrant March 2020 Ride Like a Girl: The Making of a Champion and was banned from racing for four years. One of licence in 1993 and has ridden hundreds of win- the screenings of Ride Like a Girl was interrupted ners. Maree got her licence in 1987 and has 600 by animal rights protesters. wins. Therese was licensed in 1985 and rode 450 Sandra Hall of the Sydney Morning Herald winners. She became a trainer in 2000. Brigid was wrote that Ride Like a Girl “suffers from a perva- licensed as a jockey in 1984, riding 41 winners; sive wholesomeness … we may one day have a film she died of a heart attack in 2007. Andrew got that exposes the rough underside of the Australian his licence in 1994, and has ridden 210 winners, horseracing industry but Ride Like a Girl isn’t it”. becoming a trainer in 2000. Cathy was licensed Griffiths was interviewed about the Weir scandal, in 1996, has ridden more than 200 winners, and is telling Demeter Stamell of the Daily Mail: married to Kerrin McEvoy, three-time winner of the Melbourne Cup. Michelle Payne said, “Jockeys I celebrate Darren because he gave Stevie Payne tend to go out with jockeys or people from the a job … he kept Michelle on a Group One. racing industry because no one from the real world I celebrate Darren as the man who saw the would ever put up with the lifestyle.” ability and talents of these two people … why Stephen is the foreman at the family stables in are we talking about ... what he did four years Ballarat. Margaret was the only sibling not to go after? It’s irrelevant. into racing, but she graduated in accountancy and works as Michelle Payne’s accountant. In 2016, he Payne family is a extraordinary family Michelle Payne and her brother Stephen were of jockeys and trainers amassing more than honoured as Queen and King of Moomba. T2000 wins. Michelle Payne, the youngest, has rid- Ride Like a Girl was the highest grossing den some 300 winners. Seven of her siblings also Australian film of 2019. Jim Schembri says: “It became champion jockeys. Patrick (the oldest, serves to reminds us all … that the Australian film now fifty-two) was licensed in 1990 and has rid- industry can, indeed, knock out a decent family den more than 1000 winners. Bernadette got her film when it sets its mind to it.”

All Our Good-Morrows

Till we loved we knew not what we did, wrote Donne of lovers. No whens or thens, only now, this moment’s world, newer than the last— like children to whom figures from the past were characters in story-books, nursery yarns, not breathing lives with their nows behind them, hidden where their heirs would find them staled by history, wiser when gone for good. The old world’s passionless clocks chimed soon. What they waited for had already happened. Hours, centuries, crowded their little room, days changed hands, reclaimed owners. In the end time at their table added them to its store of what lovers did both after and before.

Derek Wright

Quadrant March 2020 99 Philip Drew

Rethinking the Architecture of Bush Dwellings and Settlements

n January 25, 2019, the Swedish sixteen- Highway. It was thrilling. Before this, Australian year-old Greta Thunberg warned World architecture was, for the most part, borrowed and Economic Forum delegates, “Our house imitated overseas architecture. Glenn Murcutt’s Ois on fire!” Eight months later, along the south Kempsey Museum was none of that. It was fresh, and south-east of Australia from Melbourne to new, and best of all it was authentically Australian Brisbane, bushfires on an unprecedented scale and in the sense of being indigenous in spirit. It was a intensity exploded as if in answer. Australians were revolutionary breakthrough in architecture. stunned by the loss of life, the quantity of houses The Kempsey Museum responded to the deli- and infrastructure destroyed, and the estimate of cate quality of the landscape with a softly rounded more than a billion wild animals incinerated. We roof and extended corrugated iron forms. It sat had entered a new era of the climate regime that comfortably among the trees, not out of place, presaged major shifts in ecology that threaten the not needing an English landscape to validate it. It survival of dry eucalyptus forest. belonged. Australia has always been a fire land, but in the When I was preparing my book on Murcutt, spring of 2019 something new began. Prolonged Leaves of Iron, I encountered two of his houses— droughts, we are warned, will be more frequent, examples of architecture that dealt with the fire bushfires longer and more intense, eucalyptus for- problem directly. It had never crossed my mind till est will retreat under intensifying cycles of bush- then that there might be an architectural solution, fires and desiccation. much less what might be its aesthetic consequences. In the 1950s, growing up at Coffs Harbour on Murcutt’s solutions, sadly, have been ignored. the north coast of New South Wales, I remember Let me describe the Laurie Short House at the town enclosed on three sides above the banana Terrey Hills. The site of the house was two and a plantations by bushfire, a wildly dancing cordon half hectares surrounded by Ku-ring-gai National of red and yellow against the black night, and the Park, superimposed against a broad backdrop of sound of exploding eucalypts, as loud as heavy twisted casuarina salt-stung scrub. Murcutt had artillery. Fire is a permanent quality of our land- just gone into private practice as a sole practitioner scape. Yet 230 years on, we still behave as though and saw the project as an opportunity to show his we live in a green and pleasant land like Kent or mettle. He did not disappoint. His design began as the English Lake District. Deluded, we construct a homage to the German modernist Mies van der our houses in defiance of our knowledge. Rohe, and was inspired initially by Mies’s elegant What occurred this summer was not inevitable. Farnsworth pavilion at Plano, Illinois. No one Houses can be designed that survive intense fire- who has been to Chicago could possibly mistake storms. This has been known for more than forty Plano, eighty kilometres north of Chicago, with its years. It involves nothing more difficult than the freezing winters, heavy snowfall, sylvan woodland application of existing technology and straightfor- and fiery fall foliage, for Terrey Hills. Mies took ward bush knowhow. To rebuild the same as before the marble Greek temple and re-expressed it as a would be disastrous. transparent steel-and-plate-glass pavilion. It required several designs before Murcutt found et me explain. Arriving back in Australia after his métier and ultimately resolved the complex a year at Washington University in St Louis challenges of geography, landscape, climate and Lin 1983, I discovered the newly completed local place, and crucially, dealt with fire. The Short history museum south of Kempsey on the Pacific house was half-buried and backed into the hillside,

