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Gineorge a PPost-Christianell Age The Opening of the Australian Mind Salvatore babones The Ugly Hypocrisy of the Industry Nicholas T. Parsons AustrAliA’s secret WAr HoW unionists sAbotAged How the Left Has Captured Professional Associations our troops in World WAr ii Stuart Lindsay HAL COLEBATCH’s new book, Australia’s Secret War, tells the The Paris Agreement is No Longer Relevant shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the William Kininmonth war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions — against their own society and against the men and women of their A Nuclear Option is Not Too Late for Australia own country’s fighting forces during the perils of World War II. Graham Pinn Every major Australian warship was targeted by strikes, go-slows and sabotage at home. Australian soldiers fighting in New Guinea and On King Arthur Elizabeth Beare the Pacific went without food, radio equipment and ammunition because On Pablo Neruda David Mason of union strikes. Photographs © australian War memorial On Michael Portillo Joe Dolce Waterside workers disrupted loading of supplies to the troops and On J.L. Carr John Whitworth pilfered from ships’ cargoes and soldiers’ personal effects. Other strikes by rail workers, iron workers, coal miners, and even munitions workers I  and life-raft builders, badly impeded Australia’s war effort. Poetry Les Murray, Carolyn Evans Campbell, Jamie Grant, Andrew Lansdown, Gwyneth Lewis, Katherine Spadaro For you, or As A giFt $44.95 Reviews I Peter Smith, Robert Murray, Edward Cranswick I ONLINE www.quadrant.org.au/store Fiction Robyn O’Sullivan POST Quadrant, Locked Bag 1235, North VIC 3051, Australia I I I I I I PhONE (03) 8317 8147 FAX (03) 9320 9065 Letters Environment Science Literature Economics Religion Media Theatre I Philosophy I film I Society I History I Politics I Education I Health 33011 r 33011 r Q ad nt a dr ua 33011 r $8.90 Australia I November 2016 renodesign.com.au renodesign.com.au renodesign.com.au renodesign.com.au

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KTheeith W indschuttleHidden Agenda Civilisation: Does It Have a Future?—A Symposium Daniel Johnson, David Pryce-Jones, James C. Bennett, Géza Jeszenszky Growing Up Muslim in Australia The breAk-up of AuSTrAliA 08 The breAk-up of AuSTrAliA Gabrielle Lord & “Asiya” THE REal agEnda BEHind aBoRiginal REcogniTionThe bTHEre RAEalk- aguEpnda of BEH AuindST aBorRiginalAliA REcogniTion keiTh WindSchuTTle Guilty Unless Proven Innocent

THE REalkei agThEnda Wind BEHSchuindTT aBleoRiginal REcogniTion 500006 Jan Christie, Augusto Zimmermann The hidden AgendA of The AcAdemic ASSAulT keiTh WindSchuTTle AboriginAl SovereignTy on The conSTiTuTion The hidden AgendA of The AcAdemic ASSAulT ISSN 0033-5002 AboriginAl SovereignTy on The conSTiTuTion Enemies of Literature 770033

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 SovereignAustralianT votersy are not being told the truthon T he conSTUniversity-basediTuTion 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 online quadrant.org.au/shop/ I online 500006 poST for you, or A quadrant.org.au/shop/S A gifT $44.95 Reviews David Martin Jones, Patricia Anderson, Robert Murray Quadrant, 2/5 Rosebery Place, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia poST phone fAX online Quadrant, 2/5 Rosebery Place, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia I quadrant.org.au/shop/ ISSN 0033-5002 (03) 8317 8147 (03) 9320 9065 phone fAX Fiction Ang Chin Geok, Christoph Keller

poST (03) 8317 8147 (03) 9320 9065 770033 Quadrant, 2/5 Rosebery Place, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia I I I I I I phone fAX 9 Letters Environment Science Literature Economics Religion Media (03) 8317 8147 (03) 9320 9065 Theatre I Philosophy I film I Society I History I Politics I Education I Health

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33011_QBooks_Ads_V5.indd 1 27/09/2016 10:23 AM September 2018 No. 549 Volume LxII, Number 9

letters 2 Christopher Heathcote, Kazimierz Kozlowski, Michael Cashman, Glenn Wright, Suzanne Edgar, Bryan Niland, Rodney Henderson editor’s column 4 Captain Cook and the Great Game Keith Windschuttle asperities 6 John O’Sullivan astringencies 8 Anthony Daniels politics 10 Fascists Wherever She Looks Daryl McCann religion 12 The Future of the Church in a Post-Christian Age George Pell western civilisation 18 The Opening of the Australian Mind Salvatore Babones 23 Art and Civilisational Collapse Magnus O’Mallon politics 26 How the Left Has Captured Professional Associations Stuart Lindsay 32 Trump Derangement Syndrome Spreads and Intensifies Hal G.P. Colebatch fashion 36 The Fashion Industry: Not as Pretty as It Looks Nicholas T. Parsons science 41 The Paris Agreement is No Longer Relevant William Kininmonth 46 A Nuclear Option is Not Too Late for Australia Graham Pinn 50 Junk Science and the Sugar Tax Swindle Satyajeet Marar defence 52 Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War Michael Evans society 60 Women Can Be as Violent as Men Augusto Zimmermann tribute 67 To Serve Them All His Days Mark McGinness history 71 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail Elizabeth Beare books 81 The Bootle Boy by Les Hinton Peter Smith 84 So Far, So Good by Ross Fitzgerald & Antony Funnell Edward Cranswick 86 The Vanished Land by Richard Zachariah; Narrapumelap by Jennifer O’Donnell Robert Murray television 88 Michael Portillo’s Homage to Victorian Britain Joe Dolce literature 94 Words May Fly Abroad: The Unique Career of J.L. Carr John Whitworth 98 Australia Cor Unum Diana Figgis poetry 102 The Voice of Pablo Neruda David Mason story 107 Painting with My Father Robyn O’Sullivan sweetness & light 111 Tim Blair Poetry 17: Bingham’s Ghost; Verticals Les Murray; I Would if I Could Gwyneth Lewis; 22: Four haiku Gary Hotham; 31: Dry Rot Jamie Grant; 43: The Calmness of Despair Katherine Spadaro; 44: Them ; Meditations on Emptiness Andrew Lansdown; 58: Tropical Storm Katherine Spadaro; 59: Throwing Stones at a Nice Moon; Vibrations; Saguaro Carolyn Evans Campbell; 70: Sixteen is a Very Difficult Age Libby Sommer; 80: Beach of Memory Katherine Spadaro; 93: Old Age Gwyneth Lewis; 97: Distinguished Joe Dolce; 100: Haiku Gary Hotham; 101: Beyond Posterity Jamie Grant Letters Lux Veritatis

Sir: It is sad news that the Ramsay

Editor Centre’s proposal of a degree in Keith Windschuttle Indigenous Censorship Western civilisation at the Austral­ [email protected] ian National University was rejected. Sir: In August I visited the An organisation similar to Editor, International Melbourne Museum to see a the Ramsay Centre, aiming to John O’Sullivan major Vikings exhibition loaned defend Western civilisation, the Liter ary Editor by Swedish museums. It contained Lux Veritatis Foundation, was Les Murray hundreds of archaeological items started in 1996 in Warsaw by two excavated from burial sites across Redemptorists. This foundation Deput y Editor Scandinavia, and the galleries were established the College of Social George Thomas abuzz with eager youngsters and and Media Culture (Wyzsza Szkola Editor, Qua dr ant Online enthusiastic school parties. Kultury Spolecznej i Medialnej) in Roger Franklin However, then I reached an Torun, Poland, in 2001. The college [email protected] empty display cabinet. A label is similar to Campion College in explained that the ancient Norse Sydney. It is an independent school Contributing Editor artefacts intended for it were not and receives no government funding. Theatre: Michael Connor included due to objections from The foundation owns TV Trwam, a Columnists Aboriginal elders and members of Christian television channel. One of Anthony Daniels the museum’s Aboriginal Cultural the two founders of Lux Veritatis, Tim Blair Heritage Advisory Committee. the dynamic Father Rydzyk, also They considered some Viking mate- created Radio Maryja, a Catholic Subscriptions rials contrary to their own “indige- conservative radio station. nous laws”, deeming that if allowed Perhaps the Ramsay Centre and Phone: (03) 8317 8147 to be shown, “this current display the Lux Veritatis Foundation should Fax: (03) 9320 9065 could undermine many hard-won, make contact. The college in Torun Post: Quadrant Magazine, positive steps over recent years”. and the above-mentioned related Locked Bag 1235, Checking the museum’s web- enterprises are proving crucial in North Melbourne VIC 3051 site, I found that this Aboriginal the face of collapsing Western civi- E-mail: quadrantmagazine@ committee has a say over the con- lisation in Western Europe. data.com.au tent of all displays in ’s state museums. Every exhibit must be in Kazimierz Kozlowski Publisher accord with “indigenous laws”. By via e-mail what right do Aborigines meddle Quadrant (ISSN 0033-5002) is in a Vikings exhibition? The deleted published ten times a year by funerary artefacts had nothing The Herd or the Team? Quadrant Magazine Limited, whatsoever to do with Aboriginal Suite 2/5 Rosebery Place, history, indeed, the show was about Sir: Wolfgang Kasper’s review of Balmain NSW 2041, Australia my cultural heritage. Why do La llamada de la tribu (July-August ACN 133 708 424 Aborigines decide what I, as a per- 2018) quotes the book as attributing son of Norse descent, am permitted humanity’s “tribal instinct” to evo- Production to see of my own historical roots? lution. Speaking of “thousands of generations of Homo erectus” it says, Design Consultant: Reno Design One wonders if this is a fore- Art Director: Graham Rendoth taste of what will happen should “Facing nature with awe and dread, Aborigines be granted some form they survived by slavishly follow- Printer: Ligare Pty Ltd of clout over the Commonwealth ing an almighty leader who prom- 138–152 Bonds Road, parliament and its instrumentalities. ised protection and salvation.” We Riverwood NSW 2210 Will all our institutions involved are to believe that modern humans Cover: Colours of Australia with the study of history be sub- have inherited a “herd mentality” or “Heidelberg” jected to indigenous censorship? “tribal instinct”. Will Aborigines set about deleting This is unlikely for several rea- www.quadrant.org.au chunks of European history from sons. First, studies of hunter-gath- the national school curriculum? erer tribes do not emphasise the slavish following of an almighty Christopher Heathcote leader. Our ancestors are considered Keilor, Vic to have lived by hunting and gather-

2 Quadrant September 2018 Letters ing for thousands of generations. disconcerting to this lifelong What Right? Second, our primitive ances- conservative. tors lived in small of perhaps Glenn Wright twenty to thirty. In such a small Sir: We hear much of the “Right group, there is little specialisation, via e-mail of Return” of Palestinians, but and everybody can see how eve- what does it mean? To have a right rything is done. Almighty leaders The Back Pages of return to a place you must have like Napoleon or Hitler have gen- been there before. To have a mean- erated a mystique, employed means Sir: I salute your wisdom in acquir- ingful right of return you would of propaganda, and concealed ing the services of Tim Blair as a need to have substantial connec- their weaknesses. How would satirist worthy to inherit the maga- tions to the place. Do I have a right an “almighty leader” achieve this zine’s back pages once occupied by of return to St Paul’s Cathedral when the only available followers the wit and wisdom of the late Peter or Hayman Island because I have are his relatives? Ryan. Long have I missed Ryan’s been there, and how much land am Third, slavishly following an combination of learning and hard- I entitled to? almighty leader doesn’t increase hitting irony. Long may his succes- Jews were in Hebron for hun- the chances of survival. Did Hitler sor continue to occupy that space. dreds, if not thousands of years, enhance the Germans’ survival Thank you, also, for publishing until the pogroms of 1929 and after- prospects, or Stalin the Russians’? David Mason’s beautiful essay on wards, but the right of return, even Usually we think that two minds the American poet Richard Wilbur. to Jews who went to Istanbul to are better than one. Our pred- It whiled away a recent spell in bed trace the titles of their family land, ecessors on the savannah probably with flu and sent me scrabbling for is rarely taken seriously. thought so too. every scrap of Wilbur’s verse that In 1948 the foundation of Israel Fourth, we moderns may face I could find in my anthologies of and associated war led to approxi- nature with awe and dread, but did American poetry; there I found mately half of the 1.5 million our ancestors? After all, they grew that I had double-ticked several Muslims in Israel leaving, either on up in it. We just don’t know. Awe favourites: “Museum Piece”, “After the advice of their leaders or driven and dread don’t fossilise. the Last Bulletins”, and “Love Calls out by the Jews. About 750,000 Last, the terms are very subjec- Us to the Things of This World”. Muslims remained. There are now tive. A group carrying out a program 1.8 million Muslims in Israel. I oppose have a “herd mentality”, Suzanne Edgar The Muslims living in Israel, whereas when my friends and I act Garran, ACT unlike Muslims outside Israel, in unison we demonstrate solidarity. enjoy a free vote and are well rep- The Arrow Theatre resented in the Knesset. They have Michael Cashman full access to health and education. Grange, Qld Sir: Yes, the Arrow Theatre did fail Muslims are well represented in the under Frank Thring (July-August law, including the supreme court, Live Exports 2018), but it was never totally closed. and the other professions. Their life It continued with amateur produc- expectancy is higher than in any Sir: Bravo to Stuart Lindsay for his tions and for a time Jon Finlayson Muslim-majority country, including articulate and telling criticisms of produced several professional wealthy Gulf states. the “live meat industry” (June 2018). revues. David Barratt then took The Palestinian Authority A regulatory system that more or over the theatre and gave his young claims a diaspora of over 9 million, less encourages a blind eye being turks a place to act, write and pro- but this is of little relevance. More turned to those who blatantly and duce. Many of these people worked importantly, there are claimed regularly transgress its provisions is on in theatre, film and television. to be over 5 million in Gaza, the a legislative sham, bringing our sys- Several still do. David Barratt also West Bank and various camps in tem of laws into disrepute. expanded the Arrow Theatre, open- surrounding countries. These are The case for animal welfare ing upstairs his Studio Theatre those who claim a right of return. has not always been the monopoly (seating forty) and renting out the Even with Muslim treatment of of the left (Matthew Scully being larger upstairs space to the Meland women it is inconceivable that one notable conservative advocate). Theatre (seating eighty) and for a 750,000 exiles could have increased However, sadly it seems that number of years turned this Middle to 5 million let alone 9 million. If abject cruelty is fast becoming the Park location into a hive of theatri- they have a right of return, it is cer- hallmark of those who are otherwise cal activity. tainly not to Israel. conservatively minded. That this Bryan Niland Rodney Henderson awful trade is blithely perpetrated Willoughby, NSW via email by fellow conservatives is deeply

Quadrant September 2018 3 captain cook and the great game

Keith Windschuttle

he book’s title is Lying for the Admiralty drawing maps that treated both Van Diemen’s (Rosenberg, Sydney, 2018) and instead of Land and Stewart Island as peninsulas of the land a subtitle to spell out its subject matter, its to their north. His concern was that if these islands coverT has a portrait of Captain James Cook and a were known to be separated by straits from their map of with its east coast uncharted, adjacent mainlands, the French could repeat their as it was before the great navigator’s first expedi- previous tactics in the Atlantic at Newfoundland tion. For a brief moment I thought this might be and the Falkland Islands and occupy them, thereby another assault on Cook, adding to the indignities inhibiting British ambitions in the region. his reputation suffered from the graffiti attack on For Australian readers, her most dramatic claim his statue in Sydney last September. The accusation is that, rather than barely noticing the existence of of lying sounded like the now well-entrenched left- Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) on his way north ist campaign to discredit him on the 250th anniver- from Botany Bay, recording in his journal that he sary of his epic voyages of discovery, which began sailed straight past its heads while two to three when he left Plymouth Dock on August 26, 1768. miles out to sea, Cook actually explored it closely Author Margaret Cameron-Ash quickly dispels over several days. He immediately recognised its any such thoughts. Her introduction confirms that strategic value and a magnificent prize for the Cook was not only a great man but a loyal English British Empire. He kept its existence entirely to patriot who was not above preparing charts, log himself and the Admiralty. books and journals which, with the approval of the British Admiralty, provided misinformation fter the Seven Years War (1756 to 1763) which to deceive the navigators of foreign powers. Cook divided Europe into two opposing coalitions, was a player in what Rudyard Kipling later called BritainA and continued their rivalry around the “Great Game” of spying and deception in the the globe, from to the Americas and the geopolitical rivalry among the European powers Pacific. Empire building became an arms race. In for maritime supremacy. Cook’s discovery of September 1763, Louis XV sent Louis Antoine de the Australian continent’s east coast, and the Bougainville to establish a colony on one of the information he kept secret about it, were critical Falkland Islands, the last site where Pacific-bound manoeuvres in this rivalry. expeditions could then stop to take on fresh water This is both a compelling new take on the polit- and supplies, a strategic necessity for those vying ical climate behind the founding of Australia and for power in the South Seas. Advised by one of an exciting, page-turning work. It is easily the best his Versailles spies of France’s plan, the British book I have read all year, and one of the best in Secretary of the Admiralty, Philip Stephens, sent many a year. It is located within the same revision- Captains John Byron and Samuel Wallis on two ist version of Australia’s origins that Alan Frost ships to plant a colony on the other Falkland Island, has been pioneering since the 1990s in his books and to then explore the Pacific to find the legendary Botany Bay Mirages, The Global Reach of Empire and Great Southern Continent. Byron did his duty on his recent popular summaries Botany Bay and The the Falklands but then circumnavigated the globe . without further success. Wallis, however, went on In joining this company, Lying for the Admiralty to discover the islands of Tahiti. solves some problems that Frost himself found diffi- Cameron-Ash calls Tahiti the pivotal discov- cult. Cameron-Ash demonstrates clearly how Cook ery in Pacific exploration. No longer would navi- discovered both Bass Strait and Foveaux Strait in gators have to race across the ocean like Byron in but deliberately misled readers by fear of running out of food, water and wood. Tahiti

4 Quadrant September 2018 captain cook and the great game was a base where ships could fill their barrels with outside the heads of the harbour, let alone from the fresh water and local foodstuffs, and ships could be Endeavour two or three miles out to sea, the sole repaired. vantage point given in Cook’s journal. The French thought the same. Just ten months In a chapter she acknowledges is largely con- after Wallis’s discovery, Bougainville dropped jecture, Cameron-Ash argues that during the anchor in Tahiti too. The French embassy in eight days he spent at Botany Bay, Cook’s jour- had bought the plans for Wallis’s voy- nal is uncharacteristically vague about his own age from two of his crew for 150 guineas and sent movements. She argues it would have been easy Bougainville after him. The British did not know for him to walk several times along the six miles Bougainville had reached Tahiti until James Cook of Aboriginal tracks to Sydney Harbour. From got there the following year and was told by local high points on Bellevue Hill, Bondi Junction or chiefs. Pyrmont Peninsula, he could have seen from the The public purpose of Cook’s expedition was to Heads to the River. record the transit of Venus, an astronomical exercise Once he found what he wanted—better to calculate the distance of the Earth from the Sun. than even the famed harbour of Trincomalee in Most of the expeditions to the Pacific at this time Ceylon—Cook set sail for home up the east coast were made by ships laden with astronomers and of New Holland. He would definitely not show off naturalists ostensibly on Enlightenment-inspired his prize for his crew to see. Until Britain could scientific expeditions, but also with instructions, protect it by planting a garrison on its shores, he mostly secret, to take possession of those Pacific would conceal it by omitting it from his charts. He Islands useful for trade and navigation and to keep never stopped to investigate any of the other fine searching for the increasingly dubious Southern harbours he later passed in the habitable temper- Continent. ate zone up the coast: Broken Bay, Newcastle, Port Like Byron and Wallis, Cook had reason to dis- Stephens, Port Macquarie. “They surely required trust the loyalty and obedience of his crew to keep investigation after the shortcomings of Botany sensitive information confidential. Cameron-Ash Bay,” Cameron-Ash says, but the Endeavour never says Richard Orton, Cook’s clerk and the very man entered any of them. who made copies of his journal for the Admiralty, It struck me long ago that was later sold details of Cook’s voyage to East India surprisingly hasty in abandoning Botany Bay and Company captains. Moreover, an American mid- relocating to . As soon as he arrived, shipman aboard the Endeavour, James Matra, after an eight-month voyage from , and a published an unauthorised account of the voyage, cursory two-day survey of the bay, Phillip set off to giving away many details. The Admiralty itself inspect the harbour. He returned three days later, did not allow publication of Cook’s journals at all, his mind made up. Phillip made his real motives only a bowdlerised version written in 1773 by James clear in May 1788 in his first despatch to Lord Hawkesworth. Sydney:

he biggest secret the Admiralty kept to itself, We got into Port Jackson early in the afternoon, Cameron-Ash argues, was the naval value of and had the satisfaction of finding the finest TSydney Harbour, which she thinks Cook must have harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail revealed in an interview with Admiralty Secretary of the line [battle ships] may ride in the most Stephens after he returned home. She did not find perfect security. this in any of Cook’s or Stephens’s papers but says the information was revealed by Arthur Phillip in Pretty obviously, this was what Phillip expected letters to the Home Office before leaving Britain to find all along. The only source that could have with the First Fleet in May 1787. Phillip said that informed him was the Admiralty, who got it from if he found Botany Bay suitable he would locate Cook. his settlement there but, if not, he would “go to a Nonetheless, lacking a telling document from Port a few Leagues to the Northward, where there either Cook or Stephens, Cameron-Ash will have appear’d to be a good Harbour, and several islands”. a hard job convincing everyone else she is right. Now, the only way anyone could know there Some more document finds are much needed for were islands in Sydney Harbour was to either her case. But her account already fits better than enter it by sea and go well inside, at least as far any other with what we now know about the his- as Bradley’s Head, or else walk around the hills torical forces driving the race for imperialism in above its shoreline. None of its islands are visible the Pacific that eventually founded our nation.

Quadrant September 2018 5 a s p e r i t i e s

John O’Sullivan

n the last month several Iranian women have had written. been sentenced to long years of imprisonment To start with, a large part of the column is a in the country’s harsh jails for the crime of hymn of affection for Denmark, the Danes, and Iremoving the burka in public. Wearing a garment their cussed, practical love of freedom in everyday that covers most of the body and head is manda- life or what he calls their “Viking individualism”. tory in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Demonstrations by That affection is why he then goes on to express women against this and similar rules have been regret that the Danes should have fallen from their spreading in both countries and have subsequently usual high standard of toleration by following been broadcast on Twitter, YouTube and other the examples of France, , and social media. It’s a movement of great cultural sig- Belgium and banning the burka. nificance, and the women who lead it meet street That’s the main message of his column, which attacks as well as official punishments. They are is not concealed in subtle asides and unspoken extraordinarily heroic. implications. The headline above it encapsulates his Yet if you type the single word burka into Google, argument clearly: “Denmark has got it wrong. Yes, the first three visual stories that pop up are all the burka is oppressive and ridiculous—but that’s related to the recent article by Boris Johnson in the still no reason to ban it.” London Daily Telegraph in which he criticised the It’s a liberal argument, and a balanced one burka as resembling a “letterbox”. If you then type too. On the one hand the burka is oppressive in both burka and Boris, no fewer than 13 million and bullying to women, often imposed on them links to stories involving both words then appear. by men, erodes the trust of others who cannot If you have a morbid curiosity to find out about read a woman’s expressions face-to-face, has no the rebellion of Iranian women against wearing the religious warrant in the Koran, and finally renders burka, however, Google will link you to 5 million its wearers absurd or sinister akin to letterboxes or stories—a solid number but only just over a third bank-robbers. On the other hand, a legal ban would of the number involving Boris. inevitably be seen as critical of Islam, foster a sense To be fair, the Boris column generated a lot of of grievance among Muslims, risk turning people secondary stories. There were attacks on him by into martyrs, and invite a general crackdown on Prime Minister Theresa May, by the chairman any public symbols of religious affiliation. Boris of the Tory party, Brandon Lewis, by “Muslim thinks that modest restrictions on the burka can community leaders” and their “spokesmen” be reasonably justified for security or commercial (denouncing his descent into Islamophobia), by reasons. But he concludes that “telling a free-born various Tory MPs from the party’s Remainer adult woman what she may or may not wear, in a faction (two of whom threatened to leave the party public place, when she is simply minding her own if he ever became its leader), by columnists from business” is not an argument he could wear. several newspapers, notably the Guardian, and even from faraway New by the US news program o what explains the outraged reactions to the the Daily Show, which issued one of its standard column? Two in particular deserve scrutiny. solemn moral reproofs in “satirical” disguise. SFirst, Brandon Lewis announced that he was refer- In short, Boris was better covered than the wives ring Boris to an internal party inquiry that could of the average Saudi prince or Iranian ayatollah. in principle remove the party Whip from him. One might suppose therefore that the Boris Second, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, column was an especially fiery, controversial and Cressida Dick, revealed that she had asked her crude expression of racial or religious prejudice. 500-strong unit dealing with “hate crimes” to That is certainly what his critics said or implied. examine the column but been advised that it did But their attacks bore no relationship to what Boris not rise to a level justifying prosecution.

6 Quadrant September 2018 asperitieschronicle

Neither response is very comforting. There was arious faction fights are taking place under nothing remotely like a crime in the Boris article. cover of this row. May and the Remainer Tories Even if the decision to refer it to the “hate crimes” areV using the debate to depict Boris as a reckless unit was prompted by complaints, how does that extremist who should be kept away from power if justify revealing that the police had acted on the Theresa May is ousted in autumn, as most people complaint? Such an announcement suggests to the expect. His leftist critics in Labour and the media world that the column was improper in some way— are desperately trying to ensure that their structure that it had violated some taboo on public speech of multiculturalism and diversity remains intact and that, unlike laws against robbery or rape, is usefully continues to give them a political advantage in keep- unclear until needed when it can be defined to ing ethnic and religious minorities within the Left the action. More and more media reports consist coalition. And the Islamists are hoping to establish of the police reading newspapers and internet blogs as a rule of UK politics that no aspect of Islam (by before arresting suspects for threatening public which they mean Islamism) can be open to criti- order by offending others by their words, generally cism. These are all influential forces, not often found on matters connected with race, culture, migration, on the same side of any debate, and a week ago they or the catch-all “diversity”. PC Plod is looking must have calculated that their combined forces more and more like “the paramilitary wing of the could hardly avoid victory. Guardian”. That inevitably has a chilling effect on But two forces have emerged, also in combina- public discussion of sensitive questions and the tion, to frustrate their calculations. Public opinion in “painful conversations” that Theresa May called for several polls has come down firmly on Boris’s side, if in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester bombing also beyond his arguments. Between 50 and 70 per but disapproved of when Boris was talking. cent of Brits think that free speech is today facing Did Boris fall foul of “diversity” then? It seems too many restrictions—and that maybe the burka possible. When Brandon Lewis let it be known should actually be banned. Still more important, that Boris was being investigated, that led to wide- a significant number of reform-minded Muslims, spread angry protests from the Tory rank and file including women who were themselves offended by which in turn prompted nervous leaks that in all the burka and the extreme and fanatical version of likelihood Boris would only be required to undergo Islamism it symbolised, have made strong public “diversity training”. statements that in effect endorse Boris. My guess is that this assurance won’t soothe the And that has transformed a debate that was earlier average Tory constituency chairman to any extent. conducted in a curiously theoretical atmosphere, Most Tories were probably surprised to learn that especially by the anti-Boris Left, as if it were solely support for “diversity” is now a condition of mem- a question of protecting the sensitivities of religious bership in the party’s code of conduct. They will minorities. Only a few references had been made probably feel that “diversity training” is a close to women being brutalised and imprisoned for not relation of that “political re-education” that the wearing the burka. But, as Barabas explains, “that communists used to require of dissidents before was in another country and besides the wench is being allowed back near power—and they won’t dead”. Except that increasingly it isn’t. Women be far wrong. in Paris, London and other European cities have Lewis, May and the high-minded Tory MPs like been physically attacked, slashed, and had acid former Attorney-General (and Remainer) Dominic thrown in their faces for wearing “immodest” Grieve would benefit considerably by reading Ed in areas where “radicalised” Islamists are a West’s superb book, The Diversity Illusion, which significant percentage of the local population. This lays out in great detail with full statistical support violent intimidation is spreading, and the spread how the Blair government in alliance with Left of the burka is a sign that some submit to it. We sociologists foisted mass migration on Britain and need to find responses that tell Muslim women followed that up with a series of laws and regula- they will have allies in resisting it and achieving tions to ensure that relations between the country’s emancipation. Jokes, ridicule and mockery do not new multicultural communities would be managed seem disproportionate or uncivilised. They are harmoniously by the simple technique of prevent- traditional ways of persuading people to abandon ing “painful” conversations on difficult topics like folly. And Boris’s critics offer nothing better— the burka. indeed, they would prefer not to be told about the “Diversity” has never been passed into law, but intimidation. it’s now the theory of the modern British state. This issue is not going away. In fact it’s only just And Boris seemingly offended against it. arriving.

Quadrant September 2018 7 astringencies

Anthon y Daniels

young Frenchman whom I know had just the children of a certain group had been severed returned from a year in Australia. For many from their parents, not with the intention of pro- young French people a year in Australia has tecting them from harms, but with that of extin- becomeA almost a rite de passage, their favoured des- guishing the language and culture into which they tination for such a rite. And the young Frenchman were born. I doubt that this could be done. did not regret his choice before he knuckled down But in any case, such a use of the word geno- to the serious business of having a career that he cide debased it, and this (for me) was not without did not really want and would not really enjoy. importance: for when you have used up the word Such is the fate, perhaps, of most of mankind, or genocide in describing a much lesser event, what at least of educated mankind. word do you use when genocide, in the sense of Naturally I asked him how he had liked the deliberate physical extinction of a whole ethnic Australia. He had liked it very much. What he group, occurs? The emotional force or charge of the missed about France, though, was the sense of his- word genocide will have been dissipated by its over- tory, missing in Australia. I said that Australia had use, and familiarity breeds indifference. a very interesting history, though of course not a long one by European or Asian standards. remember when the odious regime of Nicolae “You mean the genocide?” he said. and Elena Ceausescu was overthrown and they He was an intelligent young man, but not the wereI accused of genocide. It was shortly after I kind to devote much attention to the details of his- had visited the country, entering it as a tourist and tory as against a general feeling of its presence or visiting dissidents. At the British embassy I spoke absence. And he knew that there had been a geno- to the first secretary, having first descended into cide in Australia, a fact that he had absorbed by a deep cellar that had been supposedly cleared of a process of cultural osmosis rather than by more all bugging devices. Every Romanian whose home scholarly means. I visited immediately covered the telephone with I said that I thought there had been no genocide a cushion or two on the assumption that it con- in Australia, that the claim that there had been tained a listening device. If you heard a footstep such a genocide was misleading. It was true that behind you, you assumed that you were being fol- the fate of the Aboriginal population had been in lowed. The streets were largely empty. Romania many respects an awful one, and no doubt very bad was a Balkan North Korea, spared somewhat by things had been done by settlers, but there was a its corruption, inefficiency and disorganisation. tragic dimension to the encounter which required (Ceausescu was a great admirer and would-be imi- no genocidal intent to produce its results. tator of Kim Il-Sung. I cannot recommend highly It turned out that we were talking at cross-pur- enough the film of the Danube of Thought’s visit poses. He did not mean by genocide the attempt to Pyongyang, available on YouTube. It is both ter- to kill an entire race of people, such as occurred rible and hilarious, especially the dancing.) in Rwanda. He meant something more along the I am ashamed to say that when I heard that the lines of the effective destruction of a culture or Ceausescus had been tried and shot, my heart leapt extinction of a way of life by, for example, removal with joy. It took a little while for a reaction to set of children from their parents and bringing them in. Their trial was perfunctory, to say the least, and up in a completely different culture, speaking a dif- grossly unfair. There was no semblance of due proc- ferent language. ess. No one should be taken out into a courtyard Even on this rather loose definition of genocide, and shot like stray dogs, as they were, least of all of course, you would have to demonstrate that all by people who, until only a few days before, would

8 Quadrant September 2018 astringencieschronicle have fawned upon the condemned and obeyed their trial in which he had been allowed a defence would every order. As is so often the way with very bad have been a festival of tu quoque pronounced against people, the Ceausescus achieved some slight dig- his accusers. It is the terrible achievement of totali- nity in the face of death. My initial reaction taught tarian regimes such as that of the Ceausescus that me that I was not immune from the evil of political no one emerges both alive and innocent, which is passion. one of the reasons why the effects of such regimes The charge of genocide against the Ceausescus last at least a generation or two. It will take three did, however, appal me straight away. They were generations to overcome the legacy, the Romanian quite bad enough without having to historian Andre Pippidi told me in accuse them of the most abomina- Bucharest three months after the ble of crimes. Romanian behaviour overthrow. in Transnistria and Odessa during It is the terrible the war, after all, had been incom- achievement of ehemence is often the tribute parably worse than anything done totalitarian regimes that egotism pays to guilt. by the Ceausescu regime, awful IV ought to feel the wrongs of the though it was. True, the Ceausescus such as that of the world deeply because that is how were guilty of genocide in the nar- Ceausescus that no good people feel them: therefore if rowly juridical sense that they sold I express myself strongly enough I practically all the country’s remain- one emerges both will at least appear to be good. The ing Jews to Israel and the Saxons to alive and innocent, stronger the words the deeper the Germany, in the latter case ending which is one of feeling I appear to feel. a six-century-old cultural tradi- This is not the first time in his- tion: but the juridical sense makes the reasons why tory that an intelligentsia has felt no moral sense (and is therefore the effects of such the need for vehemence. In criti- immoral), because selling people cising Chernyshevsky, the Russian for money, not even into slavery, is regimes last at least radical of the mid-nineteenth cen- a far cry from exterminating them, a generation or two. tury who wrote the atrocious novel however repellent as a policy it What Is to Be Done that exerted so might be. One might as well draw powerful an influence on Lenin (if no distinction between robbery and murder. we want to believe that literature can do good, we The easy resort to the most extreme possible must also believe that it can do harm), Tolstoy, not descriptions of people and actions that one detests entirely alien himself to the siren-call of bad ideas, seems to be a characteristic of our times. Oddly wrote: enough, this combination of moral imprecision and verbal inflation occurred in the West with the large One only hears his fractious disagreeable voice expansion of tertiary education in the Western which ceaselessly mouths spite. It gets excited world—or so it seems to me. The word fascist came because it does not know how to speak and to be used lightly, almost joyously, to describe any- its voice sounds false. All this kind of thing body or any policy which conflicted with the moral comes from Belinsky. However, he spoke like orthodoxy of the moment. Its employment obvi- that because he really had been hurt whereas ated the need to examine and refute arguments, this writer [Chernyshevsky] thinks that in just as no one needs (or is able) to refute a paranoid order to speak well one must speak insolently delusion. The label by itself was enough to stifle and in order to speak insolently one must get discussion, a word without definite meaning but angry … it has come to be thought among with a connotation like the grin of the Cheshire us … that it is the thing to show oneself Cat that remained when all else of that creature indignant, bitter, testy. had melted away. The murder of the Ceausescus was more like Is this not somewhat reminiscent of our own getting rid of the evidence than an act of justice. times, when a possible future Prime Minister of Ceausescu was the kind of man whose greatest Great Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, compares the Israeli intellectual asset was probably a filing-cabinet government to the Nazi, appears to mean it and is memory for all that his associates had done. A real applauded by many for doing so?