100 Quadrant March 2020 Rethinking the Architecture of Bush Dwellings and Settlements but it retained its original minimalist steel-and- firefighters trying to save his house, which they glass aesthetic and some of the Farnsworth abstract did do … purity and isolation behind large sheets of plate glass. Murcutt included additional refinements Laurie Short’s confidence was justified. The to the Miesian formula: the east-facing rooms design not only saved the house, it eliminated the exposed to the morning sun were shielded by need for volunteer firefighters to attend and risk sliding louvred screens mounted on tracks, and an their lives. open covered space on the north-east corner was shaded by deep-angled steel louvres. decade later, Murcutt designed a house for The design adopted an improved approach to two painters, Sydney Ball and Lyn Eastaway, bushfire defence. It featured a flat concrete water- Abelow a ridge above a steep valley at Glenorie, ponded roof (ten centimetres deep) and long entry north-west of Sydney, which demanded extreme wall clad with black ceramic for fire protection. fire measures. In 1980 Glenorie was very isolated Tiles are superb heat insulation and are used by and there were few houses, an ideal location for two NASA to protect spacecraft during re-entry. At painters whose sole wish was undisturbed quiet in first the plan was to screw-fix three-millimetre beautiful inspiring bush surroundings. Sydney Ball steel plate cladding on the entry wall, but after dis- was a significant abstract artist who exhibited in cussions it was decided to use black tiles instead to New York to considerable acclaim. His paintings reduce the contrast between the black steel frame were large, and their hanging and display became and the panel infill. The same black integrated the raison d’être for the design. the steel frame with the infill and gave the same The house was framed around a single long wall, handsome fire-charred appearance three metres high and six metres overall as the burnt trees surround- long, so placed it could be viewed ing it outside. The house at Plano he design not only frontally. The wall became the was white against brilliant spring T spine; to create sufficient depth for green; at Terrey Hills, it was black saved the house, it to be seen properly it was located against the charred black of burnt it eliminated the opposite the entry, and became the bush. The bony look of the Short back of an equally long north-west house echoes the boniness of its need for volunteer veranda. Under an overhang below surroundings which is tough and firefighters to attend the house, Ball discovered hand adapted to fire. and risk their lives. stencils in an Aboriginal sandstone The sky is important in our gallery. His house became its mod- experience of Australian landscape: ern successor in corrugated iron light reflected from the ponded roof was captured art, Murcutt’s first all-corrugated-iron house. and directed into the interior through semi-circu- The modest floor platform measured seven lar hoods and bounced into the family room. metres by twenty-five metres, and was elevated Soon afterwards, Murcutt’s fire precautions on steel pipes and floated over a series of sand- proved their effectiveness in a conflagration. Even stone ledges. The location of the art wall immedi- as far back as 1972, Murcutt considered a sprinkler ately behind the entry controlled everything. The system around Laurie Short’s house as an addi- couple’s two bedrooms were at one end and the tional layer of protection. In an interview, Murcutt painting gallery in the middle, which flowed into remembered: a single dining and living space separated by a fire- place, then extended outside onto the veranda. We developed a sprinkler system around the The Ball Eastaway pavilion was simplicity itself. site … last fires that came, he rang me and The bathroom, laundry and kitchen, each side of said, “Look, that’s to let you know that the the entry, were behind the blank south-east wall fires came right around the house, but I rolled facing the road. The house is narrow and long, a couple of forty-four-gallon drums of petrol open at each end, so positioned it slipstreams the down from the shed where I’d thought they’d sandstone rock ledges below it. It is near the road explode, into the house.” on the ridge for ease of access. Below the house, the He just stayed in the house with his forty- hillside slips into a steep valley. In strong winds the four-gallon drums of petrol, and the house threat from bushfires can be extreme. Preventive awash in water and nothing was damaged at measures were crucial in determining construction all ... and the interesting thing is Laurie said and materials. Steel was used throughout for the he was by himself, and my brother Gary was structure and wall framing; two steel beams on two sites away and had something like thirty ten-centimetre diameter columns support the

Quadrant March 2020 101 Rethinking the Architecture of Bush Dwellings and Settlements floor, and the walls are hundred-millimetre and Fireproofing settlements means they will need seventy-five millimetre metal studs. Corrugated to be much more compact, like medieval European galvanised iron, screw-fixed horizontally, was towns. Many people won’t take kindly to this, but selected for the cladding outside over hundred- there are social benefits: a communal lifestyle to millimetre Insulwool. The internal walls are lined compensate for loss of individual freedoms and in plasterboard. autonomy, without greatly diminishing ease of Unlike most conventional suburban houses access to wild nature. built in the bush, Murcutt’s most radical innova- What might such a settlement be like? tion was a comprehensive drenching sprinkler sys- Defensible bushfire settlements need to neutral- tem. Sprinklers are mandatory in high-rise office ise ember attacks and counter the intense heat and residential towers. It was exceptional at the produced by firestorms. A perimeter defence ring time to install them in a dwelling. To ensure com- around settlements, configured to deflect wind- plete drenching of the roof and walls, thirty-seven- driven embers and reduce the force and tempera- millimetre diameter water pipes were mounted ture of the fire front, is an elementary requirement. fifty millimetres off the roof and roof shoulders, Throughout history, people have contended with running the entire length with twin-spray noz- marauding bandits, pirates and irregular armies zles at intervals. Under extreme fire conditions seeking booty and captives. The better to defend and ember attack, their function is to drench the themselves, people have built fortified, walled set- entire external corrugated building skin in a uni- tlements for their common defence and abandoned form water curtain. A diesel generator and electric previous patterns of dispersed scattered home- water pump, supplied from an onsite water tank, is steads. Numerous instances illustrate the common independent of the mains water. features of compact settlements behind stone or Images of brave men defending their homes timber fortification walls and moats. They usually with a garden hose are ludicrous by comparison. have a single strong entry point and permanent and The sprinkler system used equipment that was secure access to water. Examples spring to mind: readily available, most of it standard in agricultural Carcassonne in south-west France, Mykonos in the irrigation. None of it was high-tech. Aegean, San Gimignano in Tuscany, Dubrovnik on the Adriatic in Croatia. Bush settlements could omplete towns were destroyed in the recent adopt and update such features as compactness and bushfires. This raises the question of whether adaptation to the topography. theC design of settlements in the bush should be A bushfire attack is an extreme, intense assault rethought to prevent such disasters in the future, that usually lasts not much over half an hour. and what might be involved. Could better planning, The essential requirement is an efficient practical better defence measures, better equipment and dif- defence against fire storms and the spread of fire ferently styled settlements avoid such calamities? from ember attacks. On the Catalonian coast the Moreover, if we put defence against fire on a war farmers, exposed to repeated attacks by Corsair footing, could we put such events behind us? pirates from North Africa, moved their villages We are at war with nature, like it or not. It inland. On Mallorca, the people built lookout tow- is time we reconsidered how we intend to live in ers and lit fires to warn of impending Arab raids. Australia, whether to adapt, reform destructive These were practical measures. land use practices, how we manage, mine and farm Australians love their freedom to build where land, and critically, how and where we build our and how they like. It’s individualistic and hedon- houses and settlements. istic, and comes at a price. The alternative is a The role of post-bushfire inquiries seems to more rational science-based approach: medieval be to dissipate public anger while doing nothing. walls can be replaced by an earth berm to deflect But there is much that can and should be done to fire storms, topped by perimeter water lines with fireproof bush settlements. It will require a radi- sprinklers that throw up a uniform water curtain cal rethink about where and how people live in to dissipate the ember attack. The cost of con- the bush that will involve drastic changes to the structing such a perimeter defence will necessitate form and construction of new settlements. People living in close quarters, in a denser layout, a sacri- choose to live in the bush for a wide variety of fice perhaps, but one that would bring unexpected reasons, many to escape from the city, others on benefits. The dwellings will have to be constructed farms, others like the tranquillity of the bush, and of non-combustible materials, perhaps have water- others are loners. It is now obvious that we cannot ponded roofs, ceramic or plastered exteriors. The take the Australian bush for granted, and nor can tightly grouped, long low dwellings might have we live there willy-nilly. lush gardens and a pond and larger garden at the

102 Quadrant March 2020 Rethinking the Architecture of Bush Dwellings and Settlements centre, adjoining the emrgency bushfire refuge, a rials and tested the performance of entire wall ele- control centre for co-ordinating fire defence and ments and published Notes on the Science of Building, medical clinic, partly underground, under a roof which sold for five cents. It was closed and sold off protected by a thick layer of earth. In the middle, to developers! We need its equivalent, but better, a water storage tank, above that a bushfire lookout to tackle the problems I have outlined and find the equipped with satellite connection for early warn- most efficient and economical solutions. ing, radio, fire detection gear and visual obser- Public inquiries make recommendations, but vation. Somewhere there would be a helipad for these are no more than a beginning. What is emergency evacuation. needed are designs, tested and worked out in detail, Petra flourished for centuries in a kilometre- to replace the forlorn burnt towns up and down the long gorge by harvesting rainwater captured by an east coast of Australia. The worst outcome would to ingenious system of channels and reservoirs. At its be rebuild as before, having learnt nothing. Other peak, it supported 20,000 inhabitants. Singapore societies in the past have addressed similar chal- is a more recent modern instance. Such examples lenges of decreasing rainfall, prolonged drought, show how, in an increasingly hot and desiccated and encroaching desertification, and found ways Australia, aided by modern technology and sci- to combat them. If we are to survive the present ence, we might succeed in meeting the increasing crisis, we will need to learn and benefit from this fire risk. experience and develop new paradigms for bush There are numerous ways to defeat bushfires, and dwellings and settlements to meet the new chal- each will have to be rigorously tested and evaluated. lenges presented by fireland Australia. Once upon a time, the Department of Housing and Construction, later the Department of Works, Philip Drew is an architecture historian and a operated the Commonwealth Experimental doctoral candidate at UNSW on “The Life and Building Station, which fire-rated building mate- Sculpture of Thomas Vallance Wran”.

When Did the Ordinary Become Extraordinary?

At what point did remaining married to one person For 25 years become something to remark upon? Pretty soon it will be strange to marry someone of the opposite sex Whoops! I have already stepped over the modern norms By insinuating there is an “opposite sex” For I understand that male or female gender Are no longer to be recognised states Except, that is, when used in such expressions as: “All men are rapists” or “Old white men are privileged” Funny that: it did not seem very privileged Growing up in a large family always short of money No running water in the house and an outside trek To the lavatory. But in those days that was pretty ordinary.