Quadrant September 2018 9 Daryl McCann

Fascists Wherever She Looks

ascism, it would appear, is very much in the ernment regulations”, put their trust in the unlikely eye of the beholder. Madeleine Albright, candidature of Donald J. Trump. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State from 1997 The decision by ordinary Americans, steelwork- Fto 2001 and currently a professor of International ers, low-wage employees, veterans, small-business Relations at Georgetown University, attempts owners, Christians and so on, to support Trump at to argue in Fascism: A Warning that if President the 2016 election is one few now regret, given the Donald Trump is not a fully-fledged fascist then booming economy and Trump’s masterful handling he’s nevertheless a proto-fascist and constitutes “the of international trade negotiations, including those first anti-democratic president in modern US his- with South Korea, Japan and the European Union tory”. His malign influence on the international for starters. According to Albright, Donald Trump order encourages a growing “circle of despots”, a list cannot be the champion of ordinary folk—that is that includes everyone from Maduro and Erdogan to say, a genuine populist leader—because of “his to Putin and Duterte, not to mention Kim Jong-un, country-club life-style, a cabinet stocked with bil- “the sole example among them of a true Fascist”. lionaires, and a penchant for hiring foreigners to What Albright cannot concede, along with the make the beds in his hotels and stitch together entire Trump-approximates-Hitler brigade, is that clothes stamped with his brand”. Leaving aside the Donald Trump is a conservative-populist who stole vituperation, the key point about Trump’s wealth the march on progressive-populists. is not its magnitude but its origin: a business com- While populism is no bad thing, insists Albright, prising (mostly) American real estate and 23,000 Trump’s 2016 victory should not be categorised in (mostly) American workers. The billionaire forged those terms. She does cautiously acknowledge that an alliance with the working men and women of ordinary Americans were fed up with the de-indus- , Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by trialisation of the country and the slow economic distinguishing national capitalism as mostly prac- recovery after the Global Financial Crisis. To state tised by him from supranational capitalism as mostly the matter any more strongly would reflect poorly practised by Wall Street and, yes, Hillary and Bill on Obama’s tenure, and any criticism of the Healer- Clinton. His unsophisticated personal tastes— in-Chief remains taboo. The best Albright can do is sports, fast food, blunt language, unapologetic suggest that while some Americans perceived their patriotism and the “Gold Room” in Trump Tower— prospects as bleak before the advent of Candidate simply corroborated Ivanka Trump’s depiction of her Trump, others did not: “On the economy, I’m father as “blue collar with a big budget”. reminded of the Sgt Pepper tune where Paul sings Trump’s populist “Make America Great Again” ‘I’ve got to admit it’s getting better,’ and John sings, program might be best characterised as economic ‘It can’t get no worse.’” Because of their “personal patriotism: the encouragement of domestic manufac- gripes—legitimate or not”, aggrieved voters, from turing, energy independence, twenty-first-century “the unemployed steelworker”, “the veteran waiting infrastructure, bilateral (rather than multilateral) too long for a doctor’s appointment” and the “low- trade arrangements, low unemployment and an wage fast-food employee” to the “fundamentalist accelerated GDP. There is, possibly, an argument to who thinks war is being waged against Christmas” be made that policies of this kind echo the autar- and the “businessman who feels harassed by gov- kic pretensions of 1930s fascist regimes, but it is not a case to be made by left-of-centre critics such as Madeleine Albright. Progressives have, if nothing Fascism: A Warning else, a history of advocating government interven- by Madeleine Albright tion in the economy to serve the national interest, HarperCollins, 2018, 216 pages, $27.99 from Roosevelt and Attlee to Bernie Sanders and

10 Quadrant September 2018 Fascists Wherever She Looks

Jeremy Corbyn, who now adopts the Trump-like for the state—“Believe, Obey, Fight!”—is obviously manifesto “Build it in Britain”. an ideology of sorts. And it has little to do with Neoliberal fundamentalists, like the National Trump’s tax cuts and elimination of government Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, might be a different regulations. matter, given their preference for unfettered mar- Madeleine Albright might not be an ideologue kets. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, for instance, herself, but she is a political partisan of the highest Williamson wrote a notorious article disparaging (or lowest, if you like) order. Everybody on her side Donald Trump as “Father-Fuhrer” for promot- of the political aisle in America, not least Hillary ing economic patriotism as a means of mitigating Clinton, is a pro-democracy player. Albright remarks the effects of the global economy. Williamson’s that if Clinton had won the 2016 election she would contempt for ordinary Americans is almost palp­ have written her tome with the goal of “lending able: “The truth about these dysfunctional, down­ momentum to democracy during Hillary Clinton’s scale communities is that they deserve to die … The first term”. In other words, she was planning to be an white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, apologist for a Democratic administration but since selfish culture whose main products are misery and the honest and transparent Clinton lost, Albright used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make made it her job to tar President Trump with the fas- them feel good. So does OxyContin.” Williamson’s cist brush in a left-wing version of McCarthyism. tirade complemented Candidate Clinton’s “basket Any attempt by the White House to negotiate with of deplorables” diatribe from the other side of the a less-than-democratic foreign leader is just Donald political divide. Instead of disparaging the working Trump chumming it up with “the circle of despots”. class, Candidate Trump promised them an economic By linking Trump’s “pumped-up machismo” and recovery—and delivered. How does that make him, economic patriotism to 1930s fascism and today’s “cir- in the words of Madeleine Albright, “the first anti- cle of despots”, Madeleine Albright gives legitimacy democratic president in modern US history”? to what she supposedly laments: the polarisation of political opinion. Her misdiagnosis of Nazism is the ccepting Albright’s thesis that President Trump most striking example of this. She mentions Adolf is a proto-fascist and an enabler of foreign “fas- Hitler frequently in Fascism: A Warning; however, cist”A leaders is built on a fallacy. We are invited to because of her emphasis on “process” to the detri- believe that fascism is not an “ideology” but a “proc- ment of “ideology”, the Fuhrer turns out to be just ess”, and that any political figure or movement another strongman, albeit more manipulative and Albright deems menacing can be located on a fascist murderous than today’s “circle of despots”, Kim spectrum. Thus, her extraordinary claim that the Jong-un excepted. Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic In fact, there is a specificity about Hitler’s of Korea (DPRK) is a “true Fascist”. A totalitarian world­view that qualitatively differentiates it from he most certainly is, but a fascist? Albright reflects Mussolini’s fascism, despite the shared anti-demo- that portraits of Adolf Hitler in the classrooms of cratic views and even the anti-Jewish 1938 Reform her native Czechoslovakia were exchanged for ones Laws. At the centre of Hitler’s apocalyptic and mil- of Joseph Stalin in 1945, as if this proves annihila- lennialist Aryanism is a cosmological anti-Semitism tionist racialism is the same as Marxism-Leninism. that makes nonsense out of any attempt to under- Albright’s loose definition of “fascism” allows her to stand the Holocaust and Nazism with PC notions of make other awkward claims such as “the DPRK is a intolerance. To leave ideology out of our calculations secular ISIS”. Professor Albright’s flawed methodol- benefits no one more than modern-day ideologues ogy is the opposite of illuminating. who equate Donald Trump, regulated immigration, Some authoritarian movements in the 1930s protected borders, patriotism, Christianity, white certainly had trouble articulating a systematic ide- heterosexual males, the constabulary, America, the ology. Francoism, for instance, was mockingly West and even Israel with Nazism. referred to as “a bayonet in search of an ideology”, All of that might be nothing more than an absurd while Mussolini, the original fascist, struggled with joke if it did not threaten to undermine democratic communicating a coherent philosophy. Italian fas- discourse in the West and open the way for genuine cism extolled a dictatorship and a one-party state, fanatics on the Left and the Right. How can you along with a form of collectivism that borrowed compromise or negotiate with someone you believe from Social Darwinism. Everything—including embodies a kind of absolute negative? This, for what Mussolini’s state corporatist “Third Way”—was it is worth, would be my warning to Madeleine intended to absorb the individual into the state: “All Albright and all those who caricature conservative- within the state, nothing outside the state, noth- populism as fascism or Nazism and, by so doing, help ing against the state.” That almost mystical regard extinguish civil debate.

Quadrant September 2018 11 George Pell

The Future of the Church in a Post-Christian Age

rchbishop Eric D’Arcy, who retired as public square, despite the gains made with pub- Catholic Archbishop of Hobart in 1999, lic opinion in the pro-life struggle, which are not was a learned and perceptive man who lec- matched in any way here in Australia. He sees the turedA in philosophy at Melbourne University for churches as largely ineffective in combating the more than twenty years. He loved Europe, but was forces of cultural decline, being content to be chap- (only slightly) less enthusiastic about the United lains to a consumerist culture fast losing a proper States, being fond of teasing his listeners by claim- understanding of Christianity and indeed of the ing that the people of the were as Transcendent. different from us as the Chinese. He took his solution from the moral philoso- The claim is preposterous, but we underestimate pher Alasdair MacIntyre, best known for his 1981 Australian-American differences at our peril, espe- work After Virtue, who proclaimed that Western cially when we read a good and provocative book civilisation, and in particular moral philosophy, from the US such as Rod Dreher’s The Benedict had lost their moorings. MacIntyre predicted that Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian eventually full participation in mainstream society Nation. Written last year, it has produced contro- would not be possible for those wanting to live a versy, and insights aplenty. It is not primarily about life of traditional virtue. MacIntyre’s book in 1981 Pope Francis or Vatican policies and struggles, but might not have produced a revolution, but it cer- about how adult Christians can continue in the tainly provoked great interest in Christian circles faith and hand it on to their children, when most and controversy in the world of philosophy, which of the sociological currents are hostile. the author answered in two subsequent editions in While this is of special interest to all committed 1984 and 2007. Christians with an eye to the future, the chang- Today there is no agreement on the source and ing religious or irreligious patterns of majority foundations of moral thinking on issues ranging Australia will also have important consequences from human rights to the nature of human life, for the wider Australian community. I suspect the marriage and family, to sex and gender. Even the wider society is already suffering from collateral notion of truth is rejected for subjective truths and damage. most feel that it is not at all necessary to ponder Dreher’s book is not like one of the Lord’s these foundational differences. parables where the truth is often hidden within MacIntyre believes the root of the problem lies or behind an interesting or provocative story. His in the Enlightenment’s abandoning of Aristotle thesis is clear. The culture war that began with the and especially his concept of teleology. Ancient Sexual Revolution in the 1960s has now ended in Western ethics, like its medieval successor, believed defeat for Christian conservatives, and the cul- that animate nature and especially human life had tural Left has no intention of living in a post-war a proper end or purpose and therefore an essential peace. He is not enthusiastic about the way the nature. Without this central teleological content, Christian churches in the US have battled in the contemporary ethical discourse retains the con- cepts or language, but agrees on few definitions. MacIntyre compared our situation of more than The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a thirty-five years ago (and if anything the confusion Post-Christian Nation is deeper now) with that of the Polynesian peo- by Rod Dreher ple of the South Pacific in the nineteenth century, Sentinel, 2017, 288 pages, $30.99 when King Kamehameha removed the taboos his

12 Quadrant September 2018 The Future of the Church in a Post-Christian Age people observed. His drive to modernise his society Donald Trump’s contribution is to buy a bit more met almost no resistance, because over the centu- time, while leaving the basic situation of decline ries the taboos had lost their spiritual significance unaltered. I suspect Dreher underestimates Trump, and had come to be seen as arbitrary, not useful for who has already contributed substantially with his daily living. nominees to the Supreme Court, just as he under- While MacIntyre rejects Friedrich Nietzsche’s estimates Christian resilience. concept of the “Ubermensch”, who constructs his In the first half of his book Dreher defines the own set of virtues and laws to control the “low challenges of post-Christian America. In the sec- lifes”, he believed Nietzsche accurately identified ond part he discusses how the Benedictine Rule the weakness of the Enlightenment in its individu- can be adapted and lived by adults and families. alism and subjectivism, which in turn can degener- The book is written for theologically traditional ate into emotivism. Karl Marx’s writings are also Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox believ- important to MacIntyre and he sets out to repair ers, whom he describes as “orthodox” with a small the moral weaknesses of Marxism (as he sees them). o. Dreher is not a Catholic and lives in a Greek For him only classic Aristotelianism, inter- Orthodox community with his wife and family. preted by a new Benedict, might save Western humanity, with its metaphysical framework, where rules are based on the virtues grounded in human Diagnosis nature; man as he is. Societies need to recover their ven after the Second World War young Irish- moral authority, founded on the virtues, so reject- Australian Catholics still learned the poetry of ing the notion that only the individual, serious or EJohn O’Brien, the pseudonym for Monsignor John capricious, is the agent and moral arbitrator. For Hartigan (1878–1952) parish priest of Narrandera him morality is not just a person’s opinion, and he in the Riverina. Perhaps his best-known poem was rejects the notion that each person about Hanrahan, who always dis- is able to paint his own moral pic- coursed after Sunday Mass during ture in the form and colours of his society the changing seasons that “we’ll all choosing. A society dominated by A be rooned before the year is out”. such rugged individualist egotists dominated by rugged They weren’t. would quickly move to anarchy, but individualist egotists In fact, John O’Brien was a “herd mentality” dominated by a not pessimistic, but optimistic, sceptical deep-rooted narcissism would quickly move to if a bit sentimental, despite the and hostility to delayed gratifica- anarchy, but a “herd Depression. The free market and tion seem to be our lot in Australia. mentality” dominated globalisation, the pill and reli- Dreher dubbed the strategic gious decline were not parts of the withdrawal proposed by MacIntyre by a sceptical deep- agenda. as the “Benedict Option”, named rooted narcissism and Dreher’s pessimism is quite dif- after St Benedict, who withdrew ferent, with a Flannery O’Connor from Roman society early in the hostility to delayed hardness and darkness; with not seventh century, to found what gratification seem to be too much about the dawn that eventually became the still sur- our lot in Australia. follows a long hard night. In the viving and immense monastic Introduction to his book Dreher Benedictine tradition. The first two informs us that Christ “did not Catholic archbishops of Sydney were Benedictine promise that Hell would not prevail against His monks, but in Australia, unlike England, church in the West”. Benedictinism has not flourished and expanded. For Dreher, “The West has lost the golden thread Dreher’s true believers will develop crea- that binds us to God, Creation and each other”. tive, communal solutions to help themselves and He uses a variety of metaphors to explain that the their children hold on to their faith in what, he ground is moving under our feet, citing the sociol- believes, will be an ever more hostile world. They ogist Zygmunt Bauman’s “solid modernity” of pre- will often live in small communities of commit- dictable and manageable social change which has ted believers, somewhat removed from the main- morphed into “liquid modernity” where changes stream. He sees many Christians as clueless about are so rapid that institutions do not have time to what is happening. While grandparents realise that solidify. For him the 17 million dead of the First too few of their grandchildren worship regularly, World War shattered what remained of an ancient most remain reluctant to accept that we have a Christendom, after Darwin, Marx and Freud had crisis, unlike Dreher, who believes the extent of started a mighty wave of cultural upheaval which

Quadrant September 2018 13 The Future of the Church in a Post-Christian Age

“cannot be stopped, only ridden”. For Dreher the changes the way believers live and so do escap- future does not belong to conservative Christian ism or irreligion or superstition, which always fill political activists, who are as ineffective as White the gap caused by the flight of genuine religion. Russian exiles. As the Czech poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “A true It was Sigmund Freud who replaced religion opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after with psychology, a better help for coping with death—the huge solace of thinking that for our life’s challenges, he claimed, and paved the way betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not for today’s “gospel of self-fulfilment”. Freud’s going to be judged.” interpreter Philip Rieff describes the victory of Dreher also laments the influence of the mod- “Psychological man” who “is born to be pleased” ern barbarians who believe they are liberated from over “Religious man” who “was born to be saved”. all authoritative pasts, who are indifferent and Autonomy is the goal of the irreligious, possible often hostile to Western civilisation. However, now in many ways that were not dreamt of by the in the US the barbarians have not conquered the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola humanities faculties as comprehensively as in (1463–94) who claimed that “We can become what Australia. Columbia University offers a course on we will”. the Western great books. The hard work of pres- Wittingly or unknowingly, all Christians, ervation, the fightback started there much earlier whether they be lukewarm or committed, regular than in Australia, than Paul Ramsay. His foun- or “C and E” worshippers at Christmas and Easter, dation should make a profound contribution in a are influenced at their schools and universities, by variety of ways, but the elephant in the corner, reg- the media, at work or play or in their family by ularly ignored by antagonists and protagonists, is these spirits of the age. Christian communities can the massive Christian contribution, for at least 1700 be contraceptive, looking well but unable to pro- years, to Western culture and achievement. There duce life. is the rub. Just as the Catholics were the only group Dreher quotes a 2005 survey which claimed that with men and women on the ground, in the work- most American teenagers followed a pseudo-reli- ing class, who could be inspired to drive out the gion MTD, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”, where communists from control of the Australian unions the Creator God is interested in us, wanting us to after the Second World War, so too Western civili- be good, nice and fair to each other. The goal is to sation will not retain its present influence, much less be happy, to turn to God in trouble and to go to expand it in Australia, without Christian cultural heaven. This pseudo-religion, which is destructive warriors, especially Catholics and Evangelicals. of biblical Christianity, was resisted more effec- And it is the Christianity of Western civilisation tively by Evangelical teenagers than by Catholics which is obnoxious to the protesters. or mainline Protestants. Dreher foresees serious Christians with tra- It was the invention of the pill which unleashed ditional moral belief systems being squeezed out the Sexual Revolution, described by Mary Eberstadt of the professions and then excluded from public in Adam and Eve after the Pill (2012) as having social life and discussion. Christian gynaecologists are consequences, different, but similar in importance already under pressure, but the other dangers seem to those of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in distant prospects, if at all, in Australia. Certainly 1917. For Dreher it is sex which “is tearing the church neither humanists nor Christians should abandon apart” and it is the Sexual Revolution “which has “the switch points of cultural power”, such as the toppled the church’s authority in the broader cul- humanities faculties, to the forces of ignorance ture”, a wider and more formidable challenge than and intolerance who aspire to continue their “great the paedophilia crisis with all its tragedies. march through the institutions”. When God is reduced to being a Cosmic Therapist and we strive to combat the Sexual Revolution with a middle-class moralism of being And Australia? happy with oneself and nice to others, then, accord- he differences between the US and Australia ing to Dreher, we are bringing knives to a gunfight. are significant despite our common language, What is often not remarked upon in Australia Tshared democracy, respect for the law and the is that the corrosive forces weakening the churches dominance of American entertainment. are also at work in the wider community, which Australia has no great mountains or great rivers is probably less equipped to resist. The tragedy of or lakes. It has plenty of desert, plenty of droughts secondary school suicides, unknown at least to me and much of the land is barren and dry. The US sixty years ago, is but the tip of an iceberg of sad- minus Alaska has about the same land area, but is ness and suffering. A monotheism taken seriously able to sustain a population about thirteen times

14 Quadrant September 2018 The Future of the Church in a Post-Christian Age that of Australia. the US. No Catholic church in Australia has been The first British governors in Australia, like burnt by a mob, and James Scullin was the first the earlier Captain James Cook, were not deeply Catholic prime minister (from 1929 to 1932), long religious, much less were the soldiers and convicts. before John Kennedy was the first Catholic presi- When the Spanish visited in 1793 to examine the dent (1961 to 1963). strength of the defences preparatory to a military For all these reasons trends are more likely attempt from Lima to take over the colony, they to arise earlier in the US than in Australia, play were scandalised to find no church building. When out more vigorously if not violently there, and be the first church was built it was burnt down by per- described more vividly, “in the raw”. sons unknown. While we have no Mayflower tradition at the reher is right that profound and hostile forces start of our story, and did mistreat the Aborigines, are damaging religion, but I prefer to take him none of the colonies had slaves, we fought no war withD a pinch of salt and claim the underlying religious for independence and never fought a terrible civil landscape here is better seen in black-and-white than war. We have no Bible , the Irish spread widely in technicolour; duller and possibly bleaker. In many and never congregated as they did in Boston and parts of the US the Catholic church-going rate is New York, and we have no Hollywood. much higher than ours. Australia has no Bible Belt The religious scenes in the two countries run in and never had the capacity for a Christian Moral parallel to their geography. Australia seems to be Majority movement. In the US, 250 Catholic terti- more widely secular, is less religious and less anti- ary colleges and universities flourish (although the religious than the US. Political Catholicism is often attenuated), rhetoric in Australia almost never while Australia has two Catholic “does religion”, unlike the practice eople are reluctant universities and a college. On the in the US, one of the most religious P other hand Christian schools in societies in history; a fact which to confront the Australia, partially funded by gov- helps explain Hillary Clinton’s implication that they ernments, educate nearly 1,300,000 defeat. students, about 33 per cent of all The religious terrain is flatter are doing the wrong young Australians. Only 8 per cent in Australia. So too is the political thing. The Christian of US children are in religiously scene. answer lies in good affiliated schools, which receive As Australia is a constitutional no government funding. About monarchy, headed by a governor- models of fidelity 190,000 attend Catholic schools, general, with compulsory voting at and humanity, where the numbers continue to elections which are decided by pref- decline. erences in the absence of a major- more children, Dreher is right on many points, ity, constitutional forces move the lasting marriages and the destructive trends in the majority in Australia towards the and gospel values. US are at work here similarly, but middle rather than to populism or not always in the same ways. The extremes. Sexual Revolution is at the heart A confident superpower led by a succession of much personal confusion and suffering, a major of directly-elected executive presidents, admit- cause for lapsing from regular worship and some- tedly balanced by powerful legislatures, who are times for disaffiliating, especially among the young. the end result of a process where voters have to The beautiful Christian teaching on the cen- be encouraged to vote (sometimes by demonising trality of love—that sexual discipline safeguards the opposition), produces a culture quite different abundance, that love-making is essentially linked, from Australia’s, where governments are less pow- directly and indirectly, to new life and therefore to erful, leading an easy-going population, typical of men and women and is not primarily for personal a comfortable middle-order power more interested pleasure and self-expression—is readily dismissed, in a royal marriage in England than the threat of sometimes furiously, sometimes easily. People are Islamic extremism in Indonesia. Incidentally, it is reluctant to confront the implication that they are far easier to fly from Australia to London or Los doing the wrong thing. The Christian answer lies Angeles than to Jakarta. in good models of fidelity and humanity, more Australia has few Hispanic or German migrants children, lasting marriages and gospel values. and despite the English–Irish, Protestant–Catholic Dreher is also convinced that “Catholic lite” or antagonisms of most of our history, anti-Catholi- Christian lite in any major denomination acceler- cism in Australia has been less virulent than in ates the decline. This is well established in formerly

Quadrant September 2018 15 The Future of the Church in a Post-Christian Age

Catholic countries like Belgium, Holland and good political work of democratic persuasion per- and runs counter to the intuitions of many formed in the United States, despite the long list even benevolent outsiders, who feel that if the of losses on abortion and same-sex marriage. The churches were more liberal, more accommodating changes the pro-life movement has achieved in the on sex, life and marriage issues and less mysterious, US are remarkable, where 56 per cent of Americans then their numbers would rebound. The opposite now consider abortion to be morally wrong, and is the case. A passion for social justice does not 76 per cent want to limit legal abortion to the first give an exemption from regular prayer and wor- three months of pregnancy. The pro-life forces ship, from following the Ten Commandments in there have also worked effectively for the appoint- the Christian dispensation. ment of pro-life judges. There is no parallel for this I cannot follow the Benedict Option on a cou- in Australia. ple of major points. The thesis underestimates the In a democracy Christians are also voters who enduring effects of popular religion, participate in choosing those who of regular simple prayer and devo- govern and, where free speech is tion, of feasts and festivals ranging allowed, the first necessity is to from a local feast to World Youth Most Australian keep speaking and voting. In both Day. Christianity must continue churches still do not countries the majority of people to be offered to the sinful and the do much on social are Christians and they have the searching, to those who are dam- capacity to defend their religious aged and confused, to those who media or television freedoms. In Australia, Christian are only partly converted. A help- and radio. It is on and other forces were unable to ing hand is always welcome. Pope prevent the legalisation of same- Francis is right that the church must social media especially sex marriage (although Australia act as a field hospital, although it is that the curious was the last Anglophone country also more than a primitive hospi- will come to explore to change), but I believe there is a tal. Most Australian churches still majority vote to protect religious do not do much on social media or religious answers. freedom and to preserve fund- television and radio. It is on social ing for Christian schools which media especially that the curious teach Christian doctrine and for will come to explore religious answers. After por- Christian hospitals which respect life, initially and nography, religion is one of the most visited topics finally. Political leaders who know the Australian on the internet. tribes realise these claims are probably true, but As the social forces against Christian living those with a tin ear sometimes cannot recognise the have intensified, sociological defences have to be music. Despite the paedophilia crisis, the Catholic strengthened and these might be best found in vote was not extinguished. smaller communities of worshipping families; but While it is no surprise to see Christians sup- such groupings should be first of all in the cities porting the separation of church and state, there and towns as they were in the early Christian cen- is an irony when Christians are in the forefront turies, in the New Testament times (when this is defending free speech against a bizarre coalition financially possible). The hermits only fled to the who must not be offended. But this is an impor- desert from about the end of the third century, ini- tant contribution both for the churches and for the tially in Egypt, while the monasteries came even nation. later. Believers who move to Wagga or Wodonga or No changes are complete and no changes are Ballarat to found supportive communities are to be permanent, but Dreher has made an important congratulated. Rural Australia, still largely Anglo, contribution in reinforcing the conviction that for is now more irreligious than the cities and needs Christians a new game has begun. life-giving Christian oases. But the cities remain as the most important battlegrounds in the clash Cardinal Pell, formerly Archbishop of Melbourne and between good and evil, faith and fear. Archbishop of Sydney, is the head of the Secretariat for I also believe that Dreher underestimates the the Economy in the Vatican.

16 Quadrant September 2018 Bingham’s Ghost

Bingham, alias Lord Lucan vanished for forty years without a sign or a token till his title devolved on his son. Our earlier, flannel- Bingham vanished from company and speech just round the time his workmate turned solemn, with a new tale about him. I Would if I Could

Bingham—his forenames didn’t last— The boring sleeps! had quit bush slog to go scan Each day, at lunch, for fresh graft down the Hunter Valley. Dad took a ten‑ It had come time to abandon Minute nap “to keep the cheerless tramp after cedar The ball in the logs to fell and float down Air.” He juggled the wintry floodwater gullies. Fatigue. Woe betide No place for follow-my-leader The child who Woke him. but Bingham proved not wholly missing. Better Odd times, in moleskins and To wait for he’d appear by the Forestry roadside, The world to moveless, with his pockets pulled out Restart. and patriarchs and other locals Another story shivered grimly at encounters with him. When he was old, Long gone now, he froze many a rider Slipping into the quicksand and silenced whole carloads of revellers. Of the day‑ Long doze: “Remember! No matter Verticals What time of day or night You come, Whizz of blue striped Wake me straight away! curtains on a rail Do you promise?” and beyond those, the dull downrights of sheet iron Gwyneth Lewis wrapped around fruit trees Translated from Welsh by the author to fence off horse-rubbing, donkey-scrape, and the horns which used to grind off sugar.

Les Murray

Quadrant September 2018 17 Salvatore Babones

The Opening of the Australian Mind Great Books as Education for Democracy

Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material tion their democracies come from the West. When prosperity ... but far more it requires confidence, Japanese students want to explore the philosophical confidence in the society in which one lives. roots of Zen Buddhism, they look to their own his- —Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (1969) tory, and to China, and thence back to India. But when they want to explore the roots of their parlia- s it better to live under a wise aristocracy or in a mentary democracy, they go back to Montesquieu, reckless democracy? Certainly, most of us hope Magna Carta and the Greeks. Democracy has been to live in wise democracies. And we can easily adopted in and adapted to many cultures, but it is pointI to corrupt aristocracies, or even argue that uniquely a product of Western civilisation. corruption is the ultimate fate of all aristocracies, The words culture and civilisation have been no matter how well-conceived. But those answers used, confused and abused in many different com- evade the question, which is no philosophical set binations, but their common English meaning piece but a recurring problem in practical politics. should be clear. Italian culture is very different One need look no further than Brexit, Trump and from French culture, but Italy and France share the European Commission’s actions against Poland a single civilisation. They eat different foods and to find living cases of liberal elites calling for the speak different languages, but they read the same suppression of the democratically expressed will of books. Western civilisation is the Germano-Roman the people. The etymology of “aristocracy”, after all, civilisation that arose on the ruins of the western is “rule by the best”. half of the Roman empire, in the areas that were And while it’s easy to score cheap points ridi- formerly Roman but which later passed under the culing the mandarins of contemporary liberalism, yoke of Germanic conquerors. democracy is chock-full of moral dilemmas that It may have taken a long time, but the fusion no political science textbook can answer, no phil­ of two cultural traditions—Germanic freedom and osophy lecture resolve. A strong grounding in the Roman order—eventually produced a new civi- facts of history helps, but is only a prerequisite for lisation that was much more than the sum of its political wisdom. True education for democracy is parts. In his epic 1969 television documentary and a challenge of civilisational proportions. book Civilisation, the art historian Kenneth Clark “Civilisational”, because democracy transcends identifies the birth of Western civilisation with the mere political science. Many countries with per- return to building in stone in early medieval France fectly democratic written constitutions are not after a hiatus following the collapse of the Roman democracies at all, while the has empire. For Clark, the early Germanic tribes were developed a durable and robust democracy with- little more than raiders and pillagers, possessing a out ever having a formal, written constitution. distinctive culture but no civilisation to speak of. Democracy also transcends sociology, with socie- Building in stone represented, if nothing else, a ties as different as South Africa and South Korea commitment to settling down in one place—and eventually finding their way to at least some ver- fighting to defend it. sion of democracy. But there is one thing that all In a neat coincidence of Western history, the contemporary democracies have in common: strong first stone structure built by the medieval Franks roots in Western civilisation. was a baptistery in Poitiers, the same place where in Non-Western countries like Japan may have 732 the Frankish leader Charles Martel turned back deep, meaningful cultures that are every bit as an Arab invasion and ensured the independence of sophisticated as Western culture, but without excep- Western Christendom from Muslim domination.