David Harrison

Quadrant March 2020 103 S t o r y

Train Tracks Louis Groarke

ohn Newton rearranged himself on the railroad tracks. He was lying there for some reason or other. It was uncomfortable; a thick morning fog had drifted in from the sea. He felt very stiff. And damp. Chilled to the bone. How long had he been there? Several hours? What was going on? His head was like a blank piece of paper. He couldn’t think of anything. Numb with cold, he shook himself. JSlowly, he sat up. A bottle of whisky, one-third full, lay at his feet. He reached over, opened the bottle, and took a large swallow. It burnt going down his throat—like liquid smoke. Brrrr! That was good. Faint outlines of what had happened slowly came into focus inside his head. Now he remembered. He was trying to kill himself. Yes! That was it! He was trying to commit suicide. He should have been run over by a train by now: a dreadful way to end things, but sometimes there is no way out. John had lived out west as a child. The shudder and the whistle of a train in the middle of the night represented something so romantic and terribly lonesome. An internet blog had said that a meeting with the iron horse was the quickest, the easiest way to go. A final bump in the middle of the night and the engineer would hardly notice. And, John thought, all his problems would be solved. In an instant. John had spent the previous evening walking a long way down the tracks. Stopping for gulps of whisky at steady intervals and looking up at the stars, he was trying to think of something profound. Nothing poetic or religious came to mind. He was just depressed about the allegations. He couldn’t think much of anything else. The whisky made him drowsy. At some point, sitting down on the tracks, he promptly fell asleep. He didn’t expect to wake up. Surely, that would be the end of everything … But here he was, still alive. He looked at his watch with some frustration: it was past four in the morning. That didn’t make any sense. A midnight express passed through the town each evening without stopping. Shouldn’t he be dead? He touched his limbs. They were warm and physical. Something moved in the dust beside him. A bird? A rat? It disappeared in the darkness somewhere. No, he was definitely alive. He could see the dark tree trunks with their skeleton-like branches lining the railroad tracks. What was going on? John took another long bracing pull on the bottle. Suddenly, it came to him. How could he have forgotten? They had eliminated the Sunday service. Something the conservatives in government had been threatening for a long time. The change to the schedule had been implemented as part of a large program of government cutbacks. John was a liberal. He was always complaining about cuts to

104 Quadrant March 2020 Story public services, it seemed. So the conservatives had done away with the midnight Sunday service and foiled his suicide attempt. Damn! As if they wanted to make him suffer even more under their lunacy. The strange turn of events almost seemed like a conspiracy. The sky was turning pale with the slow arrival of morning. John’s back was killing him. It was most uncomfortable there on the gravel and metal tracks. He was stiff and sore. He felt like an old man. For the moment, the mood for self-destruction had gone out of him, evaporating like a bad dream. He would have to come back another time, he thought, as he wearily stood up. He couldn’t wait there forever. John stretched awkwardly, tidied his coat in a professional manner, and took several more draughts from the bitter bottle. Trudging off in the direction of home, he followed the railroad tracks back into town as the sun peeped over the horizon. His whole life was a mess. He was a loser. Even failing at suicide. In the glow of the early sunrise, the grey concrete shapes at the edges of the town turned into magical shades of pink and lavender. John couldn’t help but notice. But the roseate hues quickly faded. The sun was still low in the sky, but it gave off more of a glare, foreshadowing the heat of the coming day. John passed through dilapidated streets. He had finished the whisky. Cutting through a back alley, he threw the bottle into an open dumpster, hearing it shatter against the sides of the metal container. The sharp sound of the bottle breaking depressed him somehow. A sense of despair welled up inside him again. He mulled over his previous plan. The allegations were not going away—he knew it in his heart. John was a doctor. He had been accused of sexual assault. There had been acrimonious emails for the last couple of years. They kept arriving, ever more frequently. The victim was threatening to go public with the most salacious details. He was terrified. He had paid money, trying to get rid of the problem. How could anyone accuse him of such a thing? He had been a feminist, an angry opponent of white male patriarchy, rejoicing in the MeToo era, signing petitions, marching in demonstrations. His political credentials were impeccable. When a colleague had been charged with sexual harassment, John had forced him out of his clinic, losing a friend but doing what he had to do. And now he was faced with this. He hardly remembered his accuser; she said the most disgusting things. A burning sense of shame filled him: a burning sense of shame for something he didn’t do! Everyone would assume the worst. That is the way people are: always ready to jump to conclusions. If the news went public, who could know what would happen? He cringed at the thought. It wasn’t fair, he said to himself. But he had to admit, it all looked less than perfect. His second marriage had ended in divorce. His ex-wife had insisted that he was an “unfit father”, and he had lost custody of both of his children. All this mess had been followed by a number of casual flings, but they were all consensual. Who could think anything different! John was walking through a run-down, decaying part of the town with old-world street names: Paris, Belfast, London, Donegal. But, today, the picturesque names seemed drab and dirty. As he wound his way past the deserted early-morning tenements and abandoned store-fronts, he started thinking about suicide all over again. He was thinking that, maybe, death would just be a peaceful oblivion. Like a big, deep sleep. That didn’t sound so bad. A quick fade into nothingness. It might be better to finish everything quickly before more bad things could happen. John saw a car coming towards him. It was moving too quickly, he thought, a bit recklessly. A sudden impulse seized him. He wasn’t thinking clearly. As the speeding

Quadrant March 2020 105 Story

car approached, he jumped out in front of it. John had the distinct impression that the driver, who was wearing thick glasses, looked straight at him before turning the steering wheel violently to avoid the collision. The car slammed into the concrete wall of an adjacent building, missing John by inches. There was a loud noise and exploding glass everywhere. The vehicle was on its side and spilling gasoline. John rushed over and pried open the door. Crumpled in a corner was a man dressed in black with a Roman collar. An elderly priest. He was frothing at the mouth; blood was pouring from a wound at the side of his face; he was glassy-eyed and breathing heavily. The gasoline smell was getting stronger. John had to move him. “You are going to be all right,” he said. “I’m a medical doctor.” He looked in the stranger’s eyes: “You take it easy. I’m a medical doctor. You’re in good hands.” He carried the victim as carefully as he could across the roadway; the car erupted in a red flash, followed by intense heat, dark billowing smoke, and the smell of burnt plastic. The old man looked out into space and briefly smiled. He mumbled something indecipherable. He had misshapen teeth the colour of tea. It was as if he was fumbling around inside his mind, looking for something. “Yes, that’s it,” he said as if he had found a lost object. The priest made a tenuous sign of the cross, gave a very tired breath, and died. Two days later, John was sitting in a police station talking to the officer in charge. The policewoman addressed John as “Doctor”, making a deferential little nod in his direction. “The priest was on his way to a hospital,” she was saying. “He was going to give the last rites to someone. It’s a Catholic thing. We found the paraphernalia in his car. The diocese confirmed it.” John was mildly interested. It was as if the officer liked explaining things. “He was a hospital chaplain?” “Why, yes. In a palliative care unit. It seems that he was on his way to visit a dying patient …” It was hard to decipher the officer’s attitude. She was very professional. Was she scoffing at an outdated religious practice or genuinely trying to understand what had happened? But it didn’t matter. John had come to the police headquarters to make some kind of confession. He was going to tell them straight out that the accident was all his fault. The car had swerved because he had unthinkingly stepped out into the roadway. He had seen the driver look directly at him alarmed, before turning the steering wheel and crashing the car into the concrete wall. If he hadn’t been there, there would have been no accident. No one would have died. John wondered if his impulsive behaviour might amount to some sort of crime in the eyes of the law. Manslaughter? Something even worse? The events of that morning had turned out all wrong. In trying to take his own life, he had killed someone else. He was ready to face up to the consequences. The officer breezily waved away John’s concerns. “Listen, Doctor, he couldn’t properly see what was ahead of him. He had to drive with thick prescription glasses. His licence was coming up for old-age renewal. He shouldn’t have been driving. We are too lax about these things. Besides, you pulled him out of the vehicle and tried to save him.” It was an unsatisfying absolution. John felt he had to take responsibility somehow. He carefully avoided saying anything about suicide but insisted, even more forcibly than before, that he had carelessly stepped out onto the road without thinking.

106 Quadrant March 2020 Story

Still, the officer was having none of it. “Look, Doctor,” she said, lowering her voice as if she was letting John into an unwholesome secret. “Are you Roman Catholic?” John fumbled a bit; he wasn’t sure what to say: “Well, I was raised Catholic. But that was a long time ago …” “Well, I don’t mean any disrespect, Doctor; I know the driver was a Catholic priest but he had a previous charge for driving under the influence. And they found a bottle in the burnt-out car. Don’t torture yourself about what you are not responsible for.” John continued protesting but to no avail. The police officer leaned in close in a leering way. “You know,” she said, almost whispering, “there have been allegations …” John flinched: “What do you mean?” “The diocese will have to deal with it. Two altar boys have accused him of sexual misconduct. A long time ago. Stop lamenting, Doctor; he was no saint.” John stammered: “Has it been proven in a court of law? One has to be careful about allegations, you know.” The officer was unimpressed. “Times have changed,” she said firmly. “We take these things seriously now. We are just beginning the investigations. But, you know, priests with altar boys.” She tossed her head derisively. “We will sort it out eventually.” The next morning John met with his lawyer, who told him that his accuser had finally gone to the police. There was no way out. An investigation into the sexual details of his private life was imminent. The results might be embarrassing, but he might win his case. Or he might not. John stood up abruptly. “I am sorry, we will have to discuss this later. I have to attend a funeral.” And he hurried out the door.

Louis Groarke is Professor of Philosophy at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. His poetry has appeared in Quadrant, most recently in the December issue.

2020

The kangaroo had no inclination nor the emu that not walking backwards might be an impediment to escape, and that their forward trajectory was quickly enveloping them into a smoky dreaming from which ever forward, there was no return. Skippy and Emu along with Cuddlepot and Snugglepie joyfully sewed pyroclastic fuel into the hopeful, abundant landscape and danced us oblivious into the sunburnt country. Impatient Bill the steam shovel saw nothing, but even that gentle man from the moon, who always saw what no one could, didn’t see the lucky country’s luck running out.

Andrew Lee

Quadrant March 2020 107 S t o r y

The Hard Blue Edge Barry Gillard

I am the rest between two notes That harmonise … reluctantly … —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (1905)

uring her prolonged illness, some members of the family had felt that the compilation of a book might help visitors while away the time dur- ing lengthy hospital visits. Here, fond memories of the woman could be recorded, cards from well-wishers pasted in and general observations made. Since it seemed recovery was impossible, the book might also assist in the reconstruction of a life well lived. At the end, the book contained a random collection of items: D• Drawings and messages from great grandchildren who could not be expected to understand the gravity of the woman’s predicament. • The woman’s own much loved recipe for cumquat marmalade on a page colourfully illustrated by an adult granddaughter. • A reference to and recorded comments on the woman’s dislike for the variety of wine known as Pinot. • A list, compiled by the woman’s son-in-law, and probably not exhaustive, of the twenty-eight countries the woman could recall visiting and with a note that her favourite country had been Italy. This was accompanied by a rather ineffectual drawing of an aeroplane. • Photocopied snippets from old newspapers, 1937 and 1939, relating to elocution awards gained by the woman wherein the judges had made comments on the display of such things as correct emphasis. • A short piece of writing in the hand of a granddaughter, the ill woman no longer able to write with her former fluency. This piece noted the importance, as related by the woman, of gaining a scholarship to complete her secondary education at a time when life was hard. • Several old photographs annotated with recollections, once again in another’s hand. These portrayed the then young woman’s first job as a primary teacher (eighty- three pupils in the class), bike riding in the bush with the young man who she would marry and whose ashes many years later she would disperse at a favourite coastal location. There were also photographs pertaining to the marriage itself and the cruise honeymoon to Sydney. • A small and rather good study in blue biro of the ill woman’s withered hand as it rested on a section of her torso. • And on what would be the final page, the words Requiem Mass, and underneath

108 Quadrant March 2020 Story the subheading: Music—and beneath again—the surnames Mozart and Bach; then, Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8, then, in brackets: A Time for Everything.