18 Quadrant September 2018 The Opening of the Australian Mind

In the sixth century, Clark’s “confidence” meant the Quincy school board decided to examine the the confidence to build; in the eighth, it meant the students themselves. What they found showed confidence to defend. Throughout the Crusades, the dangers of leaving education to the educators. the voyages of discovery, and the colonial era, it The students could read passages from their les- meant—for good and for bad—the confidence to son books, but they couldn’t read pages from the expand. In the two world wars and the Cold War it newspaper. They could recite the alphabet, but meant the confidence to persevere, and to overcome. they couldn’t spell words. They knew the rules of Today, there are no external threats to Western English grammar by heart, but were unable to use civilisation. There is much talk of a rising China, them to write simple sentences. One member of but few people seriously believe that China will the school board, later to serve as president of the invade and subjugate the Western world, and even Union Pacific railroad, said that the schools were fewer want to trade in their Western democracies mistaking “the means for the end”. for totalitarian party-states. As perhaps it had been That end was literacy, and the radical program for Rome, the only real threats to Western civili- they introduced was the reading of real books. In sation come from within. We have fact, they gutted the entire cur- elections, but are they meaningful? riculum (except for mathematics) We have politicians, but are they he only real and replaced it with reading and leaders? We have policies, but are T doing. (They admitted that they they moral? Western civilisation is threats to Western were stumped by the challenge of here to stay, but what kind of civi- civilisation come from motivating students to embrace lisation it will become is, as always, the study of arithmetic.) Not only up for grabs. within. We have grammar and composition, but his- elections, but are they tory, geography, philosophy and the meaningful? We natural sciences were to be taught Education for democracy by bringing students into contact s an indispensable mechanism have politicians, but with real books. for intellectual reproduction, are they leaders? We At the end of three years, the Aeducation is the foundation of every “Quincy Experiment”, as it came civilisation. By 1873, the US state have policies, but are to be known, reported dramatic of Massachusetts already had more they moral? Western improvements in students’ true than two hundred years’ experience reading abilities coupled with of educating its youth at the pub- civilisation is here higher test scores on the old rote lic expense. Originally introduced to stay, but what standards—at a cost reduction to thwart the designs of “that old kind of civilisation of more than 20 per cent, to just deluder, Satan”, Massachusetts’ $15.68 per pupil (which was per- public schools later took on the it will become is, as haps what the school board valued more secular, republican mission always, up for grabs. most). It really was a rare case of of education for democracy. The “more for less”. The superintendent idea that democracy requires an they hired to reform the schools, informed electorate is pure common sense, and as Francis “Colonel” Parker, went on to lead the Cook America evolved from a country of the pulpit into a County Normal School in Chicago, where he country of the pamphlet, education for democracy taught Chicago’s public school teachers about the meant learning to read. Quincy model and further developed it into what Reading was then taught by rote, with teachers we now know as student-centred learning. leading the students in chanting lessons in unison in The educational theorist John Dewey taught at what might today be called the “Shanghai method” the University of Chicago and was deeply influ- of learning. Chanting in unison works well as far enced by Parker’s methods (his children even as it goes, which is not very far. In the small town attended Parker’s practice school for teacher educa- of Quincy, just south of Boston, some particularly tion). Dewey is the giant of American educational intrepid members of the school board decided to theory, the prophet of “progressive” education. drop in on classes to see how their students were Critics today often associate progressive educa- doing. The ratepayers were pumping $19.24 per stu- tion with students writing self-reflective essays and dent into the town’s schools, and they wanted to making papier-mache pyramids, but that is to forget make sure they were getting their money’s worth. the nonsense that came before. After Quincy and In place of the usual end-of-year exams given Dewey, rote drills at the blackboard disappeared for by the teachers, the burghers and businessmen of more than a century (though they are now coming

Quadrant September 2018 19 The Opening of the Australian Mind back on the computer). sive education is often popular among primary Dewey promoted student-centred learning as school teachers, who are understandably drawn to a the antidote to the authoritarian model of education philosophy that encourages them to introduce play in which teachers shovel facts into students’ empty into the classroom and get paid for it, it has a mixed minds. The one bedrock principle of progressive reputation among secondary school teachers and is education is that education is preparation for life positively loathed in the academy. University teach- in society—in our case, for life in democratic soci- ers abhor a style of learning that lets students draw ety. The subjects are important, but secondary. As their own conclusions from independent reading, Colonel Parker showed in Quincy, you could learn for two reasons: it challenges the teachers’ author- practical grammar better by reading the speeches of ity, and it’s a lot of work. Daniel Webster than by sitting through a grammar In Western civilisation today, universities have lesson. That’s nothing less than a return to the ped- replaced the church, the temple and the mosque agogy of the old English grammar schools, where as the final arbiters of knowledge and wisdom. you learned to write well by reading the letters of Academics arrogate to themselves the sole right to Cicero. Dewey wanted that kind of education for decide what (and how) their students should learn. everyone. Their very titles of “lecturer” and “professor” imply At the university level, progressive education preaching the word of truth from the podium, meant reading the classics. In 1904 Dewey left the latter-day pulpit of secular society. University Chicago for Columbia University in New York, teachers, their professional associations, and their where he helped inspire the development of a unions vehemently maintain that academic freedom core curriculum centred on the reading of great is inviolable, that it licenses them to lecture and books. The Columbia core was actually the brain- profess as they see fit, and that, even in publicly- child of Dewey’s Columbia colleagues Frederick funded institutions, it shields them from oversight Woodbridge, a fellow pragmatic philosopher, and by anyone other than themselves. John Erskine, an English professor and classical Such a broad construction of academic free- pianist who later went on to be president of the dom might be somewhat questionable in a pub- Juilliard School. After the First World War (and licly-funded research institute like the CSIRO. It in response to it), these professors pushed through is absolutely unconscionable in a university, where a reorientation of the first-year experience around academics are not only scholars, but teachers. As the idea that students should not just learn about Socrates understood twenty-five centuries ago, Western civilisation, but experience it for them- teachers are ultimately responsible to the societies selves through the reading of great books. in which they teach. History has long since con- Over the last hundred years, American univer- demned the Athenian assembly for ordering the sities have had an on-again, off-again relationship death of Socrates, but Socrates himself accepted with the idea of reading the great books of Western (and executed) the verdict. Teaching is a public civilisation. Except at Columbia and a few small trust, not a private sinecure. University teachers colleges like St John’s in Annapolis, Maryland, the hold in their hands the future of society itself. reading of great books has been relegated to self- That doesn’t mean that governments should selective honours programs. Western civilisation, if impose political litmus tests on university teach- it is offered at all, is taught as a one-semester lecture ers, as the Nazis and Soviets did, and as China course. The classicist and philosopher Allan Bloom and Saudi Arabia do. It means that society—all of blamed the abandonment of great books for “the society, broadly construed—has an interest in what closing of the American mind”, in his 1987 best- and how its children are taught. This is neither a seller of that title. As Bloom wrote on the fron- revolutionary (nor a reactionary) idea. In Australia, tispiece of his book, “higher education has failed the government, businesses and the professions democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s are already deeply involved in shaping what stu- students”. Three decades on, those souls are poorer dents are taught. The government heavily subsidises than ever. education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (the “STEM” disciplines), medicine, nursing, teaching and (some of) the arts. Law firms From academic freedom to classroom and bar associations intervene in the minutiae of tyranny the legal curriculum, medical associations in the merican higher education wasn’t killed by medical curriculum, nursing associations in the papier-mache pyramids. It was killed by the nursing curriculum, accounting associations in the Ateachers, with the full co-operation of the corpus accounting curriculum, and so on. delicti, the student body itself. Although progres- In the humanities and social sciences, it’s the

20 Quadrant September 2018 The Opening of the Australian Mind students who determine what is taught, by voting cles. Thus “critical thinking” (in education jargon) with their feet (and dollars). Sometimes there is is put into practice as the application of discipline- a stand-off, with university departments insisting specific tools to discipline-specific problems. that students conform to a particular ideological That may not always be such a bad thing. position if they want to study a particular subject. Students study engineering to learn the tools of the It can be tough going for a conservative student in engineering profession and how to apply them to culture studies, or for a socialist studying finance. practical engineering problems. Fair enough. But But departments that drive away students eventu- few people study philosophy to become philoso- ally lose their licences to drive at all. phers, or political science to become political scien- Whether or not you agree with the contents tists. They study these subjects because they want of a particular university curriculum, you can rest to think more deeply about the world, or perhaps assured that class enrolments are essentially mar- because they want to serve their country—or lead ket-driven, even in the humanities and social sci- it. The tyranny of the lecture hall holds nothing for ences. Especially in the humanities them. and social sciences. In professional If you want students to learn schools, students may be forced to he ANU wants about civilisation, host a screening take particular subjects in order to T of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. have the opportunity to fulfil their to keep its students’ You won’t find a better lecturer larger career aspirations. If you minds firmly under practising today. But if you want want to be an engineer, you have them to become civilised, they have to take calculus. But the only job its control, whereas to experience civilisation for them- that requires anyone to take culture the Ramsay Centre selves. And the best way to do that studies is ... the job of teaching wants to free is for them to read great books. culture studies. With full sympa- Australian students thy for those few conservatives who From Quincy to Canberra aspire to teach culture studies, their to think what they plight probably does not rise to the n Friday, June 1, the Australian level of an important policy prob- will, under the National University with- lem. Given the relative financial influence of some of drewO from talks to host a bach- rewards involved, we might worry the most profound elor’s degree in Western civilisation more about the few socialists who sponsored by the Ramsay Centre for want to teach finance. thinkers who have Western Civilisation. Predictably What gives academics real ever lived. enough, press coverage of the col- power over their students—and lapse focused on the Westernness society—isn’t the authority to set of the Ramsay program. But that the curriculum. It’s the authority to decide how it is was never at issue. The Ramsay Centre issued an taught. Academics love to hear themselves lecture, indicative curriculum for the degree in late 2017, and cost-conscious universities indulge that desire. and all universities bidding to host it bought into Even when academics hold discussions, they are the Ramsay Centre’s list of books. usually little more than lectures in disguise. And Tellingly, one of the sticking points in the in the humanities and social sciences, students are talks between the ANU and the Ramsay Centre mostly evaluated on the basis of essays, which are in was the ANU’s desire to call the degree “Western effect lectures in reverse: the best way to get a good Civilisation Studies”, against the Ramsay Centre’s grade is to tell your teachers what you know they insistence on “Western Civilisation”. Another was want to hear. As a result, Australian classrooms are the ANU’s attempt to pin the Ramsay Centre down dominated by one and only one point of view: that on academic freedom with language that made it a of the teachers. “shared” commitment, not just a university commit- The dominance of the teachers arises not by acci- ment. Together these positions meant making soci- dent, but by design. Even those few teachers who ety the instrument of the academy’s goals, instead are deeply committed to intellectual openness can’t of the other way around. Judging from his pub- get students to seek out their own answers when lic comments, the ANU’s Vice-Chancellor Brian the only questions the students know about are the Schmidt seemed not to understand the difference. ones posed by the teachers themselves. Teachers The difference in both disputes is that the ANU also provide the only approved tools for answer- wants the Ramsay Centre to pay for its academics ing the approved questions: textbooks, lecture notes to teach students about Western civilisation (some- and (Holy of Holies!) peer-reviewed journal arti- thing the ANU says it is doing already), whereas

Quadrant September 2018 21 The Opening of the Australian Mind the Ramsay Centre wants Australian students to considered a sign of wisdom. experience Western civilisation for themselves. The Independence of mind is a good thing, and ANU wants to maintain its teachers’ freedom to what’s good for the goose is good for the gan- teach how they choose, whereas the Ramsay Centre der, as for the goslings. An Australian “Western wants to introduce a new way of teaching into Civ” degree can’t be some kind of conservative Australia. The ANU wants to keep its students’ counterpart to a Chinese Communist Party cur- minds firmly under its control, whereas the Ramsay riculum, where students are taught the virtues Centre wants to free Australian students to think of the British Empire and learn quotations from what they will, under the influence of some of the the work of Edmund Burke. For good or bad, the most profound thinkers who have ever lived. empire isn’t coming back, and anyway Burke was a Like the Quincy students of 1873, today’s Whig. Students should read the imperialist poetry Australian students know how to recite, but not of Rudyard Kipling and Burke’s Reflections on the how to read. The Ramsay Centre program would Revolution in France, but also the autobiography get them reading. More than that, it would get of Olaudah Equiano and Thomas Paine’s Rights them thinking—for themselves. The point of the of Man. And they should do it without being told Great Books approach to Western civilisation is in advance what to think. They’ll make up their not the greatness of the books that the students own minds, and by doing so shape their own—our read. It is the Westernisation and civilisation of the own—civilisation. students who read them. That’s “civilisation” as a If you live in a house made of oak, you are more process: students become civilised by reading great likely to study the origins and properties of oak trees books for themselves. And the civilisation that val- than those of bamboo, however useful and versatile a ues thinking for oneself as the highest goal of edu- material bamboo may be. Australia’s oak is Western cation is uniquely the Western one. civilisation. Along with “white Australians” (what- When other civilisations have students learn their ever that might mean), Aboriginal Australians and classics, they tend to emphasise rote memorisation. Arab Australians live in that same oak house. First Imperial Chinese students were examined on their Fleeters and the children of Vietnamese refugees ability to quote passages from the Confucian clas- share it with recent immigrants like me and my sics, and Communist Chinese students are exam- Chinese students. Western civilisation belongs to ined on quotations from Chairman Mao. Even the all of us and none of us, and we all share a respon- English-language portion of China’s famed Gaokao sibility for its upkeep. The reading of great books is exam focuses on the recitation of standard phrases the kind of home improvement that has the poten- that are widely ridiculed as “Chinese English”. In tial to open all of our minds. Muslim civilisation, it is considered a mark of great learning to memorise the entire Koran, earning the Salvatore Babones is an Associate Professor of Sociology scholar the title of Hafiz or Hafiza. For Westerners, at the University of Sydney and the author of The however, memorisation is a parlour trick, useful New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the mainly for game shows and school exams. It is not Tyranny of Experts, published last month by Wiley.

Four haiku

above the snow lost what’s left in the pond of our world the splash

morning snow refreshing last week’s after the funeral mannequins dressed heaps of seedless grapes for the window in bowls

Gary Hotham

22 Quadrant September 2018 Magnus O’Mallon

Art and Civilisational Collapse

am haunted by a strange feeling these days. I am In the future, citizens, there will be no darkness sure I am not the only one who has felt it. While or lightnings, no savage ignorance or blood- enjoying the art of our past I have found myself feuds. Since there will be no Satan there will more and more feeling a sense of unease; fear even. be no Michael. No man will kill his fellow, the I earth will be radiant, mankind will be moved by Listening to Beethoven, reading Wuthering Heights, seeing the paintings of Guerin, I feel that I need to love. That time will come, citizens, the time of somehow protect these things, that they are under peace, light, and harmony, of joy and life. It will attack from an unseen enemy. Equally disconcerting come. And the purpose of our death is to hasten is the afterthought I have: that this fear is perfectly its coming. rational. You see, I do not fear destruction of the music, literature or art per se. I fear the destruction Where have we gone since then? How have we of that which it all represents. These things repre- gone so wrong? Look at the “art” of our times and sent the soul of Western civilisation. see if it gives a single flicker of the immense warmth Art is the window into a society’s state of mind. that radiates from that page in Les Misérables. See if Art comes from the subconscious of individuals, it can bring you the same sense of love for mankind. and thus art at large reflects the subconscious of our The irony is that those who preach universal love civilisation. And around us we have seen beauty, the loudest these days see human beings as evil or virtue and elegance dissolve into fear, confusion and incompetent creatures who are undeserving of love nihilism. What does this say of our ideas? or even pity. Beethoven’s music reflected the soul of his times: Read those words of Hugo. That was a time the hero-worship of revolutionary Europe, the sense when the West believed in itself. What have we got that there was wonder in life to be unlocked and now? We have the mess of Jackson Pollock’s Blue that the West’s philosophical momentum had the Poles. We have the vulgarity of Marcel Duchamp’s key. Man was glorious. Individualism and freedom urinal. We have “I Poop You”, an art show in San were great and worth fighting for. These ideas that Francisco some years ago, where paintings were had been brewing for so long in the West could now constructed using animal faeces, and one piece be wholly realised. They had already won the battle consisted of a golden toilet plunger. The aim of the of the mind. Whatever struggles there are reflected show was, according to the stagers, to “challenge in Beethoven’s music, there is an uprightness, a con- squeamishness and to advocate the power of poop fidence, a belief in glory that brings it up from dark- as a means of expression”. And when we don’t have ness. Beethoven’s music plunges us into the very toilet humour as art, we have other things that dis- depths of human despair and up towards sunlight. turb us. Beethoven’s darkness knows that there will be light. Of course, not all writers were as good as Hugo. And this optimism was part of the glory of Western Not all composers were as good as Beethoven. But, civilisation. It is also reflected in that quote from generally speaking, our artists were aspiring to be Victor Hugo: “Even the darkest night will end and like them. They were following the same artistic the sun will rise.” A simple, uncompromising smile principle which had guided Hugo and Beethoven towards the future. From all the possible ways we and probably every other artist: beauty. The West might distil the West’s philosophy at least since the believed in beauty. It believed that life and human Renaissance, it is undeniable that central to it all beings could be beautiful and grand. This optimism was an optimistic belief in the greatness of life and was part of its core philosophy. Now it seems the the glory of humanity. West has grown up and looks back at its optimis- Listen to Enjolras in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, tic past with a sense of amusement. The laughter is urging his fellow rebels to fight the revolution: holding back tears.

Quadrant September 2018 23 Art and Civilisational Collapse

To clarify the link I am going to make between They have piercings all over their face. It makes art and civilisational collapse, I will say that today’s me wince, of course. But also, it makes me nerv- art is both a symptom and a cause of it. It is symp- ous. A society that has adopted nihilism, banality tomatic of everything wrong with our mentality. It and short-term hedonism as a way of life cannot causes the instilling of despair in the next genera- last for long. A society that has given up dreams of tion. This generation will turn their eyes to art for glory and honour cannot last for long. The pseudo- inspiration, but find nothing but a self-hating, life- intellectual nihilists who supply our arts want to hating desperate plea for death. think the merry-go-round will carry on for ever and Today’s art shows that we in the West no longer ever, that there will be ever new ways to shock and believe in our values as capable of achieving hap- immiserate us, that there will be no bottom to the piness or human greatness. Today’s art says these swamp they drain to furnish our galleries. The prob- things are impossible. Thus, we will try to achieve lem is there is an end. It ends when you demoralise neither happiness nor human greatness. And even a people so much they have no more will to go on if we desperately defy this state of affairs and try living, when you demoralise a civilisation so much to achieve them, we have no guide. it has no more will to sustain itself. Without the inner optimism that This process of artistic decline is has carried the West’s philosophy not new to history. We have seen it from the Renaissance, through the We see everywhere a before in ancient Greece. Observe Enlightenment, to the Romantic short-termism in art, the changes from the Hellenic era era, we are at the mercy of any alien to the later Hellenistic era (which culture that can offer us some sort a sign of a civilisation led in to the time when Greece of reprieve from our hopeless and that fears death and finally capitulated to Roman rule). meaningless existences. And this, senses catastrophe so In Greece, changes in art coincided incidentally, is the reason Douglas with gradual civilisational decline, Murray gives in The Strange Death much it indulges in as the idealistic and heroic art of the of Europe for why people are con- whatever it can as older world turned into more natu- verting to Islam. If we believe that ralism and the everyday. Observe the the West’s individual freedom leads quickly as possible. same transformation with Western to a hopeless dead-end of late-night art, from the Romanticism of the McDonald’s and alcohol binging, nineteenth century to the natural- why would we bother protecting individual free- ism of the twentieth, plummeting right down to the dom? There is no point in considering the grand, empty thud of Storage Wars and The Biggest Loser. the virtuous—all those things are delusional and Observe also how the grandeur of ancient Rome frivolous. All those times the West thought it was gave way to the bleakness and monotony of Dark grand and virtuous it was just oppressive and racist. Ages art. Observe also the art of Weimar Germany, Now we see everywhere a short-termism in art, which the old regime described as decadent and a sign of a civilisation that fears death and senses Adolf Hitler described as degenerate. It is easy to catastrophe so much it indulges in whatever it can as see why. Germany had created Wagner’s operas. quickly as possible. See the buildings that we create Then, as the music of this past gave way to the ato- these days. Do we expect them to last for thousands nalism of Berg and Schoenberg, Berlin developed a of years like those of Rome? See the instant gratifi- reputation for moral disintegration. cation of our culture, where the offers but a brief nod to its covering function before exposing e are witnessing this same transformation as much flesh as possible. The gap between what we in Western art more generally. We have see around us and pornography is diminishing. And Wdescended so far into nihilism that even when the look again at our standards of dress. Tattoos and art of our times tries to achieve beauty and grandeur nose rings are now as unremarkable as sunscreen. it fails. It is held down by the inherent despair of Ugliness has become a way of life. It is fashionable our age. A case in point is the film La La Land. It is to show your hatred of our civilisation’s elegant past. beautifully shot. And the music is wonderful. There Don’t tell me it’s just “their version of beautiful”. I was the intention to recall the old-fashioned musi- don’t deny it. But these aesthetic choices represent cal. Yet notice how the mood and outlook of that era certain values. And these are dangerous values. can only be half-achieved now. Everywhere in the I began by discussing that feeling of unease. I film, the aesthetic elements do more to mock hap- feel this same civilisational angst, if you will, when piness and beauty than affirm them. Consider the I see otherwise beautiful young women with half song “Someone in the Crowd”, a musically upbeat their head shaven and the other half painted blue. number ending with a chorus: “Someone in the

24 Quadrant September 2018 Art and Civilisational Collapse crowd could be the one you need to know, the some- Mozart and Schiller, of Beethoven and Hugo go one who could lift you up above.” The song is about down without a fight. And whatever powers of hope, the chance of finally achieving success. There intimidation the destroyers of Western civilisa- are fireworks and euphoria. Then bang. The song tion possess, they are lacking a great weapon. That ends with the shot of a tow-away sign, the last chord weapon is the art of our past. Those who defend still receding. The protagonist’s car has been hauled the West know that they are defending some- away. What’s the artistic message here? It is laugh- thing grand, something beautiful and something ing at hope. It is saying, “Dream all you want, your life-affirming. Armed with the power and fury of dreams will end with something like this.” There Romanticism, we can launch a pro-West artistic are many similar elements in the film. Midway revolution to replace the death-and-faeces-worship during even that song the happy music cuts off for of our age. Despair and puerility are powerless a necessary sombre section. The song “A Lovely against the art of beauty and grandeur. Night” ends with us expecting a kiss between the In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is imprisoned for main characters, but a ringing cellphone interrupts five years for stealing a loaf of bread for his starv- the romance. And there is of course the bittersweet ing sister and seven children. He is imprisoned finale which can be interpreted as hypothesising for a further fourteen years after numerous escape what a typical Hollywood happy ending would have attempts. After he is released he is shunned by soci- looked like, before we are taken back to the grim ety on account of his criminal past, unable even to reality of broken love. There are even less obvious get a lodging at an inn. We are told of the mental elements. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are tal- turmoil he experienced in prison. Over those years ented, but they do not sing professionally. The film’s he brewed a hatred of the state which had damned makers did not want to give us beautifully rendered him to hell from birth: melody. They wanted to give us grit and rawness. They wanted to give us “real life”. Did he seek to look upward beyond that pallid For the sake of contrast, imagine if “Someone half-light in which he crouched, it was to in the Crowd” were instead towards the end of the see, with mingled terror and rage, an endless film. Instead of finishing with the tow-away sign, it structure rising above him, a dreadful piling-up concludes with Emma Stone meeting a bigshot pro- of things, laws, prejudices, men and facts, whose ducer who offers her a role in an upcoming block- shape he could not discern and whose mass buster. That is how the 1930s might have done it. appalled him, and which was nothing else than That is not how the 2010s do it. The 1930s were argu- the huge pyramid that we call civilisation. ably still riding on the optimism of the past. By the turn of this century, that optimism had died. Imagine if Jean Valjean were Tommy Robinson. But La La Land was an experiment in stepping Imagine if our stories wrote about the injustice of outside the formulaic approach to present-day art. Cultural Marxism with such eloquence and fire. What is the formulaic approach? Listen to the music Eventually Valjean reforms himself, proves himself of Adele and Lorde. Both are terrific artists. They virtuous, and loves mankind despite all the persecu- achieve what they intend to achieve. But what they tion he has suffered. Imagine if in our art we had intend to achieve is tragedy. Listen to the music of heroes that saved the West in spite of itself, who nightclubs. For extended periods harmony and mel- stood up to smearing and prejudice and violence ody vanish and we are left with the primal, monoto- and—doing as Jordan Peterson would have them nous beat of a drum, or there is merely the inhuman do—stood up straight with their shoulders back. noise of electronic humming. Unbelievably narcis- That would be the power of our art. That is what we sistic rap music finds eager listeners among even the are missing. To create that art is the task I have set wealthiest and luckiest in life. The “highbrow” stuff myself as a fiction writer, and should be the task of is even worse though. Popular art tells us that life is thousands more. an unending ride of drug-induced highs and emo- I did not want this to be another bleak piece sol- tionally crippling break-ups. “Serious” art denies emnising the death of our culture. This is a battle even human feeling, and gives us incomprehensible cry. Listen to our great music. Read our great lit- swirls and patterns or at times (the full measure of erature. Take in our great paintings and sculptures. our search for hope) a blank canvas. Then know that yours is the side of upwardness, uprightness, flourishing and human greatness. estern civilisation has reached the end of its cultural and moral self-destruction. However, Magnus O’Mallon is a Melbourne composer and WI am not willing to sit back and let the world of writer.

Quadrant September 2018 25 Stuart Lindsay

How the Left Has Captured Professional Associations

ven though the metaphor is of uncer- der” and “traditional” representation). However, tain origin, we all recognise a gravy train the endorsement of the proposal for a referendum when it glides past us; from within the and the need for the “voice” to be “permanently Egilded carriages, the tinkling of crystal enshrined” in the Constitution are unambiguous; and the self-regarding chatter of superannuated the ABA’s obeisance to these seminal demands Prufrocks—voices dying beneath the music of a of twenty-first-century Aboriginal radicalism is farther room—merge; waiters with their trays of unreserved. canapés and the cocktail-clasping passengers whom The Law Council of Australia (representing they serve are silhouetted against the crisp gaily-lit solicitors instead of barristers) had given their own blinds of each compartment. We think, does this public genuflection to the Uluru Statement a week express ever stop and if it does, how can I climb earlier and gave similar justifications for so doing. aboard? I use the language and symbolism of religious If you are a lawyer or doctor or other university- observance in both cases deliberately and not certified individual and you can profess, or at least incautiously; the failure in both cases to even ges- can accommodate without obvious discomfort your ture at scrutinising the various claims advanced in colleagues professing, the unreflective Left-liberal the statement is striking, and is inconsonant with orthodoxies of our age, then the answer to that the rational frame of mind we properly assume to question might be: seek a position on the board that be essential to legal and especially constitutional runs your profession’s association or guild. analysis. Such associations instantiate the modern gravy train par excellence. The enthusiastic endorsement he claim by these spokesmen that they are cre- by a number of them of the cause of constitutional dentialled to opine on such a matter on behalf change in furtherance of the radical Aboriginal Tof tens of thousands of Australian legal practitioners agenda provides an ideal opportunity for an exami- relies on a doubly-attenuated notion of representa- nation of this phenomenon. tiveness. The ABA and the LCA are organisations On June 22 the senior counsel who is chair- with boards constituted by the delegates appointed man of the Indigenous Affairs Committee by the boards of other organisations—state bar of the Australian Bar Association solemnly associations and law societies; the directors on the announced that the body he represents supports ABA’s board for example are elected or appointed by the so-called Uluru Statement about Aborigines the boards of the state bar associations. Positions on and constitutional recognition that came out of the those boards and committees are invariably secured Referendum Council’s activities last year. I won’t by elections in which very few solicitors and barris- paraphrase what the submission to the Joint Select ters participate. They are too busy representing their Committee on Constitutional Recognition relating clients and running their practices. to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, When I started in the law in the early 1980s the which accompanied the announcement, contains— received understanding was that the people who you can read that yourself. But there is much volunteered for these associations were supporting recitation of earlier Commonwealth initiatives in you against the state and its regulators and with giving Aborigines a “voice” (that word becomes the disgruntled clients; they were the guild-masters motif of the submission) and of the failure of those in modern dress. They also invigilated the main- schemes (ATSIC had what are coyly summarised tenance of propriety and ethical behaviour by and as “probity” issues and also problems with “gen- between the members of the profession, something

26 Quadrant September 2018 How the Left Has Captured Professional Associations about which they were much more exacting than uous, surely; whether constitutional amendment for their salaried successors. the purposes of privileging one racial group within In those days, the notion that such an association the nation undermines or promotes the rule of law should appropriate the authority to speak on behalf is one of the many serious matters in dispute here. of a group of people as independently minded and Why can members of the ABA board not be politically disparate as barristers about such sub- content with speaking for themselves? More gen- Marcusian preoccupations as “First Nations sover- erally, what explains this growing propensity of eignty” would have been identified by the members professional associations to arrogate to themselves of the profession for what it is—the manifestation an authority to declaim on behalf of tens of thou- of a progressive-totalitarian Weltanschauung—and sands of individual members about such matters? would therefore have been stoutly resisted. The The “unified and unanimous voice” that Mr Hutley changed cultural and political conditions that have speaks for is that only of the delegates of the state permitted such conduct by all kinds of professional associations, in any event, is it not? I can under- and quasi-professional associations to become stand why those who agitate for a referendum commonplace—in teachers’ unions, the Australian would be pleased that the ABA and the LCA pur- Medical Association, sporting leagues, indus- port to speak on behalf of the massed ranks of the try associations—can be identified quite easily, I profession, but the reality is they do not. reckon, provided we can train ourselves to think and speak in the cant-averse ways that came more et us remind ourselves what the Uluru State­ naturally to that earlier generation. ment says: Lawyers Weekly reported the endorsement of the L Uluru Statement in this way: Uluru Statement from the Heart We, gathered at the 2017 National ABA president Noel Hutley SC said that, as the Constitutional Convention, coming from all body representing all the independent Bars of points of the southern sky, make this statement Australia, a “unified and unanimous voice from from the heart: the Australian Bar” is powerful on matters of Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander national significance such as this. “Contributing tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the to policy responses on issues of justice for all, Australian continent and its adjacent islands, especially our most vulnerable, and having the and possessed it under our own laws and opportunity to influence lawmakers as they customs. This our ancestors did, according to work to shape laws for the common good, is a the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, precious and privileged role,” he said. according to the common law from “time immemorial”, and according to science more I am about to tell you plainly what this indi- than 60,000 years ago. vidual barrister (I left the ABA in 2016) thinks This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the of the Uluru Statement. While they are certainly ancestral tie between the land, or “mother not speaking for me, neither are they speaking for nature”, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait many other barristers who are still members of Islander peoples who were born therefrom, the ABA, just as, last year, the New South Wales remain attached thereto, and must one day Bar Association and Law Society were not speak- return thither to be united with our ancestors. ing for many of their members when they publicly This link is the basis of the ownership of the announced support for the changes to the Marriage soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been Act that allowed homosexuals to marry each other. ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the I have never met Mr Hutley nor the chairman sovereignty of the Crown. of his organisation’s Indigenous Affairs Committee How could it be otherwise? That peoples (I didn’t even know it had one) and assume they possessed a land for sixty millennia and this hold their personal views sincerely, but why do they sacred link disappears from world history in purport to speak on behalf of all of their members merely the last two hundred years? when they well know that many members do not With substantive constitutional change share their views? Where in the Objects of the ABA and structural reform, we believe this ancient constitution do they find their authority to publicly sovereignty can shine through as a fuller endorse a contentious political announcement? One expression of Australia’s nationhood. of those Objects is to promote the rule of law, cer- Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated tainly, but reliance on that as a warrant for these people on the planet. We are not an innately expressions of political support would be disingen- criminal people. Our children are aliened from