By the weekend before the Saturday on which the terminally ill woman would die, the bedside book had fulfilled its meagre purpose and had ceased to be referred to. In the palliative care unit to which she had been moved, some treasured possessions from her home had been placed in her room. On the Sunday afternoon of that previous weekend, she, together with her daughter and son-in-law watched several horse races on the television above her bed. The three had no financial interest in the outcome of these races, yet their progress allowed a form of escape from the repetitive phrases and words that had come to replace, what in more normal times, had been enlightening and entertaining conversation. Also, the seeming unpredictability of these contests acted as a momentary blind for the inevitable. The races had provided each of the three the opportunity to make selections on the basis of the name of the horse or jockey, the racing colours, a fancied number or whatever else may have influenced a selection in the moments leading up to the race. As it happened, in the final race—and it must be said that, thus far, luck had not been on their side—the dying woman’s selection was involved in a finish so close, that the decision on which horse and rider had won, could only be ascertained by the use of sophisticated photographic equipment. The image taken by this equipment, when displayed on screen, showed her selection to have been beaten by a nostril, as the man commentating so aptly put it, and on her chosen horse being declared the second placegetter, the dying woman had half smilingly offered that this had been the story of her life. The two others present, perhaps more in an effort to console themselves, assured her that this had not been the case and that by any measure she had led a life where she could rightly call herself a winner.

Some weeks after the funeral, an extended family group headed towards a large rockpool which lies in a popular section of the western Victorian coastline. It is a testing walk from the public car park to the rockpool and it must be done at low tide to avoid being trapped within a series of narrow beaches, some menaced by sheer faces of rock. When the group reached the rockpool, the daughter of the dead woman knelt by its edge and gently eased the ashes from the crematorium urn into the pristine ripples on the water’s surface. These signalled the first inkling of a turn of the tide. At this precise moment, a man and a woman, not connected with the group, appeared and stood quite still on a nearby ledge of rock. The urn now emptied, all present reflected momentarily, each after their own fashion, before conversing with the man. The woman accompanying him chose to remain silent. The man explained he had done the same for his parents, though further west and where there is a large recess in the rock known as the “Blowhole”. He said he was returning from there just now, having shown the woman, who he described as his new girlfriend, where he in more youthful days had taken considerable care and time to chisel his initials deep into the rock wall. He then reflected on his parents, extrapolated on sadness in general and philosophised on the passing of time. He noted that it seemed like yesterday and added, in conclusion, that none of his own extended family had continued to holiday in the area. All present now looked to where the sky appeared to meet the darker blue of the sea. Each had a specific point of focus: and the curve of the horizon held its hard blue edge.

Barry Gillard lives and works in Geelong. He is a regular contributor to the Australian.

Quadrant March 2020 109 Keepsake

The surgeon asked I said to her The surgeon chucked “Do you want the organ “Next time, perhaps. my organ out, once cut out?” This organ’s not since it was not important to me. important to me. I said to him Give me my stomach “What would I do I will eat it. Next time I went with a dead organ?” Give me my bowels to hospital my stomach wasn’t The surgeon laughed. I will bury them edible. “I’ll chuck it out.” in the garden so that roots My bowels wouldn’t But the nurse said grow down like fingers grow down roots. “Some of us eat it. taking hold My heart could never Some bury it in upon the darkness. be a keepsake the garden so Give me my heart of myself a tree will grow. so I can keep it because it was Some keep it as as a keepsake the only part a keepsake of of myself, of me that died. themselves, as part the only part of them that died.” of me that lived.” James Ackhurst

Make Life an Art

Head muddled, heart fatigued. A test of endurance. Sense like vapour. The path should be obvious, but the detour more appealing. The straight road so scary, like blow up Santas in suburbia inflated by air. Domestic conversations pound on the chest, deflate the mind and bind one’s feet. Wanting independence not loneliness, adventure without travelling, intimacy through the front door. A restraining order on circumstance. First prize fondled. Make life an art, coat in gold leaf, light a match and wave away the fumes.

Rowena Wiseman

110 Quadrant March 2020 sweetness & light

Tim Blair

umankind has always had an awkward the current lack of any subtlety in climate debates. relationship with things we are powerless Your climate panic crowd doesn’t bother much to control. Problems especially arise when with anything subtle. As Aztecs were to sacrificial weH try to influence the weather, for example. victims, climate activists are to nuance and wit. Aztec priests, big believers in the curative and If the humour of climate screamers had an transformative powers of mass slaughter, would aroma, it would be something like the musty reek carve open the chests of sacrificial victims in order to of a sofa left out in the rain ahead of hard waste appease the gods with victims’ still-beating hearts. collection day. Worse still, that sofa had spent the Those gods were unpleasant types, and they previous five years in a shared student house. And would dole out droughts and famines holus-bolus they were enrolled at La Trobe. unless sufficient hearts were supplied. Or dead kids. In recent times we’ve been working our way back Apparently the tears of a terrified and soon-to-be- to an Aztec mindset on weather issues. Granted, murdered child were required before rain god Tlaloc we’ve not yet begun building towers out of human would bother to crank up some clouds. skulls, but any talk of emissions reduction sooner or But the Aztecs eventually ran out of themselves later gets around to “sacrifice”. We are encouraged and weather-controlling sacrifices ended in their to sacrifice certain lifestyle traits and choose second- particular region. And, gradually, other cultures tier options in travel, diet and convenience, all in the also abandoned sacrifices, possibly after realising name of calming the weather. they didn’t actually change anything. One chap, US gay rights lawyer and environ­ Thereafter, people slowly adapted to the idea mental advocate David Buckel, did to himself what that weather wasn’t within the realm of humanity’s Aztecs did to others. Early one morning in New command. Oh, there must have been millions York back in 2018, Buckel burned himself to death of prayers over the years begging for a change of in a protest against climate change. weather, but all except the most devout understood “Most humans on the planet now breathe air that such matters were immune to human pleading. made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early Mark Twain is usually credited with this deaths as a result,” his suicide note explained. “My celebrated line, which puts people in their place early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing regarding climate-adjusting capacity: “Everybody to ourselves.” talks about the weather, but nobody does anything A bit of a mixed message there, to be honest. If about it.” It now seems, however, that this line (or a he’d used a different source of energy than efficient, variation of it) originally came from Twain’s friend rapid-burning petrol, Buckel would probably still Charles Dudley Warner, about whom a charming be alive. Very few successful suicides involve a solar obituary was written after his death in 1900. component, and wind turbine blades are only a “When people were once tried almost beyond threat to birds. endurance by the most exasperating of winters he The odd Gaia barbecue enthusiast aside, most said, ‘Everybody is talking about the weather; why of our sacrifices to date are primarily financial. We doesn’t somebody do something?’ and this, with sacrifice fifteen cents to Coles and Woolworths its subtle irony of human futility, is perhaps one of every time we buy one of their heavy new plastic the most representative examples of his wit,” the bags, an “environmental” innovation that by one obituary read. “But his humor was an aroma which estimate has increased supermarket profits by $71 interfused all his thought, and filled his page with billion. the constant surprise of its presence.” And households sacrifice thousands every damn Warner invoking the “subtle irony of human year through renewable energy subsidies that are futility” is a beautiful observation, all the more so for embedded in our power bills. We receive most of our

Quadrant March 2020 111 sweetness & light electricity from coal, but pay additionally for energy than sixty people were killed in those riots, which we don’t receive or use at all. As well, we sacrifice followed the acquittal of police officers who were jobs across inland Australia because we won’t follow filmed viciously beating King after he’d attempted the US example and frack for natural gas. to flee pursuing lawmen. As this is written, socialist Bernie Sanders is still The place recovered surprisingly quickly. Around alive and riding high in Democrat primaries. If he 1999 or so, I was in a fine new LA shopping centre defeats a dull Democrat field and scores his party’s buying some shoes when I looked out the window nomination, and—a much bigger if—he goes on to and noted familiar-looking street signs. One of the topple President Donald Trump, Sanders vows he staff confirmed that, yes, this was the very corner will ban fracking. where the 1992 riots had commenced. And now it Now we’re talking truly Aztec-level sacrifice. was as friendly a joint as you could imagine. Fracking supplies the US with half its oil and two- Several years of relative peace and progress fol- thirds of its natural gas. Imagine the global economic lowed. Perhaps Zali Steggall, the independent mem- impact that would be caused by subtracting such an ber for ex-PM Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah, was enormous amount of cheap energy from a world thinking of that brief, shining time in LA history superpower. when she announced last October that California There would also be a very severe human toll. was her guiding light. “Fracking helped save the lives of roughly 11,000 “I want Warringah to be a mini-California and Americans each winter from 2005 to 2010, according lead the way,” environmental zealot Steggall said, to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research apparently in thrall to the west coast’s climate-fix- paper,” public policy researcher Ron Williamson ing ambitions. reported last year. “How? By driving down energy As it happens, a couple of LA friends were over prices and helping them affordably heat their here in Australia during summer. I ran Steggall’s homes.” “mini-California” line by them to see how they’d Socialism always hits the poor hardest. Back react. They were incoherent with laughter for a time, home, I suppose you’d have to include in our list but eventually one of them managed a sentence. of sacrifices all the IQ points we lose every time “Not even California wants to be California,” he a Greens representative turns up on television. said. And then he began to list, in anguished detail, Against that, of course, we do have to acknowledge the grievous problems besetting that once-beautiful former Greens leader Bob Brown’s noble decision state. to sacrifice a likely Shorten Labor government. Homelessness in LA and San Francisco is out of Brown’s election campaign carbon convoy to coal- control. City streets are rife with tent communities loving northern Queensland swept Bill Shorten of the homeless, which last year were hit by a wave completely aside. Credit where it is due. of disease. At one point LA’s City Hall was shut When weather became politicised, it hastened down over fears of a typhoid outbreak that origi- our return to Aztec god-appeasement strategies. nated among the homeless. A generation or three has been raised to think In his State of the State address in February last the climate can be influenced by voting for a year, California Governor Gavin Newsom listed particular political party, and various other means outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego County, of atonement. syphilis in Sonoma County, and typhus in Los It doesn’t work like that. Besides, imitating Aztec Angeles County. sacrificial traditions is a clear case of cultural appro- “Typhus,” Newsom said. “A medieval disease. In priation, and those practising it should be shunned. California. In 2019.” Some tales of Californian decay are too revolting ntil direct flights to Texas were opened a few to be repeated in detail for Quadrant’s gentle and years ago, the first stop for Australians visit- civilised readers. Should they wish, they are invited Uing the US was California—and most usually Los to run a Google search for “California” plus “public Angeles. defecation”. As of this moment, that search returns Back in the day, LA was a fine starting point. more than 27,000 matches. It’s a completely atypical US city, what with its mas- Many years of useless, environment-focused sive city blocks and all, but once you worked out the municipal and state governments have led to this basic scheme of things and got Sunset Boulevard abysmal situation. An obsession with global cli- sorted, everything made a certain kind of sense. mate change has left authorities with a local climate I first turned up there three decades ago, when hellscape. the racial tensions that eventually led to the 1992 And this is Zali Steggall’s dreamland. Well Rodney King riots were abundantly evident. More done, Warringah.