Quadrant September 2018 27 How the Left Has Captured Professional Associations

their families at unprecedented rates. This of the cause). cannot be because we have no love for them. Aboriginal inhabitants of this continent were And our youth languish in detention in obscene manifestly never part of a nation, as that word numbers. They should be our hope for the is understood in our language. After 230 years future. of settlement we still have no catalogue of these These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly putative Aboriginal nations; no map delineating the structural nature of our problem. This is the their boundaries; no specification of the criteria as torment of our powerlessness. to how one would qualify for “citizenship” in any We seek constitutional reforms to empower such nation; and certainly no “constitution” for one. our people and take a rightful place in our own It seems clear to me that an Aboriginal “nation” country. When we have power over our destiny would not be a strictly geographical entity, and that our children will flourish. They will walk in two this must entail nationhood being interpreted in a worlds and their culture will be a gift to their racial sub-group sense instead. country. Does the Bar Association think racial profile We call for the establishment of a First as a determinant of nationality is enhancing the Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution. rule of law in Australia, then? Has it even thought Makarrata is the culmination of our matters through to this point? Does it think this agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It problem can be dealt with, as its written submis- captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful sion suggests is possible, by calling races “peoples” relationship with the people of Australia and a instead? better future for our children based on justice “Nations” betokens sovereignty. For me, that is and self-determination. what explains the ubiquity of the term in Referendum We seek a Makarrata Commission to Council discussions. It is a word adopted for strate- supervise a process of agreement-making gic political purposes, then, because it posits a fic- between governments and First Nations and tion—Aboriginal nationhood—that can be used to truth-telling about our history. ground the pursuit of the real political goal here— In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to the constitutional disfigurement of the Australian be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek nation. across this vast country. We invite you to walk 3. Sovereignty is a legal notion. It is in no sense a with us in a movement of the Australian people “spiritual notion”, even if we were to accept that the for a better future. diverse totemic and animist traditions and stories and rites of Aborigines are spiritual in the numi- I should tell you plainly what this individual nous sense in which that word is used in describing barrister and legal practitioner thinks of the Uluru religious belief and experience in Occidental and Statement. Whomever the ABA and LCA thought Oriental traditions. Discussions about sovereignty they were speaking for, I want you to know it wasn’t are discussions about identifying the source of me. authority within a polity for the legitimate exercise I strongly oppose nearly all of the propositions of power; positing amorphous atavistic links with put in that document and would do all I could to the soil as a foundation for sovereignty contrib- prevent their implementation. I will tell you the utes very little to the discussion; indeed it has the most important reasons why. effect of closing such a discussion down, which was 1. Tribes are not nations; indeed, the two words the very reason it was the first resort of so many denote antithetical concepts. authoritarian apologists of various extreme political 2. “First Nations” is an agitprop expression that persuasions in the twentieth century. does not belong in a document ostensibly promot- I am very familiar with the claim that ing sensible constitutional discourse. It seems to Aborigines have a unique affiliation with the have been floating around for a decade or so in the land we Australians all inhabit. How could I have parlance of the radical Aboriginal types that flour- missed its incessant promotion by the artistic and ish in ABC news soundbites, but it actually has a educational cadres who have controlled our schools longer leftist pedigree than that. As far as I can and our national broadcaster for a generation or ascertain, its provenance is the world of late twen- two now? It is a claim I am sceptical about. But tieth-century Canadian (especially Inuit) iden- note, please, that I am sceptical rather than reject- tity politics, though it would not be surprising to ing of it. It is simply that, for me, sadly, the con- find it or its cognates in Comintern propaganda in tamination of the knowledge and understanding we the 1930s. “First Peoples” is sometimes used inter- non-Aborigines have of the tjurrunga by decades of changeably (it is the ABA’s preferred nom de guerre bogus anthropology and Coombsian hucksterism

28 Quadrant September 2018 How the Left Has Captured Professional Associations has left its mark, as I am sure it has on many of my ever dealt with “counting”, as Keith Windschuttle contemporaries. (in The Break-up of Australia, pages 212–13), draw- 4. The linkage of Aboriginal crime and high ing upon Geoffrey Sawer, demonstrates, in the incarceration rates in the document to the absence very esoteric sense of determining the number of of the attainment of a particular politically cali- federal electorates within each state which s.24 of brated level of constitutional formality is perverse. the Constitution required be fixed by reference to The information now available to us all about the the state’s population. Its repeal made no difference levels of violence and sexual assault against chil- at all to Aboriginal enfranchisement, which had dren and foetal alcohol abuse and lawlessness in long existed; by 1967 Aborigines were “counted” many remote Aboriginal settlements (those closest in all the ways that signify in a democratic and to the land, incidentally) suggests rather powerfully humane polity such as Australia, and the authors the salience of other factors. It is, moreover, a per- of the statement well know that. The resort to such nicious linkage. It distracts Aborigines themselves rhetorical sleight-of-hand in its concluding pas- from confronting the actual causes of the levels of sages tells us all we need to know about the shoddy lawlessness inside and outside these gated commu- nature of a document which pretends to be taking nities. Please note, I do not believe the high-road in national political that innate criminality is such a discourse. cause; the presence of that particu- explains this lar straw man in the document is W f you are a legal practitioner and itself unintentionally revelatory growing propensity like me you disagree with the of the Alinskian elements in the of professional IABA and LCA statements (even if whole referendum enterprise. only in part) you should do as I am 5. The Referendum Council associations to doing and speak up, else you will which initiated the cross-country arrogate to themselves be allowing someone whom you “dialogues” which culminated in an authority to probably do not even know to usurp the Uluru convention and this your personal entitlement to speak document is the kind of patronis- declaim on behalf the truth. Why would you permit ing assemblage of big-business and of tens of thousands that to happen? Truth-telling, as mass-media personages to which Jordan Peterson reminds us, is the Western governments now seem to of individual members manifestation of our civilisation’s reflexively resort when they want to about such matters? precious inheritance of the logos. push a policy they know will meet If you are a doctor and you share fierce resistance from the popu- my views then I am afraid you have lace, and I refuse to be coerced by them. I was sur- also recently been obliged to do as I am doing. On prised Cate Blanchett didn’t get another such gig June 8, the Australian Medical Association also on this one. Many of the people on the Council earnestly endorsed the Uluru Statement. AMA and those like it seem as if they were drawn from President Tony Bartone’s press release noted that the membership of another club, one that refuses to it had been regarded by some as “the most impor- be identified, one where regularly appearing on the tant piece of political writing in Australia in the ABC is ceremonially analogous to the wearing of past two decades”, and said the AMA had for many an in a different privy society. Up with being years supported “Indigenous recognition in the manipulated by such people, I will not put! Australian Constitution”. 6. The authors of the statement make a grave If you are an accountant or an engineer or an error in inserting the “in 1967 we were counted” ref- AFL footballer or a pilot you should check what erence as part of the document’s climax. That sim- your society, association or federation has had to ply draws more attention to their bad faith. In say on your behalf about Aboriginal constitutional making this reference, they rely on the persistence recognition. You may find that they have publicly of a widespread misunderstanding about what was promoted ideas that you radically disagree with, both addressed and achieved by the 1967 referen- and, what is worse, when doing so have told the dum. The referendum had two aspects. The change world they are speaking on your behalf. But even to s.51(xxvi) of the Constitution had nothing to do before you check, you know, do you not, that the with “counting” at all but was all about giving the position will be either that your organisation will Commonwealth the power to make special laws have said nothing about the topic—taken the view, for Aborigines (laws which ironically have enabled surely correctly, that proselytising about such mat- the promotion of native grievance to acquire its ters has nothing to do with their association’s raison present-day industrial dimensions); and s.127 only d’être—or it will have enthusiastically supported

Quadrant September 2018 29 How the Left Has Captured Professional Associations the Uluru Statement. In other words, a decision populace to accept certain measures, a facility for to speak publicly at all on behalf of members will co-opting the professions into the service of gov- have entailed the promotion of only the one politi- ernment is vital; professional organisations fulfil cally correct leftist view of the controversy. And that role very satisfactorily. Government patronage so it will be with respect to any other issue. What of them can assume many forms, some near unrec- accounts for this? ognisable as patronage. Disciplinary boards in all of The answer lies at least partly in the gravy train the health professions; regulatory bodies of indus- element of all of these associations. Generally, the try; accreditation processes and educative boards holding of office in a modern professional associa- in trades and vocations—all require a bureaucracy tion especially at the national level (I single no par- and the vast amounts of money necessary to sus- ticular profession out) offers more perquisites and tain them and it is upon persons in the professions gratifications than the mere exercise of the vocation that a significant amount of that money is lavished itself possibly could: regular interstate and overseas and to whom the bureaucracy looks to constitute (business-class) travel; a public profile and the sim- them. The movement towards national standards ulacrum of exercising influence over the course of and national regulation for and of the professions public policy or events, without the has accelerated that process. These accountability that real responsibil- processes naturally entail close ity that the decisions to implement he holding of association with universities and such policies involves; authorised T other tertiary institutions, too. One time away from the spouse and office in a modern might suppose our law societies, for children and, its corollary, increased professional example, are still notionally inde- opportunity for philandering; the pendent institutions, and certainly implicit suggestion that simply association especially volunteer members still do much occupying such a position signifies at the national level adjunct educative work, but they proficiency or stature in the prac- offers more perquisites are so laden with a complex of obli- tice of the profession itself, which gations under the various statutes is often advantageous in attaining and gratifications which regulate the legal profession, promotion from practitioner sta- than the mere exercise and the levels of their interface tus to an administrator (or judge); with government and universities attendance at conferences, soirees, of the vocation itself are so extensive, as to have altered lunches and all manner of catered- possibly could. their whole character and purpose. for colloquiums, both private and Why leftism in the postmod- governmental; the frisson of occa- ern form of visceral antipathy to sional adjacency to power; a respite from the rigours Western institutions and laws and our cultural and pressures of conducting an actual practice; and, heritage is regnant in the bureaucracies and the not least for many, the chance to settle scores with, universities is not a question this short composition or to disadvantage, old rivals in the profession. purports to answer, but the fact of its triumph I take So it has its attractions. These are amplified and to be self-evident. Given the symbiotic relations our underwritten by the nature of their liaison with guilds have established with both, it might be said government, a liaison that blazons into a full-blown that there was an inevitability about the perversion scandale every time they are recruited for major of their reasons-for-being that the enlistment in operations such as same-sex-marriage campaigns the Aboriginal referendum campaign demonstrates and the proposed constitutional referendum. (no doubt the AMA and ABA and their ilk will be calling it a “struggle” shortly, if they have not n former times, the decision to involve yourself already). But if we act with honour, and I know in the work of a professional guild was motivated the legal profession at all of its levels to be rich in moreI often than not by a sense of duty (and it still honourable people, we will not be dissuaded from is for some) but that has waned. The specific ben- calling out our professional association’s infidelity efits that ensue from interaction with government to its roots. in all of its modern manifestations, it seems to me, are much more conspicuous now. With so much of Stuart Lindsay is a former Federal Circuit Court the work of political parties in power being done Judge. He contributed “The Conservative Case extra-legislatively, by readying or manipulating the Against Live Animal Exports” in the June issue.

30 Quadrant September 2018 Dry Rot

Making conversation while waiting on the tee I mentioned that I’d been in hospital with a faulty heart. “Is that all?” said one of the others. “I am having chemotherapy for prostate cancer.” “Well, I have got leukemia,” said another. The third member of the foursome didn’t utter a word, so we turned to him. “I would not go to the doctor. I don’t want to find out what is wrong with me,” he said. We each hit a ball into the familiar green landscape that appeared before us, regular in its contours as a flowerbed, a tree-framed vista that survived the spring drought. Leukemia. It was a threat that loomed over us all, like the creaking, dry-rot-riddled tree limb above the second tee. It was not only him who felt its presence: everyone assumed the disease would return from the remission that allowed our friend to be on the course, and that when it did it would be worse. Playing in a golf competition distracted him, but there would be times when he would mention a detail of his treatment, the weekly blood tests and plasma transfusions, the sickening side effects, the wait for transplants that might fail, the hormones and enzymes. When our friend did not play, we all feared what his absence might mean—the return of the adversary within, discerned in a low blood-count, so, being men, we jeered and joked about it, trying to lighten the burden each of us felt. A joke may not be so amusing, but it broke the tension that otherwise would tighten with each message that explained another absence. For weeks he was not there. The limb with dry rot broke, and fell onto the tee. Greens sloped as if an ocean swell rose under them. White orbs soared into the air. He had never complained.

Jamie Grant

Quadrant September 2018 31 Hal G.P. Colebatch

Trump Derangement Syndrome Spreads and Intensifies

hen President Barack Obama began of the duty attached to the high positions to which packing the United States of America’s they had been elected. Edmund Burke said: “Your courts, senior appointments in the armed representative owes you, not his industry only, Wforces and a host of other positions, it looked to the but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serv- extreme Left as if their long-cherished dream of ing you if he sacrifices it.” It is a principle of repre- seizing power—which would in fact mean control- sentative democracy so basic that one is taken aback ling the world—was coming true at last. by the need to repeat it. In the twenty-four hours Donald Trump’s election was shattering for after President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh them. Trump Derangement Syndrome persists even for the Supreme Court, former Speaker Nancy though, or rather because, he has had both eco- Pelosi declared Kavanaugh would be “a destruc- nomic and foreign policy successes, which appear tive tool on a generation of progress for workers, to stand a chance of crippling the Left’s project, women, LGBTQ people, communities of color and which seem to have given Middle America new [and] families” and that he would “radically reverse confidence and purpose. the course of American justice [and] democracy”. The intensity of this derangement is fairly new. There is nothing in his previous career to sug- Even recently, Americans of both parties respected gest people would die because of Kavanaugh. NBC their presidents once elected, and in general did not News journalists spread, as news, a false rumour doubt their presidents’ patriotism and public-spirit- that Anthony Kennedy had negotiated his retire- edness. Further, politicians’ families were off-limits ment contingent on Kavanaugh’s appointment. for attacks. One report noted: It was a commonplace amongst journalists that you could not get an ordinary American to criti- The Left lost their mind right on cue over cise his or her country or president when travel- the announcement of President Donald ling abroad. Election results were respected as an Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett expression of the democratic process. The idea that Kavanaugh. anyone’s career would have been in danger as a No matter whom the president was going result of voting for the candidate of a mainstream to choose, the Left was going to paint the party would have been a scandal. Now, some com- nominee as an extremist who threatens mentators predict that leftist rhetoric may evolve democracy, basic human rights, and enjoys into a shooting war. In one of his famous paintings drowning puppies. celebrating American freedom—in this case free This cheap strategy used to rile-up the speech—Norman Rockwell depicted a dissenter Democratic base was glaringly evident in a at a political meeting being heard by the others statement fired-off by the Women’s March: present with respect and politeness. “In response to Donald Trump’s nomination It is dismaying for friends of American democ- of XX to the Supreme Court of the United racy that the Democrat senators in 2018 were States, the Women’s March released the prepared to vote against President Trump’s nomi- following statement,” started an email from the nation for the Supreme Court no matter who that feminist group. nominee was, or how qualified and suitable that Clearly, the statement was pre-written, with nominee might be. This showed a willingness to the name only added in after the nominee was wreck the processes of government without consid- learned by the public, save the one “XX” spot at eration of the national interest—a plain abrogation the beginning. Oops!

32 Quadrant September 2018 Trump Derangement Syndrome Spreads and Intensifies

Charles Murray, a leading but politically incor- that intelligence officers should withhold informa- rect social scientist, is shouted own by mobs at a tion from Trump, which, given that Trump is the university where he had been invited to speak. He elected commander-in-chief, sounded “nothing has literally to flee for his life, and his host, a pro- short of treasonous” itself. fessor, is seriously injured trying to protect him. One wonders where, and how, this is going to end. rump’s election has revealed the extent to which Some years ago a British comedian, giving a leftist poison has penetrated the Washington— spoof course on American civics, was wont to utter: indeedT the whole Western—political class, and the “Like us, Americans have two main political par- urgency for him to lance the abscess while there are ties. There is the Republican Party, which is the some healthy parts remaining. The Left’s frenzied equivalent of our Conservative Party, and there is efforts to revive the Cold War, after spending half the Democrat Party, which is the equivalent of our a century denouncing it, has a comic as well as a Conservative Party.” Franklin Roosevelt trusted tragic aspect. It would seem as if they would prefer and respected his former Republican presidential war with Russia to Trump being proved right. opponent, Wendell Wilkie, enough to send him to Trump supporter Judge Jeanine Pirro said London on a vital mission in the Second World Hollywood actress Whoopi Goldberg spat on her War as a special envoy to Churchill. when they appeared together on television. Our After the last election I saw on the news some- own Robert Manne states charmingly: thing which I had not seen in America before and would certainly not have associated with America: a arguably [Trump] has the foulest attitudes man was dragged from a car, pushed to the ground or the vilest character of any president in US and kicked while his attacker screamed, “He voted history. If his presidency will eventually come for Trump!” Passers-by joined in. to be regarded as illegitimate it will be because When in Australia a man head-butted Tony sufficient American people are convinced that Abbott, it was still taken, perhaps over-optimisti- he won his office in part because of his unlawful cally, as the action of the sort of pathetic loner that collusion with a hostile foreign power. can be found in any country. In America, however, There is already overwhelming evidence such behaviour seems increasingly common, with that the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin was a sort of imprimatur from leading figures in the involved first in a complex plan to damage the Democrat establishment and media—at least their candidacy of Hillary Clinton and later as well behaviour and rhetoric can be seen as encouraging to assist the candidacy of Donald Trump. it. John Brennan, an alleged former communist This does not quite say Trump himself is guilty whom Obama made head of the CIA, tweeted of collusion with Russia, but the implication is clear. from somewhere beyond paranoia: And does anyone remember Bill Clinton get- ting an intern young enough to be his daughter to Donald Trump’s press conference performance perform fellatio on him and then publicly lying in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of about it? This matter, unlike things Trump has “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing been accused of, is one of admitted proof rather short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s than rumour and assertion. comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket In fact, well over a year of frenzied investiga- of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you??? tion and rhetoric by almost the whole of the US academic-mainstream media axis has failed to He was referring to a conventional and necessary produce any evidence of collusion between Trump meeting between world leaders which, if Obama and Russia or to unearth a possible motive for had undertaken it, would have been hailed as an such collusion. The whole thing seems like a gro- act of statesmanship and peace-making, but whose tesque parody of McCarthyism, except that Joseph agenda and details he was not in any case privy to. McCarthy’s allegations had real substance behind I thought CIA men were meant to know some- them. thing about the law. “Treason” is the one crime spe- Trump’s foreign policy and his policies of cifically set out in the US Constitution, and means, strengthening the US defence and space effort, very specifically, helping an enemy power in time of and its East European and Baltic allies, as well as war. It cannot by any exercise of imagination apply pressing NATO to greatly increase defence spend- to Trump’s meeting with President Putin. And ing, are much less comfortable for Russian ambi- further, Trump’s conversation with Putin was not tions than were his Democrat predecessor’s policies even publicly reported. Brennan went on to suggest of weakness, retreat, appeasement and unilateral

Quadrant September 2018 33 Trump Derangement Syndrome Spreads and Intensifies disarmament. president, bloodlessly ending the Cold War and Trump is pressuring the NATO countries to ushering in two decades of economic boom, it only bring their defence spending up to the agreed min- increased their irrational fury). imum of 2 per cent of GDP, or even 4 per cent. He The major previous example of the Left’s is working to break Germany away from its energy betrayal of the US was, of course, the hounding dependence on Russia, and to revive the US steel, of Richard Nixon for a minor, and certainly not coal and computer-chip industries, all of which exceptional, sin. The Left demonstrated then that have defence implications. In the Middle East he it was prepared to paralyse US foreign policy and is unequivocally pro-Israel, has relocated the US have it lose a major war, if only Nixon could be embassy to Jerusalem, and has increased defence brought down. aid to Israel. Israel is also the ultimate opponent But the Left’s frenzied hatred for Trump eclipses of Russia’s Middle East catspaws, Syria and Iran. everything that went before. It will doubtless Trump looks to undo Obama’s craven, one-sided increase rather than diminish if he continues to be agreement with the Iran regime. successful. With a few exceptions, such as Fox News, media commentators were clearly disappointed that rump has given the clearest and most consist- the talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un ent possible notice that his overarching goal had not ended in obvious failure. Shortly before, Tis restoring America’s strength, both at home and they had been attacking Trump for warmongering abroad. He may even have suc- and brinkmanship against Kim. ceeded in implanting a little tes- Obscene attacks on Trump’s tosterone into Mesdames May and he Left’s frenzied family by various “celebrities” Merkel and their dithering, spine- T are unprintable here. Anything less cabinets. Why should Putin’s efforts to revive the remotely comparable about the Russia, if it is intent on recreating Cold War, after family of any previous president Soviet power—and when Putin would have been unthinkable considers the fall of the Soviet spending half a and would have certainly have empire a disaster—have possibly century denouncing abruptly ended the career of anyone wanted that? responsible. There does seem a strong it, has a comic as well Peter Fonda tweeted: “We possibility, perhaps even a as a tragic aspect. should rip Barron Trump from likelihood, that some Russians It would seem as if his mother’s arms and put him in tried to stir up as much division a cage with paedophiles. And see and bad feeling in the election as they would prefer if mother will stand up against the possible, in which case the anti- war with Russia giant a**hole she is married to. 90 Trump media and political class million people in the streets on who are now carrying on that to Trump being the same weekend in the country. agenda are in fact the ones acting proved right. F**k.” When Roseanne Barr, on as Russian catspaws. the other hand, defended Trump If any Russian agent did work she was attacked by the Guardian for Trump’s election, I imagine he has since found for “hooligan offence-giving” and has apparently a new career, carving chessmen in the Gulag. In lost work. Comedian Kathy Griffin held up a any case, there is nothing new here. The Soviet fake severed head of Trump streaming with fake Union was always interfering in Western politics. blood on television, and, if possible even more The so-called “World Peace Council” was nothing disgustingly, publicly snivelled with self-pity when but a Soviet front, and the Soviet Union was able she was criticised for it. to control much of the World Council of Churches. It is tempting to associate this dreck with a The anti-Vietnam demonstrators were doing general decay of civilised values, not least of these Moscow’s bidding. being Christianity. Its portents for the future of the For those with eyes to see, there has been growing United States—and therefore of the entire world— violence and viciousness from the US Left for some are ominous. time, such as the attempted political lynching of Star Parker, writing in the conservative Christian Justice Clarence Thomas as a conservative judicial Black Community News, has said: “the nation appears appointment. Psychiatrists queued to pronounce to be flirting with this uneasy territory where conservatives Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan ‘reasoned discourse’ is breaking down”. She points insane, though they had never seen or examined to the case of the President’s press secretary, Sarah them (when Reagan proved the most successful US Sanders, who was asked to leave a restaurant in

34 Quadrant September 2018 Trump Derangement Syndrome Spreads and Intensifies

Lexington, Virginia, where she was having dinner, Florida. A sixteen-year-old in San Antonio, Texas, for no other reason than that she worked for Trump. was assaulted in a restaurant for wearing a “Make Restaurant owner Stephanie Wilkerson, apparently America Great Again” . confusing herself with Martin Luther or a moral hero like Claus von Stauffenberg, said she asked peculiar aspect of Trump Derangement Sanders to depart because “there are moments in Syndrome, demonstrated in both the US and time when people need to live their convictions. Arecently on President Trump’s visit to Britain, is This appeared to be one.” that the anti-Trump protesters, however hysterical, “But,” Parker asked, “what exactly are the when questioned are completely unable to say what ‘convictions’ that Wilkerson was living in this it is they actually have against him, except that he is incident? That you refuse to talk, associate, do loud, brash and (for the British) American. It seems business with anyone you disagree with? This to have no more reason behind it than did the chili- is America?” She continued, “A few days before, astic panics of the Middle Ages. Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was harassed In Britain he seems to have released a vein in a DC restaurant and then at her Northern of toxic anti-American jealousy. When he was Virginia home.” pictured sitting in Winston Churchill’s chair, the Long-time Congressional Black Caucus member Daily Mirror published a screaming front-page Maxine Waters followed: “If you see anybody from headline, “How Dare You!” Actually Churchill, the that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, great architect of the Atlantic Alliance, and tireless at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a worker for the unity of the English-speaking crowd and you push back on them, and you tell peoples, would probably have been pleased to see them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Trump in his chair. Further, he shared Trump’s she told a crowd in Los Angeles. This is something plain speaking and practice of “Action this day!” close to proto-civil war. It can be seen as not merely Like Trump, Churchill and the political class held incitement to harassment but, for the mentally each other in mutual contempt. unstable, to assassination. Coming from the mouth The human jellyfish Theresa May’s statement of a legislator, it must be a record in contempt for praising the “fantastic contribution” made by representative democracy, civic order and ordinary immigrants to modern Britain contrasts with decency. Trump’s forthright warning that Britain is “losing its After Waters’s words a gunman and anti- culture” because of the present influx. Trump seems Republican activist shot at a group of Republican a better British patriot than most British politicians, politicians, seriously injuring House Majority but the unanimity of hatred and contempt held for Whip Steve Scalise. After the Southern Poverty him by the British “quality” press—not just the likes Law Center declared the Christian-based Family of the Mirror—with hardly a pretence of factual Research Council a hate group intent on harming argument behind it, is staggering. gay rights, Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the All this has a number of possible causes. I believe Council’s offices with Chick-fil-A sandwiches the principal one is the madness which has infected and a gun intent on murdering the employees and our universities. It flows into our arts, media and stuffing their mouths with the sandwiches. (The entertainment. Why it meets so little comparably- Chick-fil-A sandwich chain espouses Christian organised resistance is a mystery, but suggests that values and does not open on Sundays.) Another the nihilistic postmodernist-leftist control of these fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its areas is nearly total. anti-Christian and anti-Republican rhetoric, James Realising that the success or failure of its project Hodgkinson, took seriously the Democrat and to transform America and the world depends upon progressive Left rhetoric that Republicans would the outcome of its campaign, and, most importantly, kill people by repealing the Affordable Care Act. that Trump, unlike some, understands this and is He drove to a baseball field and attempted a mass prepared to do something about it, the Left appear assassination of Republican members of Congress. to be staking everything on destroying him and White House adviser Stephen Miller was called a his people, if necessary by physical violence. If it “fascist” while eating in a restaurant in Washington. succeeds, it will be lights out all round. Florida’s Republican Attorney-General Pam Bondi needed a police escort to protect her from screaming Hal G.P. Colebatch, a prolific poet and author, lives thugs while exiting a movie theatre in Tampa, in Perth.

Quadrant September 2018 35 Nicholas T. Parsons

The Fashion Industry: Not as Pretty as It Looks

Contra la moda toda lucha es inútil. and the fact that women’s bodies remain much —Josep Pla the same from one season to the next.

Fashion: A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey. Dressing in fashion is therefore a matter of sta- —Ambrose Bierce tus as much as aesthetics, part of what Thorstein Veblen described as “conspicuous consumption”, The is a degenerate institution propped now expanded to tempt those on lesser incomes up by a sycophantic press. with what the drugs industry calls “generic” ver- —Kennedy Fraser sions of the stuff paraded before the fakes, cynics, psychopaths and allegedly creative geniuses at the hat most of us immediately associate with annual fashion shows. the word fashion is its ephemeral nature, In Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Veblen likewise its capacity to generate irrational explained that, after the second industrial revo- attachment.W The most familiar object of such an lution, the emergent nouveaux riches established attachment is clothes, anything from haute couture their social status through patterns of consump- to with holes scratched out at the knees, where tion, a conscious attempt to distance themselves the banal nature of the product is disguised (or in from the less well-off and advertise their position fact celebrated) by brand marketing. Moreover the in “the leisure class”. An unashamed contemporary emetic cult of catwalk celebrity and the narcis- demonstration of this phenomenon is afforded by a sistic economy of would collapse if weekend supplement of the Financial Times stuffed the majority, at any rate the majority of women, with advertorial matter and the glossiest of glossy became so contented with last year’s fashion that pictures, which emphasises the nature of the read- they just decided to keep their closets unreformed. ership it aims at through its title, How to Spend It. “The fashion industry is loath to see many days go Its critics have dubbed it the “Argos catalogue for by,” wrote Kennedy Fraser in The Fashionable Mind the 1 per cent” (Argos being a downmarket mail (1981), “without trumpeting new eras, and when- order business), and it specialises in ludicrous and ever a style emerges, or reappears after an absence, it ludicrously priced goods for the über-rich, especially hurries to coin a title before shoppers can rummage alpha males (a Rolex Steve McQueen Explorer II sinfully in closets.” “Fashion,” remarked the Queen at £20,000, which is ridiculously cheap when of Romania dourly, “exists for women with no taste, you could instead buy a Franck Muller Aeternitas just as etiquette is for people with no breeding.” Mega watch for £2 million; or how about a Maybach Happily for the industry, the particular nature Exelero car at £6 million or a Learjet at the give- of what has been tweaked to make a new frock is away price of £550,000?). Two things are notable less important than the necessity of its purchasers to about this supplement: first, the rest of the FT is be, and be seen to be, up with the latest fashion. To emphatically liberal, even leftist, in its editorials, quote Fraser again: comment and news coverage. Second, the magazine is by far the most profitable part of the paper and If, for many women, the choice of clothes is an indeed the editor apparently lamented recently that anxious, irrational affair, it is made doubly so they hadn’t invented another money-spinner like by our craving to be fashionable. The vagaries How to Spend It. of fashion are a denial of constant aesthetic This situation mirrors a larger paradox whereby standards, objective ideas of grace or flattery, today (and very much in the columns of the FT

36 Quadrant September 2018 The Fashion Industry: Not as Pretty as It Looks itself) condemnation of “inequality” is all the rage, opponents, who claimed that it showed an unre- especially among rich leftists. Fashion needs to be pentant lack of compassion, and it prompted a fash- both a leader and a follower: it must reflect social ion backlash: the subsequent sale of T- with aspiration, but must also pay heed to the image of the slogan “I really do care, don’t u?” raised a lot “concern”. It sits uneasily between ostentation and of money for the sequestered children. The “fash- the shibboleths of political correctness, an indus- ion statement” in such examples is also a political try that thrives on inequality trying to establish its statement, like a Che Guevara , or, under the credentials as the great leveller. However, as W.S. Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the luxurious whisk- Gilbert put it, “When everyone is somebody, no ers sported in Vienna by Franz Joseph lookalikes one’s anybody.” And as James Laver put it in his (usually concierges, porters and other public-facing classic work on fashion in 1945, “contrary to the employees). With such statements your personal expectations of Liberal reformers in the nineteenth allegiance can be openly or defiantly advertised. century, the more you abolish differences of caste and rank, the more desperate does the struggle for chic become, because it is only so that a woman can The politics of dress demonstrate superiority”. he political statement through dress can how- The truth of this is underlined when we learn ever be subject to radical transformations. An that, for example, Burberry incinerated £28 million TAustrian example is the taste for Tracht, that is, worth of unsold product in 2017-18 alone and £90 the style of traditional preferred by coun- million worth over the last five years. Partly this try people, which the liberal Erzherzog Johann, is to ensure, as the firm candidly admitted, that Governor of Styria, adopted as his preferred attire the “wrong sort of person” should in the first half of the nineteenth not be seen wearing Burberry century. Johann was a brother after having obtained them from urberry incinerated of the none-too-liberal Emperor a discount outlet. Richemont has B Franz I (of Austria) and indeed had apparently destroyed £400 million £28 million worth to contend with obstruction from worth of luxury over two of unsold product that quarter when he decided to years because of excess stock in marry Anna Plochl, the daughter of the Asian market. Nike has said it in 2017-18 alone. the Styrian postmaster at Aussee. smeared green paint over trainers Partly this is to Wearing the elegant Steireranzug to make them unsaleable at cheaper ensure, as the firm (Styrian suit) was a deliberate sym- prices. Further down the pecking bolisation of his attempt to be close order, even the Swedish cloth- candidly admitted, to his people, and subsequently the ing company H&M incinerates so that the “wrong sort taste for it percolated through to the much stuff that it helps to heat a Vienna court under Franz Joseph. small Swedish town, although it of person” should Soon enthusiasm for Volkstracht claims that this is imperfect stock. not be seen wearing took wing: in 1893 the Tyroler However that may be, fashion Burberry coats. Trachten Verein was founded, partly being dependent on brand snobbery stimulated by the interest shown makes it a prime suspect in the war in Tracht by well-to-do tourists to against the seamy and wasteful side of capitalism, Austria. However, here is where the ironies begin: whereby environmental considerations can eas- Tracht, like the famous Loden coat of Salzburg, was ily be sacrificed to profit and customer aspiration. made by Jewish tailors, and assimilated Jews of the Not that the public is entitled to feel smug, having upper bourgeoisie and minor aristocracy were fond binned £12.5 billion worth of clothes last year, some of wearing it. This affronted the Nazis and in 1938 300,000 tons of it ending up in landfill. a Trachtverbot (prohibition of wearing Tracht) was On the other hand, some contemporary brands promulgated for Jews. Thereafter the Nazis adopted attempt to ape the fashionably rebellious, promot- it as a classic (Southern German) nationalist form ing a cult of inverted snobbism. On the whole, the of dress, leaving a stigma from which it has never spectacle of the privileged trying (ostentatiously) to quite recovered. dress down is not particularly edifying, as Melania Two points are worth noting about this Trump discovered when she ventured out wearing a tortuous history: the first is that the associations grungy with “I really don’t care, do u?” writ- or acceptability of a particular style of dress can ten on the back at the very moment when children shift quite radically in the light of political or social of illegal Mexican immigrants were being separated changes. For example, we used to see war films from their parents. This was seized upon by Trump where some of our heroic British submarine officers