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The hidden AgendA of The AcAdemic ASSAulT 9 Australian voters are not being told the truth University-based lawyers are misleading the Barry Spurr, Patrick Morgan AboriginAl SovereignTyAustralian voters are not being told the truthon The conSTiTuTionUniversity-based lawyers are misleading the about the proposal for constitutional recognition of Australian people by claiming our Constitution was about the proposal for constitutional recognition of Australian people by claiming our Constitution was indigenous people. The goal of Aboriginal political drafted to exclude Aboriginal and Torres Strait IslanderAustralian voters are not being told the truth University-based lawyers are misleading the The Self-Portrait of Larissa Behrendt indigenous people. The goal of Aboriginal political drafted to exclude Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists today is to gain ‘sovereignty’ and create peoples from the Australian nation. This is a myth.about the proposal for constitutional recognition of Australian people by claiming our Constitution was Michael Connor activists today is to gain ‘sovereignty’ and create peoples from the Australian nation. This is a myth. a black state, equivalent to the existing states. At Federation in 1901, our Constitution made indigenous people. The goal of Aboriginal political drafted to exclude Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander a black state, equivalent to the existing states. At Federation in 1901, our Constitution made Its territory, comprising all land defined as native Australia the most democratic country in the world.activists today is to gain ‘sovereignty’ and create peoples from the Australian nation. This is a myth. On Keynes and Darwin Steven Kates a black state, equivalentIts territory, to the comprising existing states. all land definedAt as Federationnative in Australia1901, our Constitutionthe most democratic made country in the world. title, will soon amount to more than 60 per cent The great majority of Aboriginal people have always Its territory, comprisingtitle, will all soon land amountdefined to as more native than 60 perAustralia cent the mostThe democratic great majority country of Aboriginalin the world. people have always On Paul Robeson Tony Thomas of the whole Australian continent. had the same political rights as other Australians, title, will soon amountof the wholeto more Australian than 60 per continent. cent had the same political rights as other Australians, Constitutional recognition, if passed, would be including the right to vote. Claims that the The great majority of Aboriginal people have always On Sully Neil McDonald of the whole AustralianConstitutional continent. recognition, if passed, would be including the right to vote. Claims that the its ‘launching pad’. Recognition will not make our Constitution denied them full citizenship are had the same political rights as other Australians, its ‘launching pad’. Recognition will not make our Constitution denied them full citizenship are quadrant.org.au On the veranda Philip Drew nation complete; it will divide us permanently. political fabrications. Constitutional recognition, if passed, would be including the right to vote. Claims that the nation complete; it will divide us permanently. political fabrications. its ‘launching pad’. Recognition will not make our Constitution denied them full citizenship are 09 I  Tim Murphy, Edith Speers, Geoff Page, Clive James, nation complete; it will divide us permanently. political fabrications. Poetry for you, or AS A gifT $44.95 for you, or AS A gifT $44.95 Hal G.P. Colebatch, Elisabeth Wentworth, Roger G. McDonald

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D ecember 2019 ecember The Bogus Aboriginal A highLyA highLy rEAdAbLErEAdAbLE PWorldeter O’Brien, of Keith Bruce Windschuttle Pascoe APPrAisALAPPrAisAL thAtthAt Misguided Faith in Legislated Religious Freedoms brEAksbrEAks thE thE Stuart Lindsay iLLusioNiLLusioN oF oF AborigiNALAborigiNAL Australia’s Opportunity for a New Frontier AgricuLturEAgricuLturE Mervyn F. Bendle iN brucEiN brucE The Human Story: Beginning, Middle, End PAscoE’sPAscoE’s Michael Jensen DarkDark emu emu The Role of the Novel in Literature Brian Wimborne From Wartime Melbourne to Cape Fear BitterBitter Harvest Harvest is a comprehensive is a comprehensive appraisal appraisal called called it ‘the it most ‘the most important important book bookon Australia’. on Australia’. Christopher Heathcote of Bruceof Bruce Pascoe’s Pascoe’s book bookDark DarkEmu. EmuPascoe. Pascoe postulates postulates Its ideasIts ideas have havealready already been beentaken taken up in upschool in school texts. texts. that, ratherthat, rather than beingthan being a nomadic a nomadic hunter-gatherer hunter-gatherer But nothingBut nothing in Dark in DarkEmu Emujustifies justifies its success. its success. On Ron Manners Salvatore babones society,society, Australian Australian Aborigines Aborigines were wereactually actually sedentary sedentary Bitter Bitter Harvest Harvest is a forensic is a forensic but highly but highly readable readable agriculturalistsagriculturalists with ‘skillswith ‘skills superior superior to those to those of the of the examinationexamination which which reveals reveals that Bruce that Bruce Pascoe Pascoe omits, omits, On Vladimir Bukovsky John O’Sullivan whitewhite colonisers colonisers who tookwho theirtook theirland andland despoiled and despoiled it’. it’.distortsdistorts or mischaracterises or mischaracterises important important information information to to On the Soong sisters Ted Rule Dark DarkEmu Emuhas enjoyed has enjoyed extraordinary extraordinary public public and critical and critical such suchan extent an extent that, asthat, purported as purported history, history, Dark DarkEmu Emuis is acclaim,acclaim, winning winning Premier’s Premier’s literary literary awards awards in New in New worthless.worthless. Even Evenworse, worse, it promotes it promotes a divisive, a divisive, victim- victim- quadrant.org.au On H.M. Green Diana Figgis SouthSouth Wales Wales and Victoria. and Victoria. Professor Professor Marcia Marcia Langton Langton basedbased agenda agenda that pits that one pits Australian one Australian against against another. another.

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Poetry Liz McQuilkin, Louis Groarke, Ross Jackson, James Ackhurst, Joe Dolce, Caroline Smith Glen, Ivan Head, Katherine Spadaro PLUS PLUSPOSTAGE POSTAGE ForFor you, you, or or As As A giFt A giFt $34.95 $34.95 I oNLiNE oNLiNE Reviews David Martin Jones, Elizabeth Beare quadrant.org.au/shop/ quadrant.org.au/shop/ I Post Post Fiction Desmond O’Grady Quadrant, Quadrant, 2/5 Rosebery 2/5 Rosebery Place, Place, Balmain Balmain NSW NSW 2041, 2041, Australia Australia ISSN 0033-5002

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