Quadrant September 2018 37 The Fashion Industry: Not as Pretty as It Looks wore duffel coats that were also occasionally affected of form by Churchill. The coat was knee-length, had very large pockets and was fastened with toggles—an n the other hand, a political association may aesthetic “fashion statement” it was not. It was kill off a fashion altogether for a while—one spacious enough to fit over another coat if necessary Othinks of the “sinister” dark leather coats that the and the famous wooden toggles allowed it to be licensed thugs of communism favoured in Central fastened when wearing heavy gloves, while the and Eastern Europe, but which you virtually never capacious fitted over a peaked cap. However, see today (this notwithstanding that “retro-com- deprived of its association with war heroes, the munist” style is slowly making a comeback as the duffel coat frankly looks pretty naff in peacetime, memories of Stalinist savagery fade). Then again, in although Susannah Conway gallantly defends Fascinating Fascism (1975), Susan Sontag explored it as an enduring fashion item because there is, the fascist equivalent of communist chic, which or was, a cashmere Aquascutum duffel coat; also most certainly has made a comeback, albeit mostly trend-setting pop star Liam Gallagher favours the in the fairly rarefied field of sado-masochism. As duffel, although his thousands of followers appear the Weimar Republic wallowed in sexual licence, to be sitting this one out. Apparently it was also the up-and-coming Nazis were advancing a sub- mysteriously popular with the Japanese (40 per liminally homosexual counter-cultural look “that cent of the market for its main producer, Gloverall, fetishized and leather and muscles and racial in the 1990s), and a generation of children has superiority, which then (as now) had a special vicariously enjoyed it due to its association with the appeal for inadequate people”. delightful Paddington Bear, whose adventures were In this remarkable essay Sontag illuminated first brought to us in 1958. how the ideals of fascism itself, usually with suit- In reality duffels have evolved into something ably disingenuous editing, have crept back into more than an iconic weather-defying form of pro- fashion: tection for naval commanders and are now made, when at all, from “cashmere, neoprene, nylon and It is generally thought that National Socialism elysian”, which is a far cry from our man in the con- stands only for brutishness and terror. But ning tower braving a North Atlantic storm. “The this is not true. National Socialism—or, more duffel is enjoying a renaissance thanks to Hedi broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal, Slimane’s ultra-luxurious autumn/winter reinven- and one that is also persistent today, under tion of the old favourite for Saint Laurent,” claimed other banners: the ideal of life as art, the the Daily Telegraph in 2013, with a photo of the same cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the costing a mere £1490. However, turning a decid- dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of edly unsexy functional item into a fashion state- community; the repudiation of the intellect; ment is hard work and one doubts that even the the family of man (under the parenthood of combined endorsements of Gallagher, Churchill leaders). and Paddington Bear can really rescue the duffel, whose original density recalled the heavy woollen The connection with submerged sexuality is also garments traditionally manufactured in the Belgian apparent, says Sontag, in the appeal for the sado- town of Duffel. Fashion from Belgium? Surely you masochism community of SS regalia and objects must be joking? associated with inter alia Nazi violence: The fate of the duffel may be compared with that of the Gannex , which became the In the sex shops, the baths, the leather bars, trademark of Socialist Prime Minister Harold the brothels, people are dragging out their gear. Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s due to his friend- But why? Why has Nazi Germany, which was a ship with its maker, a entrepreneur called sexually repressive society, become erotic? How Joseph Kagan. The PM’s endorsement did won- could a regime which persecuted homosexuals ders for exports of the Gannex, whose peculiarity become a gay turn-on? ... was that it had a nylon outer skin and a woollen Sadomasochism has always been an internal one separated by an air pocket. Although experience in which sex becomes detached it was rather ugly, it became a fashion icon and was from personality, severed from relationships, worn by Lyndon Johnson, Mao Zedong, Nikita from love. It should not be surprising that it Khrushchev—and even the British royals. (The ulti- has become attached to Nazi symbolism in mate seal of aspirant glamour was bestowed upon it recent years. Never before in history was the when the fashion-conscious royal corgis were fitted relation of masters and slaves realized with so with Gannex .) consciously artistic a design. Sade had to make

38 Quadrant September 2018 The Fashion Industry: Not as Pretty as It Looks

up his theater of punishment and delight from Top down or bottom up? scratch, improvising the decor and and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master he second—more interesting—point about the scenario available to everyone. The color is Austrian Tracht is that it is a comparatively black, the material is leather, the seduction is rareT example of fashion trickling upwards from its beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is “völkisch” base, whereas art historians will tell you ecstasy, the fantasy is death. that most design trickles from above to below in society. Something similar happened with the Contemplating such lingering allure, one can’t Viennese waltz, which had its origins in the peas- help wondering what will happen to the plain ant Ländler of Oberösterreich, but which eventu- Maoist tunic worn by the Chinese nomenklatura ally found acceptance in a sanitised salon version (same style as hoi polloi, but much better qual- at the highest levels of society. This was an entirely ity cloth), when and if communism fades away in authentic transformation helped by some composers China and the crimes of Mao and his successors of genius; its enthusiastic adoption across all levels can be openly discussed. In fact, although Mao of society contrasts with the rather self-conscious adopted this tunic as a symbol of proletarian unity, artefacts of the arts-and-crafts movement at the it was originally popularised by Sun Yat-sen, who turn of the twentieth century, which were often the founded the Republic of China after the demise of products of middle-class artists infusing folk design the imperial dynasty. Its political symbolism was with utopian socialist notions. therefore not all that different from The modern version of “trickle what Mao wanted, so it survived, up” does not however work in the although becoming less popu- same way, or often at all. For exam- lar during the ideological adjust- Westwood has ple, the cult of ugliness manifest ment of the Deng Xiaoping era. been rewarded for in “punk” or “grunge” music and Perhaps significantly, it has made her counter-cultural clothes is good for an anti-glamour something of a comeback under article or two in the faux-demo- Xi Jinping, though evidently not posturing by the cratic glossies, but this rather tends among the sort of Western intel- capitalist system she to emphasise that it is satirising just lectuals who formerly sported it to such publications and their clien- show their solidarity with the great claims is so wicked, tele. In fact the designer Vivienne socialist experiment that destroyed but which she Westwood, whose huge success so many millions of lives. started with the commercialisa- One of its main purposes origi- exploits with such tion of punk, moved on from that nally was to provide an alterna- remarkable success. rebarbative style to a so-called tive to the Western business suit, “Tatler girl” look that parodied the which the capitalist Japanese had clothes of upper-class girls, many adopted (although in fact Sun Yat-sen had lived in of whom nevertheless seemed happy to purchase a Japan and retained some elements of Westernising parodic representation of themselves. Next up from influence in his own tunic). It also has significant Westwood was the mini-crini, an abbreviated ver- symbolic importance: the four pockets suppos- sion of the Victorian crinoline. Its mini-length and edly represent the Four Virtues cited in the classic puffball were seen by some as consciously Guanzi: Propriety, Justice, Honesty and Shame. antithetical, the crinoline recalling a “mythology The five front buttons represented the five Yuans of restriction and encumbrance in woman’s dress”, (branches of government), while the three cuff- while the mini- represented an “equally dubious buttons symbolise Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of mythology of liberation”. the People: Nationalism, Democracy and People’s Of course this contradiction may be more appar- Livelihood. The jacket is in a single piece, connot- ent than real, since erogenous zones lie entirely in ing China’s unity and peace. In view of this, today’s the eye of the beholder—to some, a flash of ankle “Mao jacket” is not loaded with the associations or a pair of lovely jade eyes peeping out of the slits of horror evoked by (invariably militaristic) fas- in a niqab may represent the height of eroticism. cist attire, even though it was worn, and insisted Westwood’s career spans the eras of the mini-skirt upon for the population, by one of history’s great- (known disrespectfully as the “pussy pelmet”), est murderers. Indeed it remains a sort of national the reversion to demure Victorian styles via Laura costume adopted by China’s paramount leaders on Ashley, and then another violent lurch to crotch formal occasions and by its diplomats. Sadly, it is a and buttock emphasis with “hot pants”. “The female barren of inspiration for sado-masochists. body,” wrote James Laver:

Quadrant September 2018 39 The Fashion Industry: Not as Pretty as It Looks

consists of a series of sterilised zones, which revealed that Westwood had lines made in China are those exposed by the fashion that is just which incorporated PVC, polyester, rayon and vis- going out, and an erogenous zone, which will cose, all allegedly derived from harmful chemicals. be the point of interest for the fashion which is Eluxe also pointed out that, despite Westwood urg- just coming in. This erogenous zone is always ing consumers to “buy less”, her company produced shifting, and it is the business of fashion to nine collections a year (compared to the average pursue it, without ever actually catching it up. It designer’s two). Her excuse seemed even lamer than is obvious that if you really catch it up you are mega-hypocrites at Facebook and Google trying immediately arrested for indecent exposure. If to square bowing to Chinese censorship with their you almost catch it up, you are celebrated as a much vaunted company values: “I don’t feel com- leader of fashion. fortable defending my clothes. But if you’ve got the money to afford them, then buy something from me. Westwood herself was adept at the art of that Just don’t buy too much.” Finally she was exposed pursuit, whether in terms of eroticism or fashion- in the satirical magazine Private Eye and elsewhere able attitudes, social and political. Her fashion lead- for using unpaid interns and requiring them to work ership resembled that of the French socialist leader over forty hours per week. in 1968 who famously defined his role with the proc- Westwood’s double standards and virtue signal- lamation, “I am their leader, I must follow them!” ling are very twenty-first-century, a world in which Haute couture was never like that; as Kennedy Fraser mission statements, mendacious branding and explains, the “new generation of ready-to-wear “greenwashing” pullulate. She has been rewarded designers—the closest thing we now have to fashion for her counter-cultural posturing by the capital- leadership—[takes pride] in interpreting the often ist system she claims is so wicked, but which she contradictory inclinations of the masses rather than exploits with such remarkable success. This speaks commanding a receptive elite”. Moreover Westwood to a wider resurgence of what Tom Wolfe memo- and a few others have brilliantly caught the zeit- rably described as radical chic—even Teen Vogue geist, where contemporary works of art, however has commemorated the 200th anniversary of Karl feeble, are made immune to criticism by claiming Marx’s birth with a gushing article describing how to embody “an ironic statement”. The urban English he exposed the evils of capitalism (but the arti- elite, with its mockney accent and carefully culti- cle was notably silent about the cruel disaster of vated egalitarianism, embraces this sort of com- Marxism once it was actually applied under com- mercial exploitation concealed beneath a pose of munism). All this, as Toby Young remarked, “in a social awareness precisely because it mirrors its own publication that depends on its advertising revenue modus operandi. Westwood loudly proclaimed her on gulling teenage girls into spending hundreds of own political commitments to the environment, to dollars on tat produced in Mauritian sweatshops”. the battle against climate change, and even to a cri- The disconnect between a frightening reality tique of the consumerism that her own burgeoning and its sanitised celebration by amoral and greedy empire was encouraging. Her heroes are a roll-call Tartuffes defines a shallow, image-conscious world of fashionable counter-culture: Noam Chomsky, where the vicarious has driven out the authentic. Julian Assange, Bradley (Chelsea) Manning. After “The greatest disservice that fashion does,” writes (for her followers) an embarrassing flirtation with Kennedy Fraser, “is to turn life’s most precious the Conservatives, she signed up as a radical Green; and fragile assets into marketable products of tran- and after falling out with the Greens, she became a sient worth.” Fashion reflects in a startlingly vivid gushing supporter of Saint Jeremy Corbyn. manner the society in which it is produced, which Inevitably the contradictions between commerce nowadays is the have-your-cake-and-eat-it soci- and virtue signalling came to haunt the by-now ety. Virtue signalling and identity politics provide “Dame” Vivienne Westwood, whose commercial excellent cover for sharp practice and greed. This success had catapulted her into the Establishment. strikes a chord in a narcissistic and sanctimonious Although she was fond of lecturing the public on the environment where the only important thing is to evils of excessive consumerism, it was pointed out feel good about yourself, for which there is ready- that her company had opened a three-storey outlet made palette of slogans to adopt. As Goethe put it, in midtown Manhattan in late 2015. That was to be “everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to followed in 2016 by a new 3200-square-foot shop grow”. and company offices in Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. It transpired that the firm had also set up an offshore Nicholas T. Parsons is a freelance author, translator entity in Luxembourg to avoid tax. In 2013, Eluxe and editor based in Vienna. Among his books is Worth Magazine, which promoted “sustainable fashion”, the Detour: A History of the Guidebook.

40 Quadrant September 2018 William Kininmonth

The Paris Agreement is No Longer Relevant

ational energy policy is failing to satisfy perising ourselves in a cause that is now demon- what has been described as the trilemma of strably false? objectives: meeting national commitments The basis of the Paris Agreement is the hypoth- Nfor emissions reduction under the Paris Agreement; esis of dangerous anthropogenic global warming. providing affordable energy; and ensuring continu- Computer models of the climate system, which few ity of supply. scientists understand, are invoked to project glo- There is potential flexibility for adopting dif- bal temperature rise as atmospheric carbon dioxide ferent technologies to provide affordability and concentration increases. The most recent assess- continuity of supply, but governments are tightly ment from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on constrained by the need for national emissions Climate Change (IPCC) is that global temperature reduction. Australia is further constrained by is projected to rise between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees for a policy shackles of its own making. Legislation is doubling of carbon dioxide concentration. in place that rules out the most obvious technol- Few dispute that human activities, especially ogy readily satisfying the policy trilemma: nuclear burning of fossil fuels, are causing atmospheric generation. The reluctance to consider nuclear is concentrations of carbon dioxide to increase. Since baffling considering that 70 per cent of France’s the beginning of the twentieth century the con- electricity generation is from nuclear and the global centration has increased from 280 parts per million nuclear increase from 2016 to 2017 was a not incon- to more than 400. Similarly, few dispute that an sequential 65 terawatt hours. That is, nuclear pro- increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentra- vided more than 10 per cent of the global increase tion will increase global temperature. The debate in electricity generation, the equivalent of ten new amongst scientists is about the sensitivity of glo- Hazelwood power stations. bal temperature to carbon dioxide and the role of The government’s favoured option of renew- natural variability. Is the sensitivity in the range of able energy, in the forms of wind and solar, is sad- 1.5 to 4.5 degrees as projected by models or is it in dled with the burden of intermittency; there is no the range of 0.5 to 1.0 degrees, as alternative analy- generation when the wind does not blow and the ses indicate? If the latter, then the anthropogenic sun does not shine. In addition, expansion of the influence is lost within the likely bounds of natu- renewable base requires considerable reallocation ral variability. Any attempt to regulate climate by of public funds from other infrastructure and social emissions control is wasted effort. needs such as schools and hospitals. There are now thirty-eight years of reliable sat- As each day passes it becomes clearer that the ellite and related climate data that give new insights federal government is finding the competing objec- into global and regional trends over the period of tives of the policy trilemma impossible to resolve. most rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The costs of overcoming intermittency and the We are now able to better resolve the competing subsidies to promote wind and solar expansion are anthropogenic and natural contributions to recent driving electricity prices for consumers through the climate change. proverbial roof. In addition, major industries that underpin our national prosperity are threatening to lanetary warming of recent times has its origins close or move overseas. in the surface layers of the equatorial oceans. It is time to re-evaluate our national commit- PIf we plot sea surface temperature (SST) and ment to the Paris Agreement and its requirement lower troposphere temperature anomalies then for emissions reduction. As a nation, are we pau- the standout features are the recurring warming

Quadrant September 2018 41 The Paris Agreement is No Longer Relevant associated with El Niño events and cooling associ­ months. That is, the warming trend is greatest dur- ated with La Niña events. With El Niño events ing those months when transport of excess solar there is reduced upwelling of deeper cold water into energy from the tropics is greatest. the warm surface layer, and with La Niña events We can be confident that the gradually warming there is enhanced upwelling of cold water. equatorial ocean surface is providing more energy Air temperature is less than the sea surface to the overlying atmosphere to be transported pole- temperature, meaning that energy is flowing from ward. We also know that the maximum transport the tropical ocean to the atmosphere. Moreover, by the atmosphere is during the winter months, because the atmospheric temperature is linked to thus explaining the maximum warming trend in the ocean temperature through convection, the air winter. temperature follows the ocean temperature fluctua- The pattern of warming over the North Pole tions. The correlation between the equatorial sea region indicates that seasonal thawing of land and surface temperature series and the lower tropo- sea ice is occurring earlier, and freezing is occur- spheric temperature series is 0.88. ring later. It is not surprising that the extent of The influence of the fluctuating equatorial sea Arctic sea ice has decreased over recent years and surface temperature on air temperature is global. mountain glaciers have retreated. There has also The correlation between the equa- been a positive benefit: the growing torial sea surface temperature and season over high northern latitudes the global lower troposphere tem- uring the previous has lengthened and the potential perature remains relatively high at D for food production has increased. 0.69. interglacial, about It should be noted that during The temperature of the lower 120,000 years ago, the previous interglacial, about troposphere faithfully follows the 120,000 years ago when there was equatorial ocean surface tempera- the global temperature no anthropogenic influence, the ture. As the ocean warms, more was warmer, the global temperature was warmer, heat and latent energy are pumped Greenland ice sheet the Greenland ice sheet was signif- into the atmosphere. Much of the icantly reduced, and sea level was additional heat is transported pole- was significantly about two metres higher than at ward by the atmospheric winds. reduced, and sea level present. Atmospheric carbon diox- In addition to the strong year- ide is not the major determinant of to-year fluctuations of equatorial was about two metres global temperature and climate. sea surface temperature associated higher than at present. The lack of warming of the with El Niño events there was a lower troposphere over the south- warming trend between 1979 and ern hemisphere, especially the 2017 of 0.11 degrees per decade. The warming of South Pole region, is an enigma. The reason may the tropical lower troposphere over the same period be associated with the differing disposition of land was 0.12 degrees per decade, and that of the globe and ocean over the two hemispheres. There is evi- 0.13 degrees per decade. dence of warming of the Southern Ocean, suggest- The question remains: Was the warming trend ing an uptake of heat that is not available over the due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide or was continental regions of the northern hemisphere. it associated with a trend of reduced upwelling of The surface air temperature over Antarctica deeper cold water, as with El Niño events? There exhibits a similar seasonal pattern to the Arctic but are more data to assist in resolving the question to with reduced magnitude. There is a warming trend favour natural variability of the climate system. during the winter months but that is offset by a Carbon dioxide is well mixed in the atmosphere cooling trend during the summer months. and we might expect similar regional warming The observed pattern of planetary warming trends in each of the hemispheres. This is not the between 1979 and 2017 is consistent with reduced case. Maximum warming of recent times, at 0.25 upwelling in the surface layer of the tropical ocean. degrees per decade, has been over the North Pole Unfortunately, the ocean circulations and their region (data from Latitude 60 N to Latitude 85). variations remain the great unknowns of the cli- Over the South Pole region there has been no detect- mate system. The reported slowing of the North able warming in the lower troposphere. Surface air Atlantic Gulf Stream is, however, consistent with temperature for the North Pole region shows that a slowing of the ocean overturning (the thermo- the warming trend is not through the year. haline circulation) and reduced tropical upwelling. The warming trend is highest during the cold win- The likelihood is that the observed warming of ter months and lowest during the warmer summer recent decades is largely a consequence of internal

42 Quadrant September 2018 The Paris Agreement is No Longer Relevant variability of the climate system and has little to do based on wind and solar, and with social infra- with atmospheric carbon dioxide. structure continuing to be substandard because of a misallocation of resources. he IPCC, the source of scientific advice for Climate science is not settled. Four decades intergovernmental climate negotiations, has of observations show that computer models have downplayedT the role of internal variability. For exaggerated the influence of anthropogenic emis- example, in its 2001 Third Assessment Report the sions of carbon dioxide. The Paris Agreement has IPCC claimed, “The warming of the past 100 years been negotiated from faulty premises. is very unlikely to be due to internal variability, as The government must recast its energy policy estimated by current models.” That is, model char- and focus on availability and low cost. This is the acteristics were used to justify the model projec- only way to redress the misallocation of national tions, a very unsound scientific practice! resources. A key factor underpinning national pros- It is also worth noting that the observed 1.2 perity must be relatively cheap and reliable energy. degrees per century rate of global warming of the lower troposphere is less than the lowest model William Kininmonth was supervisor of climate projections. A continuation of this rate of warming services in the Bureau of Meteorology and a would not exceed the 1.5 degrees aspiration of the consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation. Paris Agreement until the twenty-second century. He is the author of Climate Change: A Natural The observations point to recent warming being Hazard (2004) and a contributor to Taxing Air: a result of the internal variability of the climate Facts and Fallacies About Climate Change (Carter system and not anthropogenic emissions of carbon and Spooner, 2013). The data quoted in this article dioxide. A reversal of the cyclic warming trend are freely available from the sources: sea surface that has been evident since the early seventeenth and near surface air temperatures are from the US century would mean that investment in emissions NCAR/NCEP reanalysis data set; lower troposphere reduction has been and will continue to be a wasted temperature is from the version 6 satellite analyses effort. The nation would be left with an expensive of and Christy (University of Alabama at but unreliable and inefficient energy infrastructure Huntsville).

The Calmness of Despair

When you get out of the car and you feel the bully’s stare That’s when you feel the calmness of despair. When other kids have all been picked and you’re left standing there That’s when you feel the calmness of despair. When you want to dance with Abby and they make you dance with Claire When the teacher always picks on you and nothing’s ever fair When mum and dad are fighting and the pain’s too hard to bear That’s when you feel the calmness of despair.

Katherine Spadaro

Quadrant September 2018 43 Them Shoes

Everything is bourbon and bonhomie here in New Orleans on Bourbon Street. It’s party-time and revellers keep time with trumpet, trombone, tuba and sax. Spectators toss bead from balconies to women jiving in the street to all that jazz. A redhead with stark-white shoulders and a dark mask pauses and poses while I take her picture. A washboard-wearing white man raps a cowbell and honks a bike-horn outside the Cowboy Hotel. African-American kids fisting drumsticks belt the beat out of white plastic buckets. A boy with can-tops on his soles tap-dances for tips, a manhole cover for amp, spotlight and dancefloor. At every corner, the cuisine of Lucky Dog carts pips catfish po’ boys and alligator burgers. If nothing else, my camera gives me away as a New Orleans newbie, a tourist to be taken. A gator playing a guitar winks at me from a neon sign above a tavern door. They seem mostly of an unmenacing sort, the carnivores stalking this carnival street. Now yet another New Orleans native accosts me with an alligator grin. He is the second black man in barely a minute to remark on my unremarkable walkers. “I like them shoes,” he also says before also saying, “Where’d you get them shoes?” What’s their lark, these Louisiana larrikins? I laugh but this time, curious, I do not walk on. Having hooked me, he reels me in with his spiel: “I could tell you where you got them shoes.” It’s a lurk, a rort, a trick, but how does it work? I think of a shop in my far-off homeland.

44 Quadrant September 2018 “Yeah?” I say, knowing he can’t possibly know, yet knowing, too, he impossibly does. “Where?” “First,” he says, “you gotta pay for a shine if I can tell you where you got them shoes.” “Ten bucks,” he says, when I ask how much. I agree and ask, grinning, “Tell me where, then?” He pulls a rag from his pants back pocket and drops to one knee on the pavement. Straight-off straight-faced he says, “You got them shoes on your feet, and your feet’s on Bourbon Street.” As he lifts my shod foot onto his knee, laughter and one-leggedness unsteady me. Then to the rhythm of his buffing, in a mix of southern drawl and black jive, he jibes, “You ain’t payin’ for the shine, you is payin’ for the education.” Even the price of the Louisiana Purchase wouldn’t suffice to pay for my elation!

Meditations on Emptiness

1 Limit If only our hearts were rigid like the segments of timber bamboos they, too, might have a limit to the emptiness they hold.

2 Containment Can all the hollows of all the planet’s bamboos begin to contain half the sobbing emptiness of even one human heart?

Andrew Lansdown

Quadrant September 2018 45 Gr aham Pinn

A Nuclear Option is Not Too Late for Australia

s Australian electricity costs increase and bombs on Japanese cities. The first bomb, dropped reliability of supply declines, the failure to on Hiroshima from a B29 bomber on August 6, 1945, use the country’s natural resources is increas- resulted in an estimated 80,000 deaths. President inglyA irrational, based on ideology rather than prac- Truman called on Japan to surrender the next day. ticality. If we ignore the cataclysmic predictions of When there was no response, a second bomb was the global warming brigade, then using coal and dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, with an esti- nuclear power is sensible; if there is concern about mated 40,000 deaths. When the bombs exploded, increasing carbon dioxide levels, then nuclear power 50 per cent of the energy was released as a blast effect is even more the logical solution. Whenever this and 40 per cent as heat, which destroyed 90 per cent suggestion is made, ignorant scare-mongering— of the buildings as well as causing mass deaths; 5 per along the lines of “we will all glow in the dark”—is cent of the energy was released as radiation, result- used, as few understand the different types of radia- ing in another 40,000 delayed deaths. A third bomb tion or their effects. As a result Australia is the only was due to be dropped a week later, as Japan still had G20 country with a ban on nuclear energy. a formidable military with over 5 million soldiers To put nuclear power in perspective it is neces- and 2 million navy personnel, but Japan offered a sary to review the history of its development. Albert formal surrender on August 15. Despite the death Einstein was the first to consider nuclear fission as and destruction, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now an option to release energy. His famous equation E thriving, with no increase in background radiation. = MC2 suggested that splitting the atom and reduc- Long-term follow-up since 1975 by the joint US and ing its mass (M) could release massive amounts of Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation energy (E) (the C in the equation is the speed of has suggested less than a 0.5 per cent increase in light). Einstein was born in Germany but left to tumour development over 550,000 patient-years of study in . With Hitler’s ascent to power observation. and his own Jewish origins, Einstein never returned Missile-delivered bombs are now infinitely more to Germany but instead emigrated to the US and powerful, but there has never been a further nuclear became a citizen. With his revolutionary theories attack, as the potential for retaliation is too awful and background he was able to warn the American to consider. Misguided activists in the US and UK authorities of the wartime potential of nuclear fis- (funded by communist sympathisers) in the past sion research by Germany. He supported the con- campaigned for unilateral disarmament. Even at the struction of the first nuclear reactor, built in 1940, height of the Cold War, the possession of weapons using uranium as fuel. As well as Americans, scien- by East and West had the predicted deterrent effect tists from the UK and Canada were also involved in and prevented a Third World War. Whether deter- the development. rence will continue as rogue states acquire these Subsequently, under the hugely expensive weapons remains to be seen (there are still over Manhattan Project, the program was expanded to 4000 operational weapons worldwide, North Korea produce weapons-grade uranium for production of having at least ten) but what is beyond doubt is the a bomb. Initial testing was carried out in July 1945 consequence of a nuclear strike. in New Mexico, where the Trinity test site is now a Natural levels of radiation are not associated major tourist attraction. Subsequently, with Japan’s with disease, but natural background levels do refusal to surrender and the potential for huge increase with altitude. Studies of airline staff have loss of life in an invasion (estimated at a million revealed a possible association with breast cancer Americans), the decision was made to drop atom and melanoma. Other natural sources include gran-

46 Quadrant September 2018 A Nuclear Option is Not Too Late for Australia ite, which emits radon gas, which can increase the now visit the site. risk of lung cancer. Repeated x-rays can also increase The only other significant event has been at risk. Apart from nuclear bombs and missiles, the Fukushima in Japan, where reactors were carelessly main health concern has now focused on accidents built near a fault line in the earth’s crust. When in nuclear reactors and the problem of safe disposal an earthquake in 2011 triggered a tsunami which of nuclear waste. flooded the area and knocked out power, three of the six reactors went into meltdown and released radia- he first known radiation accident occurred in tion. Half a million people were evacuated, 150,000 a remote part of Russia in 1957 in Kyshtyn, long-term. There were no radiation deaths, but the Ta closed city and a site of nuclear weapons manu- tsunami wave penetrated up to six miles inland with facture. Information is limited but it is known an estimated 20,000 deaths. Again there has been that 10,000 people were evacuated and the exclu- a (preventable) subsequent increase in thyroid can- sion zone turned into a “wildlife reserve”, which it cer in children. The exclusion zone is smaller than remains to this day. Chernobyl’s, but leaks of radiation into the sea have Several nuclear accidents were known to have caused concern with fish contamination. It is esti- occurred with planes carrying bombs in the Cold mated the clean-up will take forty years. War era, the best-documented being the crash of an American B52 bomber in Palomares, Spain, in 1966. ew developments in reactor design have dra- The plane carried four nuclear bombs, two of which matically improved safety. Small modular leaked radiation on crashing and caused a small area reactorsN (SMR) producing 50 to 300 megawatts are of local contamination. now being designed for use in isolated areas, manu- My own experience was as a radiation safety factured at a plant and pre-assembled. Their design officer in the Royal Air Force. Fortunately no acci- means less likelihood of radioactive waste contami- dents occurred on my watch, and nation. Historically uranium has the UK’s Blue Steel stand-off bomb been used as fuel as its properties has now been superseded by Polaris have been established in weapons submarine-launched missiles. Historically research; thorium is an alternative The first significant reactor acci- uranium has been fuel which has significant advan- dent was at Three Mile Island in tages in risk of meltdown and waste the US in 1979, when a mechanical used as fuel as its production. failure complicated by human error properties have been The early nuclear power stations resulted in a partial meltdown and established in weapons were established in the 1950s. The the release of radioactive gas. This first in the US produced electricity led to a three-week evacuation of research; thorium is in 1951. There are now 450 world- 150,000 people, but there were no an alternative fuel wide with around sixty under con- noted adverse health effects. The struction and another 150 planned, clean-up took until 1993. which has significant mostly in the US, France, China In 1986 in Chernobyl, Ukraine, advantages in risk and Japan (which still has forty- human error in a testing procedure of meltdown and two). They provide 11 per cent of the resulted in a reactor core meltdown world’s electricity and are the sec- and a major radiation release. This waste production. ond most productive source of low caused around fifty deaths and a carbon power after hydro-electric at (preventable) increase in thyroid 30 per cent. China has twenty-one cancer in children; 500,000 people were evacu- reactors under construction and thirty-eight more ated. A cloud of radioactivity spread across Western planned, India has six under construction with Europe but, apart from children being advised not nineteen more planned, Russia has seven under con- to drink milk, there were no complications. At the struction and twenty-six more planned. Even the time I was close by in Berlin, but subsequently failed global warming stalwart, the United Kingdom, has to “glow in the dark”. A thirty-kilometre exclusion plans for eleven more nuclear reactors (see World zone persists around the site and the reactor has Nuclear Association, Nuclear Fuel Report, 2016). recently been entombed in a concrete sarcopha- Despite global warming activism there is no sign gus to prevent further radiation leaks. Without of reduction in the construction of coal-fired power human habitation, wildlife has returned and bears stations. Currently there are an estimated 6000 and wolves have recolonised the area. There is still worldwide with over 600 under construction. China increased background radiation but adverse effects is building 300, India 130, and there are over 100 in have not been noted in the wildlife, and tourists various Asian countries. Japan, after its Fukushima

Quadrant September 2018 47 A Nuclear Option is Not Too Late for Australia scares, is building ten more. Apart from increas- underground, the last being in 1992, just before the ing our electricity costs, what global purpose does it test ban treaty. The Baneberry test in 1970 produced serve to shut down one or two older coal-powered an accidental release of radiation which contami- stations in Australia? nated eighty workers, and a small increase in thyroid Worldwide total electricity supply is still prima- cancer has since been noted in the surrounding area. rily from “polluting” coal (40 per cent) and gas (25 Over 450 Soviet tests were carried out under- per cent), with 15 per cent hydro, 11 per cent nuclear, ground between 1949 and 1989 at Sempalatinsk in 5 per cent renewable and 5 per cent oil-generated. Kazakhstan. At the end of the Cold War the tun- Other countries with nuclear reactors include nels were sealed to prevent removal of material. Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Africa and Iran. Information is scanty but an estimated 200,000 liv- Thirty countries in the Middle East, Africa, South ing in the vicinity may have been affected by radia- America and Asia have plans for their development. tion, with increases of various cancers and genetic It would seem that in many countries the economic defects. advantages for electricity production outweigh con- cerns about pollution. verall the 2000 or so nuclear tests have pro- duced only small and localised effects on the n this country there is no planned nuclear devel- environment.O The question for Australia is, with opment, but there are again moves afoot to store half the world’s known reserves of uranium and radioactiveI waste from other countries—with the plentiful thorium, why has nuclear power been inevitable NIMBY (not in my back yard) response. repeatedly rejected as an option? This moratorium So far twenty-five years of planning has failed to has also meant that nuclear power is unavailable for produce a permanent facility for even our own radi- our military, limiting its application to ships and oactive waste. Nuclear waste can remain radioac- submarines. With concerns about carbon dioxide tive for up to 20,000 years, and many countries have levels, the nuclear question should again be put to temporary storage facilities but these are filling up. the government. A major permanent storage site is being developed in Numerous surveys have been carried out to com- Onkalo, Finland, a stable country both geologically pare the price of production of electricity, includ- and politically. The waste will be stored in forty-five ing the costs of manufacture and running. In 2011 a kilometres of tunnels. The site of seven nuclear tests French study of the levelised cost of electricity sug- carried out between 1956 and 1983, Maralinga in gested costs per megawatt hour (MWh) at 20 euros South Australia is considered the best option for a for hydro, 50 for nuclear, 70 for onshore wind and permanent storage facility. It has been cleaned up 290 for solar power. The International Renewable twice, in 1957 and 2000, and access is now allowed Energy Agency in 2018 suggested the cost of solar but not residence. There are legal proceedings about and wind power had fallen significantly and had the contentious issue of compensation, but there has become comparable with coal, with gas still more been no confirmation of disease caused by the tests expensive, but nuclear power was for some reason in service personnel. not included. The many studies now available have Five British tests were also carried out in the produced inconsistent results, partially due to lack Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast, and there of local availability of the various alternatives and is residual radioactivity there. The French conducted partially by not including subsidies or the cost of many tests (different references give a number back-up. For example, in the US, natural gas pro- between twenty-seven and 181) on Mururoa atoll duced by fracking is now cheap and plentiful, mak- in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996. These ing the nuclear option less attractive. There is no underground tests undermined much of the island, doubt however that, until battery storage becomes with minimal subsequent rectification and continu- much cheaper and more efficient, renewable energy ing leakage of radioactive material into the ocean. cannot provide reliable power and the cost of back- The first American test was in New Mexico, but up base load needs to be included in pricing. subsequent US tests were carried out between 1946 The problem this country has, as it shuts down and 1962 on atoll in the Marshall Islands, supposedly polluting base-load coal-generated where high levels of radiation remain and the power, is that electricity costs have exploded (more islands are uninhabited (although wildlife is appar- than doubled in ten years, despite $60 billion in sub- ently thriving). Three tests were also carried out sidies for renewables) and reliability of supply has on the Amchitka islands in Alaska, uninhabited fallen. This is having a deleterious effect on what islands where there is no residual radiation. Over is left of manufacturing in this country and mak- a thousand US tests were carried out at Yucca flats, ing it increasingly uncompetitive, with jobs going Nevada, around 100 of them above ground, the rest offshore to those countries with cheap coal-based

48 Quadrant September 2018 A Nuclear Option is Not Too Late for Australia electricity. In 2015 the Australian Power Generation costs were 47 cents/kWh, New South Wales 39 Technology CO2CRC report compared estimates cents, 35 cents, Victoria 34 cents, UK of electricity production costs and showed coal from 31 cents, France (mainly nuclear power) 24 cents, pre-existing power stations was still the cheapest US 16 cents. energy source, with natural gas as an alternative In South Australia, highly polluting diesel power (compiled from information from forty independ- generation, consuming 80,000 litres per hour and ent organisations). The latest government report, costing $110 million, is back-up for less-polluting the Finkel report in 2017, again failing to list the coal-fired production! The headline-producing nuclear option, suggests that by 2020 coal will still battery alternative would power the state for an be cheaper (around $80 per MWh) when compared estimated nine minutes. As suggested by Ziggy with solar plus storage (around $140 per MWh). Switkowski in his report as long ago as 2006, South With wind and solar power it is also necessary Australia could be the place for both a storage facil- to include the cost of back-up generation for when ity and the first Australian nuclear reactor. He sug- the wind doesn’t blow and the sun gested nuclear power could deliver doesn’t shine. We have jumped a third of Australia’s electricity, the gun in going renewable and, lectricity costs with a resulting 18 per cent reduc- if we continue to close down old E tion in carbon dioxide emissions. coal power stations, we will have have exploded (more Worldwide energy consumption is a twenty-year power-generation than doubled in ten estimated to increase by 50 per cent gap for base-load power. Currently, over the next twenty-five years, but with no new coal-fuelled power sta- years, despite $60 politics has intervened in Australia tions likely, the only option seems billion in subsidies and even nuclear research facilities to be gas-powered generation with have now closed down. its lesser carbon dioxide produc- for renewables) and Down the track the Holy Grail tion. Is there still a place for nuclear reliability of supply of power generation, nuclear fusion, power, particularly the use of local has fallen. This is may well make the wind tur- SMR’s, to power more isolated bines and solar panels redundant. areas of Australia? These modern having a deleterious Einstein’s famous theory described reactors are safer and more flex- effect on what is left not only the splitting of the atom ible in usage, their estimated costs (fission) to release energy but also are comparable, and they are easily of manufacturing the concept of nuclear fusion, when transportable. in this country. atoms are combined. This process, The exaggerated concerns which powers the sun, releases many about environmental pollution are times more energy than fission and exposed by the safety record of nuclear power plants, with little radioactivity. Particle physics research- with minimal loss of life and health. Environmental ers from many countries (including Australia) are pollution and destruction from wood burning for involved in building the first prototype reactor in fuel causes far greater health issues. The Fukushima France, the ITER (International Thermonuclear event was caused by a natural disaster, not a nuclear Experimental Reactor). Work started in 2013 and accident, and the last accidental radiation was more is expected to be completed by 2025. Should this than thirty years ago at Chernobyl. prove a viable option, then limitless, non-polluting electricity generation will become available. The ltimately the question should be one of cost ITER project was a product of the last days of the rather than ideology. The fact that new reac- Cold War, when Reagan and Gorbachev decided to Utors are being built worldwide suggest there is still work together. Nuclear physics research was acceler- a cost advantage. Twenty years ago Australia had ated by the threat of war, but it may yet become the one of the cheapest electricity prices in the devel- world’s salvation rather than its destruction. oped world, but current policies have have increased prices dramatically, with the worst-performing state, Graham Pinn worked in the Royal Air Force, South Australia, being the leader in renewables. before taking part in overseas aid projects in several The US energy administration in 2017 estimated countries where an unreliable electricity supply had Denmark, with its high reliance on wind power life-threatening significance. He is not a physicist generation, to have the world’s most expensive elec- but a physician with an interest in radiation- tricity price at 45 US cents/kWh. South Australia’s related illness.

Quadrant September 2018 49 Satyajeet Mar ar

Junk Science and the Sugar Tax Swindle

hen told about starving French peas- countries (Denmark, France, Hungary, Mexico and ants who couldn’t afford bread, Marie Chile) have experimented with taxes on soft drinks Antoinette is infamously said to have or sugar. Not one of these places has seen a mate- remarked,W “Let them eat cake instead.” The French rial impact on their rate of obesity, which continues revolution ended 230 years ago with her head in a to climb across the Western world. However, this basket, yet the patronising elites of the world are hasn’t stopped sugar-tax lobbyists from peddling still as out of touch with the realities of the average their narrative to the media, applying junk science person as they’ve ever been. and manipulating the data to suit their conclusions. This time, they’ve convinced themselves that Take the example of France. The Irish Heart they’re looking out for us and that we need saving Foundation claims that the French tax on soft from ourselves—whether we like it or not, and even drinks, which was introduced in 2012, has caused if it means politicising and distorting science and a 3.3 per cent decline in consumption. To back the statistics or intruding on our freedom to make our claim, they cite reports from the World Health own decisions. Organisation and the UK-based National Heart Taxpayer-funded health bureaucrats and activ- Foundation. Conveniently ignored is the qualifier ists, backed by nanny-state politicians and a partic- that these reports only consider the first five months ularly smug British multimillionaire celebrity chef, since the tax took effect, with the WHO report have now joined the global “war on obesity”. Their explicitly noting that “the reasons for this decrease policy of choice is a tax on sugar that will raise the [in soft drink consumption] cannot be ascertained”. price of treats, soft drinks and common items on We know now that soft drink consumption in household grocery lists in the hope that the hapless France was 4.2 per cent higher in 2015 than it was commonfolk will ditch their soda pops and cookies right before the tax was introduced, a significant for kale smoothies and eggplants. In Australia, the increase even when adjusted for France’s population, driving force is the Greens, who have called for a which rose by barely 0.02 per cent over that time. whopping 20 per cent tax on sugary foods to pro- In Mexico, sugar-tax lobbyists and activist mote “public health” despite their own left-wing groups were so proud of their success that they held faction’s opposition to the move because these types a widely reported press conference to announce the of taxes disproportionately burden society’s poorest. findings of a study which claimed that the Mexican The first problem with this harebrained, expen- soft-drink tax had caused a 12 per cent reduction in sive scheme is its perversity. Why single out sugar consumption across the populace since it was imple- when sugar intakes across the Western world have mented in July 2014, with a 17 per cent reduction been falling in recent years with changing consumer among low socio-economic groups. The non-peer- preferences and the entry of diet and sugarless alter- reviewed study, which just happened to be over- natives into the market? We know that obesity isn’t seen by one of the tax’s strongest proponents and caused by the intake of any particular ingredient or an adviser to the Mexican government, consisted of nutrient, but by a lifestyle and diet of immoderate panel interviews and self-reported data. The actual consumption coupled with lack of physical activity. Nielsen sales figures tell a different story. They Studies comparing high and low sugar diets have showed that over that two-year period, soda con- found negligible difference in weight gain or weight sumption had fallen by just 182 litres in the entire loss where both groups had the same net caloric country—a microscopic fraction of the 10 to 20 bil- intake. lion litres of soda Mexicans consume annually. Despite this, a slew of American states and five When faced with the facts, the sugar-tax lobby

50 Quadrant September 2018 Junk Science and the Sugar Tax Swindle wised up. In 2016, they had another opportunity to showed no significant, observable trend in cutting sell their cause, thanks to a report from Mexico’s consumption, their paper still concluded that the National Institute of Health and Welfare. At first minuscule tax increase had caused a whopping 21.7 glance, things weren’t looking so good. Yearly sales per cent drop in soda sales, based upon assump- of sugary drinks averaged 18.2 billion litres between tions and modelling that are not disclosed in the 2007 and 2013, rose to 19.4 billion litres in 2014 when paper. Failing to provide these assumptions makes the tax took effect, and again to 19.5 billion litres in it difficult to question or test the reliability of the 2015. Adjusted for population growth, that puts per- claim. This hasn’t stopped many media outlets from capita annual consumption in Mexico pre-tax at 160 unquestioningly citing the 21.7 per cent figure and litres, 162 litres in the year the tax took effect and hailing the tax a success even though common sense a minuscule decrease to 161 litres the year after the says that a tax increase so small cannot be solely tax took effect. responsible for such a large sales drop. The result is To overcome these inconvenient findings, the a media win for the agenda of the nanny state and researchers claimed that the numbers had to be a financial loss for consumers and taxpayers, for the adjusted again because of the effects sake of public health outcomes that of economic growth and the influ- never materialise. ence of the weather. In other words, Indeed, in four nations which the actual sales data which showed The result is a media have applied a tax on sugar-sweet- negligible impact on soda con- win for the agenda ened drinks in recent years (Mexico, sumption cannot be trusted and a France, Denmark and Hungary) comparison of the sales data to a of the nanny state the average body mass index and purely hypothetical and unverifi- and a financial obesity prevalence increased or able assumption about what the loss for consumers remained stable between 2008 sales would have been had the tax to 2014 with small increases in never been put in place had to be and taxpayers, for 2015 and 2016. While proponents made. This allowed the National the sake of public claim that the tax may still have Institute of Health and Welfare to reduced the degree to which obesity adopt models claiming a 6 per cent health outcomes that increased, Denmark’s experience of decline in consumption in 2014 and never materialise. obesity rates increasing by the same an 8 per cent decline in 2015 after magnitude in the years after the tax the tax—a success story that never was abolished seems to refute that happened. The soft-drink industry in Mexico has argument. In many cases, consumers simply switch since rebounded, and the regressive tax has only to cheaper products with the same or greater caloric served to take money out of the pockets of poorer content, which are often worse for them. In many Mexicans to line the state’s coffers. American states that taxed sugary drinks, sales of beer rose. ustralians are no strangers to such tactics. Consumers aren’t the only ones paying for these Our federal budget usually contains “ten-year policies. Pepsi was forced to close its factory in Aforecasts” predicting years of economic growth to Pennsylvania after that state enacted its soda tax come, often on the back of a notoriously unpredict- laws, resulting in the loss of nearly 100 jobs. It’s able commodities market, and a windfall in rev- likely that the sugar industry in regional Australia, enue as a result which will conveniently fund all especially Queensland, will be similarly affected if sorts of expenses and pork-barrelling in the present. Australia passes a tax on sugar. Ultimately, these optimistic predictions are not The Menzies Research Centre found that none always accurate, and the spending programs have of the Australian papers produced in support of a only resulted in runaway national debt. By then, the sugar tax could show a material link to reducing reality matters little because the forecast has already obesity. Politicians should be pressed hard to justify done its job, forcing a future government to deal a law backed by junk science that will take more with the problem and future generations of taxpay- money out of the pockets of working Australians ers to foot the bill. who are already shouldering one of the developed Now we see similar, bolder tactics applied to world’s highest tax burdens, while trampling on public health. Chile added a modest tax of approxi- our freedom of choice, culling jobs, and failing to mately five cents to every 500 ml can or bottle of deliver improvements in public health. sugary drink in mid-2014. This year, University of York researchers studied how the tax had impacted Satyajeet Marar is the Director of Policy at the sales patterns. Despite admitting that the data Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Quadrant September 2018 51 Michael Evans

Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War

I have yet to find any respected social scientist who war in Sudan’s Darfur region as being the result of makes a causal connection between air temperature an “ecological crisis” arising from climate change. In and war. December 2009, in his Nobel Peace Prize accept- —Major General Robert H. Scales, USA, Rtd, ance speech, President Obama stated, “There is Scales on War: The Future of America’s Military at little scientific dispute that if we do nothing [on Risk (2016) climate change] we will face more drought, fam- ine, more mass displacement—all of which will hroughout the history of arms, there has fuel more [armed] conflict for decades.” In the same always been an important relationship year, Lord Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review between climate and the waging of wars. on the Economics of Climate Change, warned that, if ClimateT differs from weather in that climate refers the world failed to deal with climate change in a to long-term weather patterns, while weather timely manner, humanity risked stumbling into “an describes short-term particularities occurring extended world war”. In November 2015, in an inter- within the atmosphere. It was Russia’s continental view with Sky News, Prince Charles attributed both climate with its severe winter, rather than any dis- the cause and course of the Syrian civil war to “the crete weather events, which played the key role in cumulative effect of global warming”. thwarting the invasions of Napoleon and Hitler. As Such views on climate change, security and war Napoleon’s aide, General Philippe-Paul de Segur, have since made their way into mainstream Western observed of the frost-bitten French survivors of culture through popular histories such as Gwynne 1812: “It was the ghost of the Grande Armée. They Dyer’s Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the felt they had been defeated only by Nature.” In the World Overheats (2011) and through the new genre First World War, the damp maritime climate of of climate fiction or “cli-fi” novels, notably Omar lowland Flanders plunged armies on both sides into El-Akkad’s apocalyptic American War (2017). a quagmire that helped to create a protracted trench deadlock. In more recent conflicts, climate has con- he science of climate change presents a major tinued to be influential in conditioning how armies challenge to national and international public fight: Vietnam’s tropical monsoon climate, Iraq’s Tpolicy-making. The scientific community is virtu- arid deserts and Afghanistan’s sub-arctic mountain ally unanimous on the reality of human-induced climate all affected the efficacy of American-led global warming—a process that Dutch Nobel lau- military operations. Yet conceding that climate has reate Paul Crutzen defined in 2000 as the beginning always played a role in warfare is very different from of new geological era, the Anthropocene (the Age of accepting the proposition that the phenomenon of Humans)—stemming from the impact of industrial- global warming will, in the years ahead, become the isation. In 2014, of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed predominant concern in international security and articles on the subject, only five rejected anthropo- the major cause of future wars with armies needing genic global warming. Similarly, only 2 per cent of to be reconfigured for a new age of “climate wars”. the membership of the American Association for the What might be styled the “climate wars thesis” Advancement of Science—the world’s largest multi- has been given authority and legitimacy by such disciplinary scientific professional society—contest prominent figures as former UN Secretary General the reality of a warming world. The global scientific Ban Ki-moon, former US President Barack Obama, community has coalesced around the 2005 eleven- the British economist Lord Stern, and Prince nation Joint Science Academies Statement of the Charles. In June 2007, Ban Ki-moon described the Group of Eight (G8) countries—alongside Brazil,

52 Quadrant September 2018 Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War

China and India—to the effect that earth’s warm- sociologist John Urry, in his 2016 book What is the ing in recent decades has been caused primarily by Future? as the gradualist, the sceptical and the cata- human activities that have increased the amount of strophic schools of thought, and they explain much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. of the bitter controversy that surrounds the subject Yet, accepting the existence of a scientific consen- of climate variation. An understanding of these sus on the phenomenon of global warming does not three contending schools is particularly important amount to any notion that “the science is settled”. As because, as we shall see, their narratives are often the American economist William Nordhaus notes reflected in discussions of the linkages between cli- in his book The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, mate alteration, security analysis and the future of and Economics for a Warming World (2013), science war. does not proceed by majority rule and a collective Members of the gradualist school accept climate judgment does not imply unanimity nor rule out the change science but view global warming as a chal- appearance of new evidence. This cautionary view is lenge best met by applying new post-combustion echoed by two prominent British writers, climatolo- technologies of carbon capture and sequestration gist Mike Hulme and sociologist Anthony Giddens. developed over time. For gradualists there is no In his important 2009 study, Why We Disagree about silver bullet solution to a warming world and their Climate Change, Hulme warns that climate sci- catchphrase is “mitigate where you can, adapt where ence can only advance by a relentless questioning you cannot”. Adherents note that the oft-derided of orthodoxy. Similarly, Giddens in his book The system of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for natural Politics of Climate Change (2011) writes: gas has done more to reduce emissions in the United States than all the renewable energy investment scepticism is the life-blood of science and just combined. Anthony J. McMichael in his Climate as important in policy-making. It is right that Change and the Health of Nations (2017) summarises whatever claims are made about climate change the philosophy of many gradualists when he writes and its consequences are examined with a that the task ahead is: critical, even hostile eye and in a continuing fashion. to ensure operating space on the planet for future generations, the global population must The works of Nordhaus, Hulme and Giddens reduce its excessive pressures on the global are powerful reminders of the existence of major environment. Yet sufficient resource and gaps in our knowledge about the progression of energy “space” must be available to low-income global warming. Climate science embraces complex countries to achieve satisfactory material and atmospheric and oceanographic systems involving social development. feedback loops, accumulations and nonlinearities, all of which are difficult to understand as interac- The sceptical school on climate change focuses tive physical processes. The innate unpredictability strongly on the complex interplay between science of the dynamics of global warming—combined with and public policy. Much of this school’s thinking is any number of unforeseen human activities in the reflected in Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg’s book future—means that uncertainty will pervade all The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg attempts at climate change prediction. accepts the science of global warming but sug- The scientific complexities of the global warm- gests that the huge political effort and financial ing debate are further complicated by long-held cul- cost involved in cutting greenhouse gas emissions tural beliefs and competing ideological worldviews is misguided policy; the vast sums of money pro- in society. As Andrew J. Hoffman puts it in his jected are far better invested in alleviating global insightful 2015 study How Culture Shapes the Climate poverty. Other sceptics such as Nigel Lawson point Change Debate, the West’s climate change debate to important historical works—such as Wolfgang is often less about the validity of science than it is Behringer’s A Cultural History of Climate (2010) about an impassioned competition between differ- and John Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of ent sets of political, social and philosophical values Human History (2014)—to highlight that the climate that arise from the challenge of dealing with global change challenge can be mastered by human inge- warming. nuity because it is not a new phenomenon. Urry’s final school is that of catastrophism. he ideological vortex that surrounds Paul Catastrophists argue that the very existence of Crutzen’s new anthropogenic age has created human civilisation is threatened by carbon emis- Tthree identifiable schools of thought on climate sions and only large-scale global action can reverse change. They have been described by the late British a cataclysm akin to the effects of a nuclear war. They

Quadrant September 2018 53 Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War range from Green radicals who embrace the Gaia CNA (Center for Naval Analyses) Corporation’s hypothesis of a self-regulating biosphere—some of 2007 and 2014 reports on American national secu- whom favour an ecological dictatorship reminiscent rity and climate change. The 2007 report, National of Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Security and the Threat of Climate Change, authored by Nature—to respected establishment figures such as a military advisory board composed of eleven retired Martin Rees, former President of the Royal Society. generals and admirals, described climate change as In 2003 in his book Our Final Century, Rees gloomily “a threat-multiplier for instability” but did not view writes, “The odds are no better than fifty-fifty that the phenomenon as a discrete cause of armed con- our present civilization on Earth will survive to the flict. The CNA Corporation’s 2014 report, National end of the present century.” Catastrophists adhere Security and the Accelerating Risk of Climate Change, to existential texts such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The was chaired by General Paul J. Kern, a former com- Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and mander of the US Army’s Materiel Command. The Roy Scranton’s We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018). report bewailed the state of the climate change A strand of the catastrophist school is particu- debate in the United States, stating, “we [the mili- larly evident among the elite opinion-makers of tary advisory board] are dismayed that discussions the Western mass media—many of whom pursue of climate change have become so polarizing and an alarmist repertoire of “believers versus deniers”, have receded from the arena of public discourse and of imminent human peril and debate”. While the report specu- inevitable species-extinction. As lated that effects of climate change Mark Maslin puts it in his Climate might accelerate in the future from Change: A Very Short Introduction As Mark Maslin being “threat multipliers” to being (2014), “climate change is perfect for puts it, “climate “catalysts for instability and con- the media: a dramatic story about change is perfect for flict”—particularly in vulnerable the end of the world as we know parts of Africa and the Middle it”—offering endless streams of tel- the media: a dramatic East—it was careful not to assign evision coverage which deliver “the story about the end of a direct causal relationship between comfort of opinion without the dis- environmental stressors and war. comfort of thought”. Yet thought, the world as we know Much of the sceptical school of rather than opinion, is precisely it”—offering endless thought on climate change is reflected what we need on global warming— streams of television in the US Army War College’s not least when it comes to linking Strategic Studies Institute’s 2008 the subject of climate change to the coverage which publication, Global Climate Change: important area of security analysis deliver “the comfort of National Security Perspectives, edited and future armed conflict. by Carolyn Pumphrey. Like the opinion without the CNA Corporation’s military board s climate change has emerged discomfort of thought”. members, contributors to the Army in public policy, attention has War College publication accepted turnedA to examining the place of climate change science but some global warming in international and national secu- expressed doubts about viewing the subject in rity. While most Western defence and security ana- terms of security and military affairs. Some writers lysts accept the IPCC’s climate change scientific viewed the security dimension of climate change as consensus, there is disagreement on its significance being part of the military’s traditional responsibil- for global security affairs and future war. In philo- ity to deliver humanitarian aid and disaster relief sophical outlook, most security analysts reflect vari- operations. Other contributors suggested that any ations of the gradualist, sceptical and catastrophist military role in addressing climate change contin- schools of thought on climate variation. Views gencies was subject to inter-agency co-operation and on climate change, security and war range from “whole-of-government” approaches in which the Australian analyst Alan Dupont’s 2008 view that instruments of diplomatic, informational, military climate change is a “stress multiplier” on all states and economic power are integrated. One scholar, and should be included in defence planning as a Kent Hughes Butts, argued that defence analysts contingency measure, to Canadian scholar Simon need to treat climate change as a “subset of envi- Dalby’s 2013 conviction that—because earth-sys- ronmental security”. He suggested that an environ- tem science and human security now intersect so mental threat only becomes a security issue if there closely—there is an urgent need to “remodel strate- is human danger or a community cost involved. For gic planning in the Anthropocene era”. example, a flood may not be a security issue—but a An example of gradualist thinking is the US flood that drowns or displaces thousands of people

54 Quadrant September 2018 Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War and contributes to the breakdown of law and order scenario. The latter was characterised by a devas- may well become both a national and an interna- tating “tipping point” in the climate system which tional security issue. produces a world in which the land-based polar ice Perhaps the most interesting contribution to the sheets have disappeared, global sea levels have rap- US Army’s Global Climate Change came from James idly risen, and the existing natural order has been Woolsey, a former head of the Central Intelligence destroyed beyond hope of repair. In his own contri- Agency. Woolsey focused his attention on how cli- bution to the study, “National Security and Climate matic and security threats are inherently different Change in Perspective”, Campbell and his co-writer in character: Christine Parthemore described climate change as an existential threat to the United States: We might call climate change a “malignant” as distinct from a “malevolent” problem—a The United States must confront the harsh problem of the sort Einstein once characterised reality that unchecked climate change will as sophisticated (raffiniert) but, being derived come to represent perhaps the single greatest from nature, not driven by an evil-intentioned risk to our national security, even greater than (boshaft) adversary. terrorists, rogue states, the rise of China, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. For Woolsey, malignant and malevolent threats involve quite different worldviews and ideological A catastrophist view of climate change as a sub- outlooks. Malignant threats such as climate change ject of security analysis has served to provide fer- attract idealists concerned with environmentalism, tile ground for a related belief that climate wars while malevolent threats attract realists concerned represent the long-term future of armed conflict. with statecraft. Woolsey was sceptical of finding any Examples of climate wars literature include Michael common cause between “the tree-hugger culture” Klare’s Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global derived from Gaia the Greek earth goddess and a Conflict (2002), James R. Lee’s Climate Change and “hawk culture” reflecting the outlook of Ares the Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars (2009), Jeffrey Greek god of war: Mazo’s Climate Conflict: How Global Warming Threatens Security and What to Do About It (2010) and Our tree-hugger needs to remember that fanatic Harald Welzer’s Climate Wars: Why People Will Be enemies with access to destructive technology Killed in the 21st Century (2012). Collectively, these have already wreaked mass death on modern catastrophist studies argue that climate change wars societies. The tree-hugger needs to keep an open will proliferate in the years ahead as droughts, floods mind, remember the Nazis, and recognise that and melting ice lead to dwindling resources, deser- evil exists, and happens. tification, shrinking water supplies, state failure and mass human migrations. Woolsey’s sceptical views stand in contrast to In Resource Wars, Michael Klare predicts a new security adherents of the catastrophist school such geography of conflict in which wars over shrinking as the Canadian ecologist Thomas Homer-Dixon water supplies and energy become “the most dis- and Kurt M. Campbell, the American policy ana- tinctive feature of the global security environment”. lyst who served as Assistant Secretary of State for These conflicts include projected water wars in the East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2009 to 2013 in Nile valley and the Tigris-Euphrates basin, energy the Obama administration. Writing in the New York wars in the Caspian Sea and oil wars in the South Times on April 24, 2007, Homer-Dixon predicted China Sea. Harald Welzer and Jeffrey Mazo come that climate stress would breed “insurgencies, geno- to similar conclusions. Welzer’s Climate Wars fore- cide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global ter- sees a future of “never-ending wars” and echoes Ban rorism”. Moreover, he warned that climate crisis may Ki-moon’s view that the war in Darfur represents well “represent a challenge to international security the “first climate war”—a struggle between African just as dangerous—and more intractable—than the farmers and Arab nomadic herdsmen arising from arms race between the United States and the Soviet ecological disaster. In Climate Conflict, Mazo agrees, Union during the Cold War or the proliferation of noting, “the fighting in Darfur can accurately be nuclear weapons among rogue states today”. labelled the first modern climate-change conflict”. Similarly, in 2008, a Brookings Institution pub- In perhaps the most baroque and apocalyptic lication, Climatic Catastrophe: The Foreign Policy and study of all, Climate Change and Armed Conflict, National Security Implications of Climate Change, James R. Lee takes matters further by speculating edited by Kurt Campbell, outlined several sce- that the globe faces a protracted “Climate Change narios of climate change including a catastrophic War”. This war would involve what he calls an

Quadrant September 2018 55 Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War

“Equatorial tension belt” in Africa and Central When it comes to historical perspective, we can Asia of hot wars emanating from warming and a learn much of value about the relationship between “Polar tension belt” in the Western hemisphere of climate variation and war from our pre-industrial cold wars, stemming from melting ice. He predicts: past. For example, a reading of Geoffrey Parker’s magisterial study, Global Crisis: War, Climate The Cold War lasted nearly half a century. The Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century Climate Change War will be a global period of (2013), demonstrates that, when it comes to climate instability that will last centuries. The period of and war, correlation is not the same as causation. the greatest instability will be the twenty-first Parker’s scholarship demonstrates how the pre- century. Westphalian and pre-industrial world of the seven- teenth century endured the most pronounced global Drawing inspiration from H.G. Wells’s 1895 climate anomaly of the past 8000 years, namely the science-fiction novel The Time Machine, Lee specu- global cooling of the Little Ice Age—an event that lates that the coming global climate war may be one coincided with revolutions, wars and famines—that in which developed societies come to resemble the killed one third of humanity. In linking the Little decadent Eloi who are preyed upon by the barbar- Ice Age with the global political upheavals of the ian Morlocks of underdeveloped societies. While seventeenth century, Parker firmly rejects “climatic denying that cannibalism will be the outcome of his determinism” and the proposition that “global envisaged grand Climate Change War, Lee writes, cooling must have somehow caused recession and “it is possible, but not perfect to revolution around the world simply substitute developed countries because climate change is the only (Eloi) and underdeveloped coun- part from the plausible denominator”. tries (Morlocks) into the lexicon of A The Thirty Years War, the Wells”. myth of water wars English Civil War and the Glorious Several climate wars theorists and the dangers of Revolution, the Ottoman threat to have called upon Western mili- Eastern Europe; the rise of France taries to transition from planning providing warlords under the Sun King, Louis XIV— for traditional warfighting func- with alibis, notions of as well as the long wars that plagued tions to preparing to manage envi- links between extreme the Asian states of China, India ronmental crises. In 2008, Michael and Japan—were not caused by the Klare urged a transformation in weather events and climatic conditions of the Little Ice military consciousness towards “a war or rising sea Age. They were historical events in combination of the zeitgeist and which “natural and human factors the work of Albert Gore and the levels and armed combined to create a comprehensive IPCC”. Similarly, Gwynne Dyer, conflict are tenuous. demographic, social, economic, and in his book Climate Wars, sug- political catastrophe that lasted gested that “the next mission of for two generations”. Yet, in an the US armed forces is going to be a long struggle inconvenient truth for today’s catastrophists and to maintain stability as climate change continually climate wars advocates, the world survived the undermines it”. Finally, John Elkington, writing in crisis of global cooling. The struggles and turmoil Jorgen Randers’s 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next of the seventeenth century were accompanied by an Forty Years (2012) called for Western military estab- era of European intellectual progress and discovery lishments to shift defence planning into considera- in what the British philosopher A.C. Grayling has tions of the biosphere and the study of ecocide. “By called “the age of genius”—the epoch in which 2052,” Elkington forecast, the “new core business of Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Kepler and the armed services [will be] recovering from natural Copernicus transformed human understanding disasters and fighting a growing range of unsustain- of the natural world. Society in Europe adapted abilities, including the destruction of key natural to the Little Ice Age and emerged economically assets like fisheries, forests, and watersheds”. reconstructed and more politically powerful than before, through post-Westphalian state building part from a lack of hard evidence, there are and a scientific revolution that led into the two major intellectual flaws in the collective Enlightenment and on to modernity. If there is a workA of the climate wars advocates. The first is their lesson from the seventeenth century’s experience climatic determinism, caused largely by a lack of of global cooling for the twenty-first century’s era historical perspective. The second is their almost of global warming it is that, despite the potential complete lack of military knowledge. for strife and turmoil, a combination of political

56 Quadrant September 2018 Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War adaptation, human ingenuity and technological For example, in 2011, three Norwegian research- innovation remains capable of overcoming a global ers, Ole Magnus Theisen, Helge Holtermann and crisis. Halvard Buhaug from the Centre for Civil War at The second flaw in the work of many of the cli- the Norwegian Peace Research Institute in Oslo, mate wars advocates is their weak grasp of military found little evidence of drought-induced military and defence analysis. This deficiency has left their conflicts in Africa. In a tightly researched essay, work open to criticism by military experts. In 2016, “Climate Wars: Assessing the Claim that Drought the former American general and leading soldier- Breeds Conflict”, published in International Security scholar Robert Scales, in his book Scales on War, (Winter 2011/12), the three scholars conclude: took the climate wars writers to task, noting that the last war over water was between two Sumerian Africa constitutes the ideal test bed for the cities in the middle of the third millennium BC “climate wars” thesis—the most likely setting over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Scales went where a systematic covariance of drought and on to observe: armed conflict should be observed. That we do not find support for the drought-conflict Environmental activism aside, the three- relationship, then, is all the more damaging for thousand year historical record of human the widely accepted drought-breeds-conflict conflict argues conclusively against any causal proposition ... There is no direct, short-term relationship between war and temperature. relationship between drought and civil war Let me be more specific. Never in the written onset, even within contexts presumed most history of warfare, from Megiddo in 1500 BC to conducive to violence. the Syrian civil war today, is there any evidence that wars are caused by warmer air. Proponents of the climate wars thesis also seem oblivious to the grave legal and moral dan- Scales was not alone. Earlier in 2011, the French gers inherent in their proposition. The idea of defence specialist Bruno Tertrais penned a demo- wars being caused by climate change, as opposed lition of the climate wars thesis in the summer to political factors, may serve to act as an alibi for edition of the Washington Quarterly titled, “The war criminals who ignore humanitarian considera- Climate Wars Myth”. Tertrais pointed out that, tions and deliberately use adverse climatic condi- historically, warmer eras have meant fewer wars, tions as a to conceal the pursuit of genocide. since colder climates yield reduced harvests, more A classic illustration of this situation is the case of famines, and increased predation by humans—as in Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the murderous the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century. He Marxist dictator of Ethiopia, who in the mid-1980s employed statistical evidence to demonstrate that, if exploited drought and famine conditions in the there was any significant link between warfare and rebel provinces of Tigray and Eritrea to enforce a warming, then the number of conflicts should have pogrom masquerading as a relief program of “vil- risen since the 1990s. In 1989, there were thirty-five lagisation”. Thousands were killed. In 2007 Human wars occurring around the globe; yet in 2009, the Rights Watch described Mengistu’s reign of terror number had dropped to seventeen. In particular, as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder and despite incidences of prolonged drought and by a state ever witnessed in Africa”. desertification, there has been a decrease in the Apart from the myth of water wars and the number of civil wars. Tertrais concluded his survey dangers of providing warlords with alibis, further by observing: notions of links between extreme weather events and war or rising sea levels and armed conflict are simi- In the modern era, the evolution of the climate larly tenuous. The idea that climate change might is not an essential factor to explain collective well induce a conflict between NATO countries violence. Nothing indicates that “water wars” or and Russia over the Arctic in the years to come— floods of “climate refugees” are on the horizon. based on the creation of a new Northwest Passage And to claim that climate change may have an arising from polar melting—remains purely specu- impact on security is to state the obvious—but lative. Similarly, the idea of armed conflict from it does not make it meaningful for defense rising sea levels in the South Pacific and the Asian planning. lowlands of countries such as Bangladesh overlooks the phenomenon that sedimentation from rivers Other defence and security analysts have closely may act to balance sea level mass. examined the alleged links between environmental Not surprisingly, in 2012, the US Secretary of factors and wars in Africa and the Middle East. Defense, Leon Panetta, admitted that, beyond

Quadrant September 2018 57 Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War humanitarian aid and disaster relief missions, it by notions of environmental conflict drawn from was difficult to view climate change as a major Anthropocene ideology. concern of the American military. While the US It is both fanciful and impractical to suggest Defense Department retains an interest in examin- that defence planners and military professionals ing its use of energy and in monitoring the secu- should dilute their core responsibilities for strate- rity implications of climate change, such concerns gic analysis and operational warfare in favour of a remain unrelated to the climate wars hypothesis. greater concentration on the scientific riddles of the In the light of the Trump administration’s recent biosphere and the study of ecocide. The main causes decision to withdraw from the December 2015 Paris of armed conflict today and tomorrow are political Agreement on emissions control, American mili- in character and have far more to do with malevo- tary interest in climate issues is likely to diminish. lent, as opposed to malignant, conceptions of secu- rity threat. Despite the vigorous efforts of assorted environmental activists, media savants and cata- Conclusion strophist writers to promote a new belief in climate- here is no direct causal link between climate induced wars, there is no empirical evidence—or variation and the outbreak of armed conflict. even any convincing emerging trends—to support TFor this reason, the significance of climate factors such a claim. Gaia, the earth goddess, remains an in security analysis continues to lie in their poten- improbable partner, still less a replacement, for the tial interaction with traditional political sources of fierce warrior-god Ares. organised violence. Beyond prudent monitoring of Ultimately, the notion that climate wars will the climate policy debate and maintaining a mis- dominate future armed conflict is at best a hypoth- sion focus on humanitarian aid and disaster relief, esis and at worst a plausible fallacy more akin to a it is difficult to view climate change as a future pri- “cli-fi” scenario than to serious defence analysis. In ority for Western security analysts and professional the years ahead, then, it is unlikely that Crutzen militaries. There is nothing occurring in human will replace Clausewitz in the classrooms of the affairs today, or in the foreseeable future, to chal- world’s war colleges and defence academies. lenge Thucydides’s statement in his History of the Peloponnesian War, that wars stem from the “fear, Michael Evans is the General Sir Francis Hassett honour and interest” inherent in the human condi- Chair of Military Studies at the Australian Defence tion. Nor is Carl von Clausewitz’s philosophy of College, Canberra, and a professor in the School of war as an extension of politics with the admixture Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University of other means in any danger of being superseded in Victoria.

Tropical Storm

The palm trees urge on the wind, frantic cheerleaders flourishing pompoms, tall pine trees keen quietly, racked by private sorrow, pink-dotted shrub rakes its face with hysterical branches, while the tall macadamia tree tosses and shakes rainglossy leaves as if modelling shampoo. On the street, slow cars are trailing grubby lace—a squad of sullen bridesmaids, and a siren making its periodical reach for heaven.

Katherine Spadaro

58 Quadrant September 2018 Throwing Stones at a Nice Moon

I threw a pebble at the proud white moon dosing in the lake to see it shatter Saguaro into a swarm of silver fish. The shivering moon The Saguaro tree springs returned round and from a sea floor turned I threw another pebble. inside out, upside down, It splintered, the fish flashed drained and dried into desert. and scattered. The moon swam away And so it stands, to the other side of the world a bit like us and I sat in the dark. looking all wrong out of the water, no longer plant nor colony, fish Vibrations nor worm. Born from a briny deep, I can no longer a salty past swallow your tears out of time, out of place, take your pain it holds fast to the clay, eat your fears clings to its sea mother’s ghost. though they eat you Tortured by wind, I can’t fulfill limbs twist around the love you need invisible walls, grow be new skin without reason I only feel a jarring nor symmetry. in my bones Still it balances when your shoulders shake in skin of spines my spine splitting and protects its softer self. when you tremble Life to the chuckwalla, Your silences wood rat and raven, when you away ground squirrel, beetle, dragging your bruised soul yucca moth, ant, like a deflated balloon it is a universe in itself, are my small deaths a complete system— host, oasis, little rat moments endangered, that eat my organs stubborn. chew through arteries leave me bleeding Carolyn Evans Campbell That is why the earth is red my son my son

Quadrant September 2018 59 Augusto Zimmermann

Women Can Be as Violent as Men The Truth about Domestic Violence

ou may have heard of a Perth-based fam- be explained by men’s being ashamed to admit ily counsellor who was forced to resign from hitting women, because women agreed with Relationships Australia WA (RAWA) after men on this point. postingY on his private Facebook page an article social commentator Bettina Arndt wrote a few The Harvard Medical School’s letter was based years ago for the Weekend Australian. The article on a seminal work published in the American Journal summarised the latest official statistics and research of Public Health in 2007. Written by four experts in on domestic violence, providing evidence that most the field (Daniel J. Whitaker, Tadesses Laileyesus, domestic violence is two-way, involving women Monica Swahn and Linda S. Saltman), it seeks to as well as men. This was regarded as a breach of examine the prevalence of reciprocal (that is, two- policy, because, on its own website, RAWA says way) and non-reciprocal domestic violence, and to its domestic violence policy “is historically framed determine whether reciprocity is related to vio- by a feminist analysis of gendered power relations” lence and injury. After analysing the data, which which, contrary to the international evidence, contained information about domestic violence denies women’s role in domestic violence. reported by 11,370 respondents on 18,761 heterosex- By endorsing a feminist policy that is so morally ual relationships, the following conclusions were bankrupt (and punishing a well-respected counsel- reached: lor for refusing to do so), this government-funded • A woman’s perpetration of domestic violence institution displays a disturbing lack of compassion is the strongest predictor of her being a victim of for the wellbeing of all the male victims of domes- partner violence; tic violence. RAWA’s policy is based on a discred- • Among relationships with non-reciprocal vio- ited approach that perpetuates the false assumption lence, women were reported to be the perpetrator in that domestic violence is always perpetrated by a majority of cases; men against women. And yet, data keeps mounting • Women reported greater perpetration of vio- which indicate that domestic violence may be per- lence than men did (34.8 per cent against 11.4 per petrated by both men and women against their part- cent, respectively). ners. A decade ago an official letter by the Harvard One explanation for these significant findings Medical School declared that “the problem is often is that men are simply less willing than women to more complicated, and may involve both women report hitting their partner. “This explanation can- and men as perpetrators”. Based on the findings of not account for the data, however, as both men and an analysis of more than 11,000 American men and women reported a larger proportion on nonrecipro- women aged eighteen to twenty-eight, the letter cal violence perpetrated by women than by men.” concluded: In fact, the authors explain that women’s greater perpetration of violence was reported by both When the violence is one-sided … women were women (female perpetrators = 24.8 per cent, male the perpetrators about 70% of the time. Men perpetrators = 19.2 per cent) and by men (female were more likely to be injured in reciprocally perpetrators = 16.4 per cent, male perpetrators = 11.2 violent relationships (25%) than were women per cent). Based on the information available, the when the violence was one-sided (20%). That authors concluded: means both men and women agreed that men were not more responsible than women for Our findings that half of relationships with intimate partner violence. The findings cannot violence could be characterised as reciprocally

60 Quadrant September 2018 Women Can Be as Violent as Men

violent are consistent with prior studies. We launched a $100 million “women’s safety package”, are surprised to find, however, that among apparently because violence against women in the relationships with nonreciprocal violence, home is on the rise. In his words: “All disrespect women were the perpetrators in a majority of for women does not end up with violence against cases, regardless of participant gender. One women, but let’s be clear, all violence against women possible explanation for this, assuming that men begins with disrespecting women.” and women are equally likely to initiate physical More recently we have seen further calls to action violence, is that men, who are typically larger from Mr Turnbull to “change the hearts of men”, and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck and from the Opposition leader, Bill Shorten, to first by their partner. Thus, some men may be “change the attitudes of men”, as if there were some following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit kind of unspoken bond between these politicians women” when struck first by their partner. and the men who commit violence against women. “Not all disrespect of women ends up in violence Unfortunately, violence by women against men against women but that’s where all violence against is a phenomenon that has received little attention women begins … but what we must do … is ensure in the media and in government. Yet for nearly that we change the hearts and minds of men to four decades the best research reveals that men are respect women,” Turnbull says. Shorten says, “All also frequently the targets of violence by female this violence is ultimately preventable and … we partners. Since the 1980s more than 200 academic need to change the attitudes of men.” studies have demonstrated that, despite the com- While these political leaders see no problem in mon assertion, most partner violence is mutual, offending the Australian people by assuming that and that a woman’s perpetration of violence is the violence against women is an “accepted part” of our strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner society, Claire Lehmann, the editor of Quillette, violence. Across several countries the best research reminds them that in our society “crimes against available shows that the percentage of men who women are stigmatised and punished harshly. are physically assaulted by their female partners Sexual offenders generally are given lengthy prison tends to be remarkably similar to the percentage of sentences and are secluded from other prisoners women physically assaulted by their male partners. precisely because the crime is so reviled—even in However, those who deny the empirical evidence prison.” And yet, in the distorted world of identity often resort to unacceptable tactics, which includes politics: “concealing those results, selective citation of research, stating conclusions that are the opposite individuality is subsumed into the collective. of the data in the results section and intimidating When one man holds power, he doesn’t do so researchers who produced results showing gender on behalf of himself, he does so on behalf of symmetry”. One of the leading researchers in the the male collective. Likewise, when one man field, Dr Murray A. Straus, has received numer- commits a murder, collectivists will portray it ous death threats, as have his co-researchers, Dr as being done in the service of all men. This Richard Gelles and Dr Suzanne Steinmetz, with regressive worldview has no qualms about the latter the subject of a vicious campaign to deny ascribing collective guilt to entire groups of her academic tenure and rescind her grant funding. people. But ascribing collective guilt strikes at the very heart of our understanding of justice ustralian media and government reports often and liberty. frame domestic violence merely as “violence Aagainst women”. This generates a totally false Clearly these two federal leaders believe their assumption that males are always the aggressors; statements on this matter will have popular sup- that men are the only ones capable of harming their port, particularly from women voters. But judg- partners. For instance, you may recall the federal ing from the letters received by journalist and campaign on television two years ago. These ads sexologist Bettina Arndt, who wrote an article in were part of a $30 million campaign designed “to the Australian in 2016 about research showing the help break the cycle of violence against women and prominent role women played in violence in the their children”. It seemed to suggest that all of the home, there are many in our community, includ- perpetrators of domestic violence are Caucasian ing many women, who are extremely uncomfort- males. The Prime Minister even assured us that his able with gender politics. She received an avalanche domestic violence campaign was all about creat- of supportive letters, not only from professionals ing “a new culture of respect for women”. Malcolm working with families at risk from violent moth- Turnbull, a self-described feminist, concomitantly ers, but also from many women who had grown

Quadrant September 2018 61 Women Can Be as Violent as Men up in such homes, or had witnessed their brothers, women to come through the door had been as abu- fathers and male friends experiencing violence at sive as the men they had left. So when the feminists the hands of a woman. As she points out, “many started demonising fathers in the early 1970s, her women commented how surprised they were that own memories were a sober reminder that: Turnbull made such an offensive, one-sided policy announcement”. Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty … We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that Women can be as abusive as men feminism has created between men and women. rofessor Linda Mills, the Ellen Goldberg This insidious and manipulative philosophy Professor at New York University, is the prin- that women are always victims and men always cipalP investigator of studies funded by the National oppressors can only continue this unspeakable Science Foundation and National Institute of cycle of violence. And it’s our children who will Justice, which focus on treatment programs for suffer. domestic violence offenders. As she points out: Erin Pizzey is part of a growing number of Years of research, which mainstream feminism brave experts and scholars trying to set the record has glossed over or ignored, shows that when it straight. As early as the 1980s academic researchers comes to intimate abuse, women are far from such as Dr Murray A. Straus, a professor of soci- powerless and seldom, if ever, just victims. ology at the University of New Hampshire, have Women are not merely passive prisoners of developed research demonstrating that women are violent intimate dynamics. Like men, women just as likely as men to report physical and emo- are frequently aggressive in intimate settings tional abuse of a spouse. These findings have been and therefore may be more accurately referred confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate to as “women in abusive relationships” (a term violence and they are summed up in Dr Straus’s I prefer to the more common usages “battered article “Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on women,” “victim,” or “survivor”) … The studies Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence”. This arti- show not only that women stay in abusive cle indicates that most partner violence is mutual relationships but also that they are intimately and self-defence explains only a small percentage engaged in and part of the dynamic of abuse. of partner violence by either men or women. Rather As the studies of lesbian violence demonstrate, than self-defence, “the most usual motivations for women are capable of being as violent as men violence by women, like the motivations of men, in intimate relationships. And women can are coercion, anger, and punishing misbehavior by be physically violent as well as emotionally their partner”. As Dr Straus points out: abusive. That violence comes out in their intimate relationships both as resistance Pearson (1997) reports that 90% of the women and as aggression. We need to put aside our she studied assaulted their partner because they preconceptions of gender socialization and were furious, jealous, or frustrated and not roles. because they tried to defend themselves. These motives are parallel to the motivations of male Erin Pizzey, the woman who set up the first ref- perpetrators. Research on homicides by women uge for battered women in 1971, knew from the very shows similar results. For example, Jurik and beginning that women can be as violent as men Gregware (1989) studied 24 women-perpetrated in domestic relations. She herself was raised by a homicides and found that 60% had a previous violent mother who used to beat her with an iron- criminal record, 60% had initiated use of ing cord until the blood ran down her legs. Pizzey physical force, and 21% of the homicides were strove in vain for her mother’s love. She was left in response to “prior abuse” or “threat of abuse/ badly damaged by her regular beatings and verbal death.” A larger study by Felson and Messner abuse. She was called “lazy, useless and ugly” by (1998), drawing upon 2,058 partner homicide her mother, who often called her father “an oaf cases, determined that 46% of the women and an idiot” and depicted his mother as a “prosti- perpetrators had previously been abused, but tute” and his father as a “common Irish drunk”. In less than 10% had acted in self-defense. Pizzey’s own experience, women are just as capable of domestic abuse in both the physical and emo- In the United States, estimates from national tional sense. When she opened a refuge for bat- family violence surveys show that within a given tered women in England, sixty-two of the first 100 year, at least 12 per cent of men are the targets of

62 Quadrant September 2018 Women Can Be as Violent as Men some sort of physical aggression from their female abused by women. Culturally it is still enormously partners, with 4 per cent (or over 2.5 million) of difficult for men to bring these incidents to the these men suffering severe violence. In another pio- attention of the British authorities. It certainly neering study in America, the clinical sample found does not fit the false narrative that women are sup- “the eruption of conjugal violence occurs with equal posed to be always weak and never the perpetrators frequency among both husbands and wives”. This of domestic violence. But it is patently clear that study included several statements by women who both men and women can be victims of such vio- often abuse their husbands. “I probably had no rea- lence, and that “men feel under immense pressure son to get angry with him … but it was such a bore. to keep up the pretence that everything is OK”, said I was trying to wake him up, you know. He was Alex Neil, a Scottish politician who was Cabinet such a rotten lover anyway. So I’d yell at him and Secretary for Health and Wellbeing at the Scottish hit him to stir him up,” said one Parliament between 2012 and 2014. woman. As for Australia, the Australian In Britain, female domes- Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety tic violence against men is clearly Despite the common Survey reveals that proportions on the rise. Data from Home assertion, most of non-physical abuse (for exam- Office statistical bulletins and the partner violence ple, emotional abuse) against men British Crime Survey reveal that have risen dramatically over the men made up about 40 per cent is mutual, and a last decade, with 33 per cent of of domestic violence victims each woman’s perpetration all people who reported violence year. Seventeen men were killed by by a domestic partner being male. their female partners in England of violence is the And yet, one of the tactics used in 2012 alone. Furthermore, British strongest predictor of by domestic violence campaigners men are twice as likely as women her being a victim is to highlight only men’s violence to keep their abuse undisclosed, and leave out any statistics relating primarily because of cultural barri- of partner violence. to women. There is constant pres- ers and a legal system that does not sure to present domestic violence protect them. as a “male problem”, and place all “They feel emasculated. Their pride is under- the blame for such violence on men as a collec- mined and they are reluctant to see themselves tive group. As a result, and based on a theory that as victims,” says Mark Brooks, the chairman of addresses the problem essentially as a male prob- Mankind, a charity for male victims of domestic lem, male victims are often met with disbelief, even violence. Even so, “every year our helpline is seeing suspicion, when they seek protection from a violent at least a 25 per cent increase in the number of men partner. seeking help”. Of course, the percentage of reported male victims would be considerably higher were it not Consequences of the denial of female for the sexist biases of the system. As noted by a domestic violence journalist in the Guardian, men assaulted by their omestic violence against male partners is wives and girlfriends are often completely ignored grossly under-reported. Frequently men do by police. They are often treated as “second-class Dnot conceptualise the physical violence they sustain victims” and many police forces and councils do not from their female partners as a crime. Indeed, take them seriously. “Male victims are almost invis- studies in the field indicate that men are reluctant ible to the authorities such as the police, who rarely to report assaults by women, “even when severe can be prevailed upon to take the man’s side,” says injuries result”. This reluctance is prevalent among John Mays of Parity, an organisation that advocates male domestic partners, perhaps because they are equal treatment of domestic violence victims, both expected to be physically dominant. Admitting male and female, and their children. Their plight is to sustaining violence from a female partner largely overlooked by the media, in official reports may be viewed as “emasculating”. Further, when and in government policy, for example in the provi- domestic violence is conceptualised as a crime in sion of refuge places—7500 for females in England these surveys, women are significantly less likely and Wales but only sixty for men. to report their own use of violence. Some research The official UK figures notoriously underesti- reveals that women fail to report as much as 75 mate the true number of male victims of domes- per cent of their own use of violence. According tic violence. This is so because men in Britain are to Professor Donald G. Dutton and Dr Katherine extremely reluctant to disclose that they have been R. White:

Quadrant September 2018 63 Women Can Be as Violent as Men

One reason that intimate partner violence Men are far more likely to be arrested for toward men is underestimated is that men are domestic violence than their female partners, even less likely to view [domestic violence] as a crime when other factors including previous arrests are or to report it to police. Men have been asked taken into account. A study in the United States in survey if they had been assaulted and if so, reveals that men face harsher legal ramifications had they reported it to police. In a 1985 survey, post-arrest: 85 per cent of violent men were arrested less than 1% of men who had been assaulted and prosecuted by the police, compared to only 53.5 by their wife had called police (Stets & Straus, per cent of violent women. Some of these men are 1992). In that same survey men assaulted by actually innocent and report “being ridiculed by the their wife were less likely to hit back than were police or being incorrectly arrested and convicted wives assaulted by their husband. Men were also as the violent perpetrator, even when there is no far less likely to call a friend or relative for help evidence of injury to the female partner”. (only 2%) … Historically, men who were victims This might explain why so many men who sus- of assault by their wives were made into objects tain violence are deeply reluctant to report on their of social derision … Men are socialised to bury partners. Compared to the support available to problems under a private , including being abused women, there are few social programs or the object of abuse from female partners … non-profit organisations providing useful assistance Either the women are bragging or the men are to men who are the victims of domestic violence. in denial, or both. Instead, male victims often experience external bar- riers when contacting these social services. When This under-reporting of female domestic vio- they locate the few resources that are specifically lence is partly explained also by the fact that men designed to accommodate the needs of these male who sustain this form of violence are unlikely to victims, hotline workers often infer that they must seek help for these issues out of a reasonable fear be the actual abusers and refer them to batterers’ “they will be ridiculed and experience shame and programs. embarrassment”. If they do overcome internal psy- In the judicial system, male victims of domes- chological barriers, they still face unfair external tic violence are often treated unfairly solely because institutional barriers in seeking help from social of their gender. Indeed, men who make claims services and the criminal justice system. For of domestic violence face a deeply hostile system, instance, male help seekers often report that when which is far less sympathetic in its treatment of they call the police during an incident in which abused men. This is an area in which the “gender their female partners have been violent, the police paradigm” has caused gross instances of injustice. In sometimes “fail to respond or take a report”. Indeed, the United States, even with apparent corroborat- male victims of domestic violence encounter greater ing evidence that their female partners were violent animosity when contacting the police. This can be to them, male help-seekers often report that they contrasted to the “positive and supportive attitude” lost child custody as a result of false accusations. As of the police to women who accuse their husbands noted by Professor Denise A. Hines (Psychology) of violence. According to Sotirios Sarantakos, an and Dr Emily M. Douglas (Social Policy): adjunct professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University: Male help-seekers have reported that their complaints concerning their female partners’ Most interesting is the finding regarding the violence have not always been taken seriously, practice of women running to the police after yet their partner’s false accusations have hitting the husband, although they hit him reportedly been given serious weight during without a reason. Even threatening to go to the judicial process (Cook 1997). Other men the police was often taken very seriously by the have reported similar experiences in which husbands—not without reason. The positive their female partners misused the legal or and supportive attitude of the police and social service systems to inappropriately block authorities to women’s position was reported to access between them and their children or to have encouraged many wives to take advantage file false allegations with child welfare services of this and to become even more aggressive at (Hines et al 2007). According to some experts, home. Even when they had severely assaulted the burden of proof for IPV [intimate partner the husband, their statement that they had been violence] victimization is high for men because assaulted and abused by him at that time or it falls outside of our common understanding previously was sufficient for the police to treat of gender roles (Cook, 1997); this can make them as innocent victims. leaving a violent female partner that much more

64 Quadrant September 2018 Women Can Be as Violent as Men

difficult. For example, many men who sustained He tries to understand my side of the argument. IPV report that they stayed with their violent He talks to me rather than hits me. I still hit female partners in order to protect the children him, however. I would like to enrol in a class in from their partner’s violence. The men worried anger management, but the shelter for battered that if they left their violent wives, the legal women does not help women with this problem. system could still grant custody of the children to their wives and that perhaps even their Male victims struggle to locate anti-domestic custody rights would be blocked by their wives violence services to assist them, since help lines as a continuation of the controlling behaviors of or shelters are generally targeted towards female their wives used during the marriage (McNeely victims. They often report that their complaints et al, 2001). concerning their female partners’ violence have not been taken seriously. Instead, male victims who In the United States, an emergency clinic study have reached out to domestic violence organisations in Ohio found that burns obtained in domestic rela- in the past have found themselves further abused by tions were as frequent for male victims as for female feminist services that refuse to believe that any man victims, and that 72 per cent of men admitted with can be a victim of domestic violence. Some have injuries from spousal violence had been stabbed. even been put at risk of further violence not only Likewise, at an emergency clinic in Philadelphia against themselves but also against their children male patients reported being kicked, bitten, by these services contacting the abusing spouse and punched or choked by female intimate partners in letting her know the man has sought help. There is 47 per cent of cases. Unfortunately, even the assumption that the vic- such emergency clinics tend to ask tim himself could actually be the only women, but never men, about perpetrator. potential domestic violence origins Based on a theory A psychiatrist who lives in for injuries. that addresses the Melbourne and once rang the This may be a natural con- problem essentially as Victorian “Men’s Referral Service”, sequence of the cornerstone of commented: “I rang them on two mainstream feminist theory that a male problem, male occasions in relation to male vic- domestic violence is primarily victims are often met tims. Both times I was told that motivated by “patriarchal con- if I had dug deeper I would have trol”. According to Adam Blanch, with disbelief, even discovered that the men were the a clinical psychologist and family suspicion, when they perpetrators.” This shows that a counsellor working in Melbourne, supposedly public service provider “only a very small percentage of seek protection from is pushing the anti-male agenda of domestic violence is found to be a violent partner. radical feminists. With so many motivated by control”. As he points Australian men taking their own out, “control” is a motive for both lives, our governments have the men and women in equal proportions. “An extraor- moral duty to provide these abused men the help dinarily large body of evidence consistently shows they so desperately need, particularly when family that most domestic violence is committed by both violence is concerned. women and men and is motivated by feelings of However, the New South Wales government revenge, frustration and anger,” he says. His con- has just gone in the opposite direction. It has clusion is that women are no less violent than men, appointed a feminist organisation to assist male although female violence against male partners is victims of domestic violence. This organisation’s under-reported. website says: “The Men’s Referral Service (MRS) As Hines and Douglas comment in their seminal provides free, anonymous, and confidential tel- study on women’s use of domestic violence against ephone counselling, information, and referrals to men, “the conceptualisation of domestic violence men to assist them to take action to stop using from a strict feminist viewpoint has hampered the violent and controlling behaviour.” It is unaccept- ability of women who abuse their male partners to able that information given “for men” is entirely seek and get help from social service and criminal predicated on men being the sole perpetrators of justice systems”. Women who resort to such vio- violence. The MRS is on the public record as say- lence face considerable barriers when seeking help ing services “need to be cautious in automatically within the current social service system. The fol- assuming that a man assessed by police or another lowing quote exemplifies the experience of one of referring agent as a victim of domestic violence these abusive women: truly is the victim”. According to Greg Andresen,

Quadrant September 2018 65 Women Can Be as Violent as Men a spokesman for “One in Three Campaign”, which than half of all the substantial maltreatment per- advocates for male family violence victims: petrators. In May 2015, the Australian Institute of Criminology released a research paper which states: A male victim seeking support who reads on “Where females were involved in a homicide, they a website that he needs to take responsibility were more likely to be the offender in a domestic/ for his “violent and controlling behaviour” is family homicide.” Although the majority of victims probably not going to have a lot of confidence in of domestic homicides overall were female (60 per ringing that service and asking for help. And if cent), women were the sole offenders in more than he does call and is assumed responsible for the half of the filicides (52 per cent) and offenders in violence, he may not reach out for help again. 23 per cent of intimate partner homicides. Also, men were more likely than their female partners to become the victims of filicide (56 per cent), par- Female domestic violence against ricide (54 per cent), and homicides involving other children domestic relationships (70 per cent). he distortion of the truth is found also in discussions about domestic violence against omestic violence by women against men is a children.T “A quarter of Australian children had phenomenon that has received little atten- witnessed violence against their mother,” South Dtion from the Australian media and government. Australia’s Victims of Crime Commissioner From the nation’s media reports, public inquiries Michael O’Connell stated in August 2010. This and official campaigns, one would believe that men statistic comes from “Young People and Domestic are the sole perpetrators of domestic violence—and Violence”, a study that reveals almost an identical that all men are equally likely to carry out such acts proportion of young people being aware of female of violence. Yet for nearly four decades research violence against their fathers or stepfathers. The has shown that men are frequently the targets of study found that, although 23 per cent of young violence by their female partners. Those who deny Australians were aware of violence against their this evidence may resort to scientifically unac- mothers or stepmothers, 22 per cent witnessed the ceptable tactics. This includes “concealing these same sort of violence against their fathers or step- results, selective citation of research, stating con- fathers. According to Bettina Arndt: clusions that are the opposite of the data, and even intimidating researchers who have produced results Whenever statistics are mentioned publicly that showing gender symmetry”. reveal the true picture of women’s participation I have no intention of minimising the real prob- in family violence, they are dismissed with lem of serious domestic violence against women. the domestic violence lobby claiming they are One must speak out loud and clear about violence based on flawed methodology or are taken out against women. In fact, we must speak out loud of context. However, [according to] the best and clear about violence against anyone. This is why available quantitative data—ABS surveys, recognising that men are also victims of domes- AIC (Australian Institute of Criminology) tic violence is so important. Enough of pretending and homicide statistics—police crime data domestic violence is simply about dangerous men show that a third of victims of violence are terrorising their families. It is time to abandon males. These data sources are cited by the main this sexist and harmful paradigm, and correct all domestic violence organisations, [although] they the injustices caused by the politicisation of such a deliberately minimise any data relating to male tragic reality that affects countless adults and chil- victims. dren, male and female alike.

Many young Australians grow up afraid of Dr Augusto Zimmermann is Professor of Law at their mothers. Australian children in violent fami- Sheridan College in Perth, and Professor of Law lies are more likely to be killed by their mothers (Adjunct) at the University of Notre Dame Australia, than by their fathers. Although men made up a Sydney campus. He is also President of the Western quarter of the 1645 partner deaths between 1989 Australian Legal Theory Association, and a former and 2012, women accounted for 52 per cent of all Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of child homicides. Women not only are more likely Western Australia. A footnoted version of this article to kill their children, but also account for more appears at Quadrant Online.

66 Quadrant September 2018 Mark McGinness

To Serve Them All His Days Michael Collins Persse November 10, 1931—June 25, 2018

ichael Collins Persse was one of the close.” Michael traced his descent from Charlemagne, greatest schoolmasters of his time. For Robert the Bruce—even Muhammad. A splendid an astonishing sixty-three years he was name among a galaxy of forebears is his five-times- Mon the staff of Geelong Grammar and resident at great-grandfather, Neptune Blood. In recent years, Corio—from its centenary in 1955 to 1993 as mas- Michael uncovered a good claim in 1670 by his ter, from 1960 Head of History, and from 1994 ancestor, the Very Reverend Dudley Persse, to the until his death as curator and archivist. In the fin- (Percy) earldom of Northumberland. est tradition of the bachelor schoolmaster, he lived In December 1862, Michael’s great-grandfather, and breathed his school. His other distinction, and a De Burgh Fitzpatrick Persse, left Moyode Castle in source of great pride and joy to him, was as History County Galway, the family seat (since the seven- Tutor to the Prince of Wales during his two terms teenth century), for Queensland. Three years later, at the school in 1966. David Checketts, the Prince’s he bought Tabragalba near Beaudesert and, over aide-de-camp at the time, is widely quoted as say- the next forty years, another ten properties from ing, “I went out with a boy and came back with a the Channel Country to the Burnett: Palparrara, man.” This time in Australia led to not only a spe- Connemarra, Tally-Ho, Buckingham Downs, Lake cial affection for the school and the country but a De Burgh, Hawkwood, Yerilla, Eidswold, Boolgal deep and enduring friendship between Michael and and Culcraigie. the Prince, who described him as “a national treas- Meanwhile, in 1846, William Collins was born ure”. Michael referred to his relationship with the at Mundoolun, the first white baby to be born in Prince as a conversation that had continued for half the Albert River District. By 1900, William and a century. his brothers had acquired 7 million hectares in Faith, friendship and family were at the core Queensland and the Northern Territory. In that of Michael’s life. His father, Dudley Burton Parry year, the year of his marriage, William leased and de Burgh Persse, was a charismatic, gregarious, later bought Nindooinbah, whose homestead the good-looking grazier. His mother, Margaret Anne architect Robin Dods extended to become a huge, (Janette) nee Collins was a clever beauty, more exotic and very comfortable country house. reserved than her husband. She had read philosophy In 1930, Tabragalba’s Dudley Persse (De Burgh’s under A.D. Lindsay (later Lord Lindsay of Birker), grandson) and Nindooinbah’s Janette Collins the Master of Balliol, and like her sisters had been (William’s daughter) married and in 1931, after a presented at the Court of King George V. In 1971, yearlong honeymoon in Europe, their eldest child, by deed poll, Michael would add Collins to his sur- Michael Dudley de Burgh Persse was born, in name, in homage to his mother’s family. . Michael liked to say he was conceived Both Dudley and Janette were descendants of in Provence. the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, no fewer than eleven Life at Eskdale West, a 3200-hectare cattle of them having emigrated to Australia between 1819 property near Esk, bought in 1931 by Janette, was and 1918; and not a convict among them. Michael comfortable—the house designed by Kenneth had a lifelong aptitude and passion for genealogy. McConnel, with a tennis court and pool—and His collection of essays, Every Tree, Rock, and Gully traditional; almost feudal. There were a cook, maid, (2014), edited with Penelope Alexander, is proof of gardener, cowboy, stockman, governess and nurse. this; especially its last sentence, “Alfred the Great Michael, his brother Jonathan and sister Jane had said God gave us relations to be our natural friends. a happy bush childhood with a wide yet exclusive To me fifth- and even sixth-cousins can still be very circle of cousins, kin, and other well-established

Quadrant September 2018 67 To Serve Them All His Days pastoralists. He would always call himself “a country late in life, and out of the blue, “The greatest mistake boy from Queensland”. of my life was not to marry your aunt” (Michael’s Although, like his democratic father, Michael maternal aunt, Dorothea Collins). always greeted and treated everyone equally, he Armed with an MA (Honours in History and retained a respect for hierarchical order. The idea Theology), Michael joined the staff of Geelong was lampooned as a bid to found a “bunyip aristoc- Grammar School on a two-year trial. Having racy”, but one suspects that Michael had some sym- resolved to take Holy Orders, he took leave in 1958 to pathy for the proposal in 1853 of the early statesman complete his studies at Westcott House, Cambridge, W.C. Wentworth to create a hereditary upper house but although his Anglican faith remained central to in New South Wales. (Michael thrice wrote a brief his life, he decided that teaching was his true calling biography of Wentworth: for Oxford University and returned to Geelong. Press in 1972, and for the Australian Dictionary of The third and most influential of Michael’s men- Biography and the Oxford DNB—a magisterial piece tors was the great J.D. (later Sir James) Darling, of work.) headmaster of Geelong from 1930 to 1961 and him- As children, they had ponies, and later horses self a disciple of William Temple, later Archbishop (never bicycles), and took part in all the cattle of Canterbury, and Sir Frank Fletcher, legendary work—mustering and dipping, especially in the headmaster of Charterhouse. By 1955, what had summer. He once wrote that if he achieved a mem- been a good school was an exceptional school; and oir, he might give the Australian chapters, or the in Michael, Darling had an admirer, observer and book itself, the Wordsworthian title Meadow, Grove chronicler. Michael wrote of Sir James, “His great- and Stream. Alas, this was not to be, but the Oral est service at Geelong lay in the education of boys to History Unit of the National Library has no less a sense of responsibility for others and to a sensitive than twenty-five hours of a series of interviews with awareness of the needs of the world in which many Michael about his early life. Those twenty-five hours of them were to play leading parts.” only took him to the age of twenty-three. At Toowoomba Preparatory School Michael ne boy with a leading part to play was the came under the influence of the first of a trio of Heir to the Throne, and after some discus- exceptional long-serving headmasters, the monu- sions,O which began with the Duke of Edinburgh mental, wise and candid Norman Connal, who and Sir Robert Menzies, Geelong Grammar was revived the school over three decades. Michael was chosen as a suitable interregnum from the Prince’s the Dux of Prep in 1945 and won the Fairfax Medal public school, Gordonstoun, which the press liked for the boy who had best served the school. In 1946, to portray as a fusion of Colditz and Sparta. Except he was sent to board at The King’s School, the old- for a trip on the Britannia to Libya when he was est in the country, then flourishing under another six, Prince Charles had never left Europe before; but remarkable headmaster, the striking, firm but kindly he was soon settled at Timbertop, the school’s out- Denys Hake. Despite the King’s ethos of “healthy post in the foothills of the Australian Alps, where hardiness”, the gentle, cerebral Michael thrived, Grammar’s fourth form spent a year of academic collecting prize after prize. He was awarded the work supplemented by a range of pursuits, including Broughton and Forrest Exhibition and was made cross-country runs and long hikes. The aims were, a foundation member of The Twelve Club. He was as Michael put it, “to reawaken the spirit of adven- dux of the school in 1948 and 1949 and school cap- ture latent in adolescent boys, to develop independ- tain in 1949, and for the first term of 1950. In his last ence, self-reliance and a sense of community, and to year, he was given a class to teach—as he had, aged restore something of the ancient harmony between thirteen, in Toowoomba. man and nature”. Charles, as he was known by Five years at Balliol College, Oxford, followed. every­one, skied, ran, hiked and helped with the It was a formative time, brilliantly captured in rankest menial tasks. Contemporaries remember Michael’s book Scholar Gypsy: An Oxford Friendship him, as head server in the chapel, hobbling about (2012), essentially a tribute to Sir Andrew Hills, the sanctuary with blisters after a weekend hike— a young baronet, with whom Michael formed an giving potency to his motto, Ich Dien. intense, platonic relationship before Hills’s death, The school had another task—to prepare the aged twenty-one, in 1955, in a traffic accident in Prince for Cambridge—and so he was tutored by Oxford. At Balliol, Michael made many abiding correspondence, by telephone and personally at friends, among them James Fairfax; as he did with the main campus in Corio by his tutors in French, four generations of James’s great-uncle, Hubert English and, crucially, History. Michael had spent Fairfax’s family. The links could have run deeper. time with the Royal Family at Sandringham earlier James’s father, Sir Warwick Fairfax, told Michael in the year and established a trusted friendship with

68 Quadrant September 2018 To Serve Them All His Days both the Queen and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen on November 3, 1959, an unprecedented number of Mother. And so with Charles, deepened by shared the Sixth Form Europe 1300–1600 class sought per- experiences such as a visit in May to Anglican mis- mission to be excused but Michael, in the interests sions in New Guinea. There was soon a relaxed of Luther/Erasmus/Calvin, sailed on, oblivious, frankness between tutor and student. On his last and found, when he had exhausted the subject, his night at school in July 1966, as the Prince read his pupils’ need to be excused seemed to have passed. paper on the reign of Charles I to the Historical Past students recalled, “a tall young fellow [in Society, Michael had no hesitation in disputing 1959] with an Oxford accent, in long white , his pupil’s explanation for the king’s wearing two trying to teach us Australian Rules football on a shirts to his execution. As he bid farewell to his wet and very muddy Cuthy oval. Later, more in his classmates, he was given a rousing “Three cheers for element teaching history”; and a few years later, as Prince Charles—a real Pommie bastard”. “the only master we had who called us by our first On his return to Britain, the Prince was awarded names, and avoided corporal punishment”. In 1980 a distinction for his optional, scholarship paper in the library, just before recess, he was remembered on “The Age of Cromwell”. The Secretary of the for saying, “Now class, I would like you all to leave Examinations Board told the Times that the Prince’s quietly, it seems Mr Osborne needs his sleep.” And performance was “extraordinary, at the end of recess, “Jim, I think especially when you consider he it’s time for your next class.” At was digging about in Australia hat made him lights-out (in 1965) he would read, and that kind of thing before- W by torchlight, to the Cuthbertson hand”. Geelong’s headmaster, T.R. exceptional was dorm Tolkien’s The Hobbit and C.S. (Tommy) Garnett, wrote to the “the unique and Lewis’s Voyage to Venus. But what Times, “Prince Charles did indeed made him exceptional was “the dig deep while he was here—into remarkable capacity unique and remarkable capacity to History—and it is no surprise to us to calm even the calm even the most uncouth, rowdy that he ‘shone’.” Michael had done most uncouth, rowdy student—to ‘gentle’ them—just his job. through the quietness of his voice student—to ‘gentle’ and the authenticity of his attention ichael would serve under them—just through to this particular child”. seven principals. A prodi- He also adopted a practice Mgious correspondent, he commit- the quietness of which became a ritual—rather like ted, decades ago, to writing to each his voice and the James Hilton’s fictional hero, Mr boy and girl in the school for their authenticity of his Chipping (who, by a quite remark- birthday. This extended to old boys, able coincidence, also served his parents and, of course, kith and kin. attention to this school for sixty-three years)—of He handwrote, in fountain pen, particular child”. regularly inviting groups to his some 3000 letters a year and no one rooms at successive Dovecotes on received less than 100 words. Even the Corio campus—lined with the Queen enjoyed his Christmas circular; urging shelves bursting with books, tables teeming with him, on her last visit to Australia, to keep sending papers and pamphlets, correspondence and curios. them. Mr Chips served cake; Michael usually made do Michael’s debut as a writer was his magnifi- with Tim Tams and Tic Tocs. cent script for the school’s grand centenary pag- Courtly, tolerant, wise, precise, with a phenom- eant, Their Succeeding Race, produced in 1957 by Dr enal memory, a love of history and learning, and a Darling and Ken Mappin. From 1966, and for the genius for friendship, Michael was really the repre- next twenty-six years, he was editor of the school sentative of a kinder, gentler age, but his deceptive magazine, The Corian. He contributed to the Old energy, relentless engagement and ineffable charm Geelong Grammarians’ Light Blue and was the over six decades made him somehow the embodi- author of a concise yet elegant history of the school, ment of the school. His role as tutor, mentor and Well-Ordered Liberty (1995). Michael was co-author friend was recognised in 2015 with the conferral of (with Justin Corfield) of Geelong Grammarians: A an MVO, in the personal gift of the Queen, “For Biographical Register (1855–1913), the first volume Services to The Prince of Wales”. The Prince himself recording every Grammar student since foundation. invested Michael in a special ceremony at Admiralty There was an other-worldliness about him. House, Sydney, in November of that year. In 2017, Melbourne Cup Day may have become “the race he was honoured with an OAM, “For service to sec- that stops the nation” but not Michael. At 2.35 p.m. ondary education, and to history.”

Quadrant September 2018 69 To Serve Them All His Days

Michael leaves a palpable legacy. The Michael Daniel—Michael, Jonathan and now their nephew, Collins Persse Archives Centre was established Anthony Robinson, made part of Australia’s Open in 2005 (munificently endowed by, among others, Garden Scheme. his great friend James Fairfax), and the following Michael is survived by his brother, Jonathan, year Michael became one of three inaugural Old also a distinguished and much-admired former Geelong Grammarian Fellows. He was an active schoolmaster (at their alma mater, King’s); by the member of the Geelong Grammar Foundation and four children of his sister, Jane, who died in 2001; the Honorary President of the Biddlecombe Society, and by most of the 12,000 students he taught, some recognising those who had committed to providing of whom are now in their eightieth year. Despite a bequest in their wills to the Foundation. increasing physical frailty, he managed to meet his The Michael Collins Persse Scholarship was favourite student for the last time on the Prince of established in 2016, giving a chance to students Wales’s visit to Queensland for the Commonwealth who could not otherwise attend the School. The Games in April. Later that month, after foot sur- Foundation raised over $830,000 and the School gery, Michael witnessed the commissioning of the contributed a further $500,000. The Michael Collins school’s first female and first Australian-born head. Persse Scholarship fund had more than $1.8 million As his surgeon put it, “If we can get you to a prince, at the time of his death, and funded the first four we can get you to a principal.” Both prince and prin- Michael Collins Persse Scholars in 2018. cipal were as delighted by his presence as thousands of others before them. rom the vast holdings of the wider family at Michael might have rather liked the Prince to the turn of last century, little remained for the have the last word. In his foreword to Michael’s immediateF family, but what has remained in family collection of obituaries and tributes, In the Light of hands was special. In 1965, after Eskdale West was Eternity (2011), he wrote of Michael: “His immense sold, Shady Tree, at Buderim, became home. Dudley contribution throughout his lifetime to scholarship and Janette Persse bought it from Lady Lavarack, and humanity will long be remembered, and will widow of Queensland’s post-war Governor, Sir John no doubt act as an inspiration and a beacon to those Lavarack. The house was largely rebuilt by Robin who follow in his footsteps.” Gibson and John Blanshard and an outstanding gar- den created by Michael’s parents, which—with help Mark McGinness, a noted obituarist, is living in over four decades from Lindsay Gerchow and Yves Dubai.

Sixteen Is a Very Difficult Age, You Know

Well yes it is. This time of year isn’t easy either. It has most of us by the neck. You don’t want to get sick at Christmas. They said he needs six weeks of intensive therapy then they’ll decide about medication. How— when everything’s closed till February? Yes, he’s up and down. Better some days, but hardly ever. They said hide all the tablets and remove the kitchen knives. I ring or text to see how he’s going. He doesn’t always pick up. Don’t refer to the incident. Wait for him to say something. Well, he doesn’t say much though he’ll let me give him a hug—sometimes. So here I am trying to gather his forgotten dreams from the air. They’re drifting just outside my reach.

Libby Sommer

70 Quadrant September 2018 Elizabeth Beare

Decoding King Arthur and the Grail

ow can a Norse god become the famous simply means “The Good God” in Old Irish). “All King Arthur? Easily. A busy librarian on Father” was written as “Alfoor” in this Swedish dis- the desk at the Interpretation Centre at play rather than the more usual Swedish three-syl- Hthe ancient royal burial mounds of pre-Christian lable form of “Alfathir”. The librarian, in a genuine Uppsala in Sweden was unaware that she had just attempt to answer my query, had done the condens- thrown a bombshell into my world, and into British ing required by the difficult phonemic juxtaposi- history. tion implied by the pronunciation marks, producing For some years I have been an accidental hob- only two clear syllables. The bombshell was that byist collecting evidence with which to decode the suddenly, accidentally, I had a key to the origin of origin of Britain’s mythical King Arthur and his a name that has eluded scholars for not just gen- quest for the Holy Grail, a quest which is the defin- erations, but well over a millennium. That name ing feature of his court and realm. I stress that I echoes throughout Britain as belonging to a great am not suggesting yet another “real” Arthur, nor British hero: Arthur. a “real” Holy Grail; in fact, my decoding puts paid For Arthur is the unexplained name that attaches to those who hold such hopes. Here I offer a neces- to over 2000 sites throughout Britain and into sarily condensed version of my main approach and Ireland, in particular to Neolithic ruins and to some findings which I am currently writing into a wild and high places. Recent scholarly work has book. certainly pointed to the mythic nature of Arthur, correctly dismissing any genuine historicity for a y interest first arose when in Sweden, visiting person of that name, but all writers to date have the ancient burial mound site of Swedish roy- got no closer to the name than to suggest that the Malty, in Gamla Uppsala (Old Uppsala). The simi- reference is to some mysteriously unknown “culture larities between this site and the seventh-century hero”, possibly associated with bears. Sutton Hoo ship burial site in Essex have long The British historian David Dumville has been noted by archaeologists. On a display in the referred to the “no smoke without fire” searchers for Uppsala site’s Interpretation Centre I had seen the a “real” Arthur, who have come up with not much unusual word Alfoor next to the name of the Norse more than, in his term for it, “King Arthur lived in god Odin. Out of curiosity I had jotted it down. I my postcode”; which signifies a mythic element to be was at that time living in north-western England uncovered, if indicative sounds and tales of Arthur and was interested in the strong Norse heritage are to be found everywhere. So there is certainly a there on the edge of the Irish Sea. As I was depart- lot of smoke surrounding Arthur. Arthurian smoke ing the Interpretation Centre I asked a busy librar- swirled around Britain and Europe for many centu- ian on the desk how one might, using an Old Norse ries until the Renaissance brought in a Roman and accent, pronounce this word Alfoor, and passed her Greek revival. Until then, tales about Arthur were my written copying of the name. Her answer came second only to biblical stories in their reach and without a blink. “I think that would be pronounced impact, written down first in twelfth-century Latin Ah-thur,” she said, putting the emphasis on the sec- by Geoffrey of Monmouth and then consolidated ond syllable. She then turned back to her computer, by Sir Thomas Malory into the classic fifteenth- unaware that she had just thrown me a bombshell. century English printed version, Morte d’Arthur. The Scandinavian god Odin, known as Woden/ And now I had the name. But no evidence for it. Wotan in Germany, is called the All Father, a term Even to me, it seemed absurd at first. How can also applied to the Irish Dagda (a proxy name which a Norse god become King Arthur?

Quadrant September 2018 71 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail

You’ve never heard of Odin in relationship to diverse sources. These included usurpers in Britain Arthur because from the Roman conquest on, who fought the Roman Imperium and the real king Odin was a forbidden name in Britain, proscribed called Alfred who finally drew a line against the by the Caesars and then by Christianity. The com- ninth-century Viking invasion of Britain. In brief, mon identity of Odin and Arthur becomes obvi- Arthur’s fable is that of a medieval-staged time ous, once I retrieve his name from under the heavy when Britain was self-ruled by a mighty king who hand of Rome. We can start by outlining some fought against the Romans and invading Dark Age general features of Odin, and of the king known as “Saxons”; a fierce warrior-king, a battle leader, a Arthur, and then move on to look for Odin’s name fair and just ruler. Continuance of Arthur’s king- in Britain, to show that it aligns with references dom was presaged upon finding the Holy Grail, an to Arthur (the All Father) and that the Grail leg- unknown item of ritual and magic, which would ends recall a religious conflict. I can then trace how restore lost lands and prestige to a mysterious Arthur and some other puzzling ciphers entered Fisher King. This quest for the Grail created many British history due to some “fake news” from an knightly Arthurian adventures, but the quest ended extremely worried British cleric. when one worthy knight, Galahad (whose name meant “hallowed”) eventually found the Grail after many other (less Christian, less godly?) knights had Odin and Arthur failed. Arthur’s wife then caused his downfall in ne-eyed Odin is a complex god, a very ancient what is clearly a contest of “sovereignty” or right god of prophecy, whose Brythonic name of to rule. EiddynO seems suggestively cognate to that of the Her name was Guinevere (the etymology is Greek sea god Poseidon (pos is an honorific), possi- of a white river spirit). She has many aspects of bly carried by sea voyagers. Both contain the sound Brigantia, sovereignty goddess of northern Britain, of idein, the Greek verb “to see”, and Ireland’s Brigid (a remnant although other etymologies are pos- of matrilineal land tenure, not sible for each god. Odin’s single-eye to be confused with matriarchy). “seeing” is ancient; it is the all-see- I commenced my Guinevere had three love affairs ing eye of Mediterranean mythos own Arthurian which eventually destroyed the that hangs over Picasso’s Guernica. quest by seeking the comradeship of Arthur’s court. Odin exchanged his other eye in First, she was enticed by a “sum- return for complete knowledge, as name of the Nordic mer king”, aligning our hero to he hung suffering Christ-like for Odin in Britain, widespread seasonal “dying and nine days on the Tree of Worlds, rising god” motifs when Arthur where Middle Earth exists between especially alert to arrives to reclaim her. Second, she Asgard, home of the gods above, any associations was seduced by Lancelot, one of and the nether regions of fate and Arthur’s favourite knights who sat the winter lands of death. with the legends and at Arthur’s round table. Finally, she We know of Odin mainly name of Arthur. betrayed Arthur during his absence through the slightly Christianised fighting in Gaul by being deployed vision of Snorri Sturluson, the early into the arms of Mordred, a “death thirteenth-century Icelandic recorder of sagas. name”. Mordred was said to be Arthur’s son or Odin was the chief god of a north-west European matrilineal nephew via his liaison with a Valkyrie- warrior culture, a father god of all the tribal chiefs styled “faery” called Morgan le Fey. Arthur’s defeat or “fathers”, a war god, a sun god, a psychopomp by Mordred in Tennyson’s “last dim weird battle overseeing the souls of the dead, a cosmological of the west” sent him to live on the mystical isle of time lord across the ages, and a “forbidden” god Avalon, where Morgan and other “Faery Queens” with hundreds of proxy names, including Beli/ revived him to await Britain’s need and his even- Belinus, the “shining one”, a name common in early tual heroic return. Morgan was also the lover of Britain. His insignia were ravens, dragons, wolves, Merlin, a “half-demon” alchemist figure as well hounds, large cats, goats, bears and the bear con- as a wild man of the greenwoods, who provided stellation Ursa. Blood red is the symbolic colour of Arthur with a magical conception and a sword by Odin; probably the “Red Ravager” of the old Welsh which he proved his right to rule by drawing it from Triads. a stone when others could not. Older Breton and Arthur we know as a famous “created” king, a Welsh myths emphasised the more magical aspects king who never was, historicised by Monmouth and of Arthur and Merlin, such as when Arthur fought Malory from folk tales and fabrications drawn from with trees, or Merlin shape-shifted into a bird.

72 Quadrant September 2018 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail

The legends contain many allusions to Bronze etin/eaton, eden/edden/edi and eidin/eidynn/eide, also Age practices. Some aspects may even refer back aiden/awyddyn/adin and idi/idius/idri. Boden (a to the Neolithic and pre-Neolithic. In further recognised variant of Odin) produces badon/baden/ work, not detailed here, I suggest that the pre- bad, bodin/bodi and bowden/bowes or bow/bo. These Indo-European word Atar/Ator (meaning forms of Odin are often used in combined names “father”), provides us with the Latin Artorius gens or as name fragments, often in religious contexts. and Arcadian Arkus god kings, as a separate ety- Man/awyddyn for example is a Welsh sea god, and mology to Alfoor for the term Arthur. I go back to I once sat by mistake on the early Roman altar of the paleolinguistics of the well-instanced bull and a syncretic Mars Coc/idius in Lancaster Castle. The bear cults of European hunters: for the bull-father wild Bowes Moor traverses the Pennines. A fore- tor (Taurus) god A/tor produces tyr/lyr/tew/lew/lug, shortened form of Odin emerges as Don, an Irish who link later to Odin. I also examine Crom, the and Welsh father god (female form Dana). Neolithic Lord of Time. It is generally thought that river names are some of the oldest names. Odin provides the Eden in Old Cumbria, the Hodder in Lancashire’s Forest of A “scatter” of names Boland, and the Oder, Danube and Don in Europe. here is firm evidence of a significant Nordic Odin thus appears as a very old European god who influence in Britain antedating the Romans. is well-evidenced in Britain, provided you look hard RecentT genetics plus the numismatic findings of enough for him. A revered ancestor of the Anglian Daphne Nash Briggs show that there were North kings, his name lies hidden in language, not held in Germanic signifiers and linguistic forms in British memory. As Woden, he is more in evidence. populations well before Roman occupation or any Odin’s name is found in Camuloddin (Latinised later Germanic or Norse incursion from the fifth into a dunum as Camulodunum) near Colchester, to the tenth centuries. All later incursions acted to the sacred place where after 43 AD the Emperor reinforce existing Nordic genes, terms, beliefs and Claudius deliberately built his massive takeover myths. Thus a Norse-influenced pronunciation of temple to his own deification as father of the Roman the All Father name as a common pronunciation state. Unaccountably till now, Claudius was said with considerable time depth in early Britain is not to have received homage from distant “Orkney”. an unreasonable hypothesis. I can also see Nordic Orkney is a Neolithic site recently shown to rival cultural influence in Pictish tribal symbol stones in Stonehenge, so this recorded memory likely refers Scotland: Valkyrie figures, Odin on his horse, and to Odinic obeisance to Roman conquest. Camulus/ graphic symbols that relate to Norse mythology. Camillos was a proxy name for the barbarian war Thus I commenced my own Arthurian quest by god in Gaul, where Odin had long been proscribed. seeking the name of the Nordic Odin in Britain, It belongs to Odin, for we see that Camul also pro- especially alert to any associations with the legends duces Camelot (the lot element from laet, the term and name of Arthur and particularly seeking any for a military base, later the setting for Arthur’s identity I could find between the names of Odin court). Two Camelot place names are still found and Arthur. I searched the extensive corpus of the in Scotland, where legends refer to a “shining cas- Arthurian legends, plus the early and late textual tle” that has features much like Valhalla. Odin is sources and remnant myths from which the legends also strongly and anciently recalled in the Scottish are drawn and within which Arthur’s historicity names of Caledonia, Cullodin and Flodden, and or lack of it is examined. I also looked into place especially in his named home, as ancient Eidynn, names and genealogies and much else. And I found in a place now called Edinburgh, Eidynn’s burgh, what I sought, the names Arthur and Odin, often an etymology not seen before. in linked contexts—but not exactly as the origi- But I am correct. The name Guatoddin was nal names. I started to recognise how much names the tribal name around Edinburgh in pre-Roman changed over time, over place and context, and by times. Guat is a prefix term which means tribe. I the type of record, whether written or oral. I found judge that the Romans, as imperialists do, misheard that the two names I sought could have variants Guatoddin as Votadin, added a genitive i for “of”, or even fragments which may become embedded in and called this tribe the Votadini. The Romans pro- other names; such fragments suggesting a further nounced v as w (a Mumbai-to-Bombay moment). extended time-depth to these names. I’m sure of this, because after the Roman departure, Odin is there if you dig deeply enough into the tribe reverted to a Cumbric Brythonic name: place names and legends. I have catalogued Odin the Gododdin. Once more they named themselves appearing as odi/ordi/oder/oddyn/oddan and in odun/ as the people (from godi meaning “priestly”) of the oden/odon/odo variants. Other variants were eton/ god Odin. This explains why in a poem written

Quadrant September 2018 73 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail circa 600 AD commemorating the Gododdin’s last As with Odin, I have also found tribal names stand against the rise of Northumbria in Dark Age of Arthur not recognised as such. One is the Irish/ Britain, we find the first written evidence of the Scots Dalriada tribe, the components of which name of Arthur. It appears as an impossible com- are people (dial) of the king (ri/rix) Arthur (arda/ parator for even the most brave and fearless warrior artha), who kept the names of Artuir and Aiden of this tribe. This comparator is Odin, of course, alive for their sons well into the seventh century unrecognised so far, except by me. Their god. The when such usage had collapsed elsewhere. The Irish great rise we still call Arthur’s Seat takes pride of Tuatha de Dana “invaders” were originally a simi- place overlooking the Gododdin’s fortress on Castle lar tribe, Christianised into Ireland’s “little faerie Hill where the military tattoo still plays. Again, people”. Irish and British cosmologies, unlike the the identity of Odin and Arthur is reaffirmed, in Scandinavian, have no genesis myths. The people locality. and their gods always arrive from elsewhere. The people around Newcastle are still called Ge-ordi’s (Jordies)—the people of Ordi, an Odin fragment. Thus Saint Geordi (our St George), who The forbidden father god has no easy provenance in Christianity, is in my view lthough the remnant traces above show that a Christianised Odin, for turning the gods of older Odin was Britain’s Arthur, it became clear to cosmologies into new saints was not uncommon in Ame that Odin became proscribed and forbidden as the conversion era. This explains St George’s wide- a named god early on. The Romans were wary of spread popularity as a horseman saviour of Britain, the barbarian father god to whom their captured plus his saving maidens facing Viking dragons, as legions were sacrificed. Recognising the spread of found on the prow of Odin’s ships his powers, they paralleled him and in Pendragon (head dragon), with Mercury, not their war god Arthur’s putative father. St George Mars, although some identifica- in particular represents a pan- The great Welsh tions still exist with Mars—notably European protector figure rather mountain called Mars Alator (All Father) in France. like St Michael (he’s Santa Geordi A barbarian father god was rec- in Italy). This is exactly what the Snowdon (surely a ognised as Dis Pater (Deus Pater) best recent Arthurian scholar, condensed Sinodin by the Romans, and a heathen Thomas (now Caitlin) Green, sus- rather than the usual Rich Father or Rich Fisher was pects Arthur must be, some sort recorded occasionally in the later of protector god, although, unlike “snow” derivation?) Christian period. But other father me, Green has no clear idea of who I suspect has a gods were in general not welcomed this figure is. Odin fits the bill. As in either period. Rome’s father god Arthur. similar heritage was the deified emperor, embody- The same process applies to the of proscription. ing the Roman state, aligning with name Arthur as to that of Odin. I the Indo-European father gods have found a wide range of vari- Jupiter (dyus pitar) and Zeus (dyus). ants: Ardur, Arder, Ardi, Artor, Artorius, Artur, Artuir, Rome faced early trouble in Britain over the First Artho, Arta, Arda, Arty, Arfa, Arfur. There are also Sacrifice, due to Odin, now being necessary first to those names referencing the All-Father directly, as Rome. The Christian Father God was Trinitarian in as Elifer, Elidur, Eliatur, Aliafur, Alator, Venator, by the fourth century, where Christ, the Father and Alfada, Ollathair, Ollathir, Olifur, Olifar, Olafir, the Spirit were all declared One and inseparable. Ulifer and Oliver. I’ve also found the Arthur/All- This meant that the father god Odin could not be Father identity as fragments such as Ardd, Ath and transferred surreptitiously to the Christian Father, Arth. These are included in Gaelic words that relate a two-way bet, as happened under the Arian (heret- to high places, life, graves and dying, including ical) view that Christ was separate from the Father. “death” and “breath”. Arth is also the Welsh word Again, proscriptions were strongly imposed by for bear; Arthur in Cornwall is associated with the Imperial Edict. Bear’s Wain constellation. Bruarder is a brew that We see Christian proscription lingering in the induces dreams (a sign of Odin), and Uisce Breatha term Sinodin (the Sin of Odin), a name used in the is the potent “water of the breath of life” (known Shetlands for the mid-summer solstice watch today now as whisky). Macbeth (Mac-beath) is the son of (although without any sense of its origin), where life (life and death reference Odin), and the clan Odin the sun god always magically returns at this MacArthur has a reputation as a very old and diffi- time from the horizon after his chase of the day cult clan, carrying the “dark mark” (a sign of Odin). across the sky (as seen on Iceni coins), just as we may

74 Quadrant September 2018 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail note Arthur too always returns. The great Welsh Bran, near Llangollen in Wales, which I climbed mountain called Snowdon (surely a condensed with my husband early in my search. Knowing that Sinodin rather than the usual “snow” derivation?) Bran is really Odin explains both the frequency I suspect has a similar heritage of proscription. and salience of these Bran scatters throughout the Mount Snowdon in particular, as well as the nearby Arthurian corpus and landscape. Urien, a form of Mount Idris, are redolent with Arthurian associa- Bran, is killed by Morcant, in echoes of Arthur’s tions, which heathen worshippers would have been last battle. Bran names are common in Britain, and warned about as sinful. Avatars (constructed identi- especially in Ireland, where the legend of a mythical ties) too show how Odin was driven further under- explorer Branden (Bran-Odin) leads to many vari- ground, with Arthur (made human) as the main ant names popular in Ireland, including Brendan. avatar form. Similarly, Merlin is an avatar, for com- A Valkyrie-raven plucks out the eyes of the mythi- pletely overlooked so far (but no more now I have cal Irish culture hero known as Cuchulainn (the Odin’s name) is the fact that Merlin’s Brythonic Odinic “hound” of Chulainn) in his death throes. (ancient Briton) name of Mwrddyn simply trans- I argue that believers in Odin during post- lates as Great (Mwr) Odin (O/ddyn). Merlin later Roman times were actually called “ravens” by developed a series of legends within the Arthurian Christians, which explains the many otherwise corpus in his own right. The Welsh god called Bran, inexplicable deleterious references to these carrion a name meaning raven, I claim also as an avatar of birds in texts and legends, as well as why so many Odin: tales of this mythical one-eyed giant parallel place names incorporate the term “raven”. Raven very closely the tales that use the name of Arthur, place names indicate that Odin’s believers once as do those of the one-eyed Irish god Fionn/Fin. dwelt there, as in Cwmbran (the “edge” of Bran) John Darrah, in Paganism in Arthurian Romance, in South Wales. Such names were also applied to first gave me the idea of looking at how the names areas where standing stone circles stood, or once I sought changed. Darrah applied a linguistic tech- stood, as in Cumbria’s Ravenstonedale, with its nique called “scattering” to the name of Bran. His Parish of Bowderdale (Boden’s dale). A name pro- results show how linguistic erosion, distortion, cor- hibition also perfectly explains Gildas’s extreme ruption, collapse, contraction and substitution in the penalty of “seven years penance” for feeding com- name of Bran create a cast of at least twenty further munion bread to “ravens”, containing as it did a names (from Bron to a distant Ryons and Urien) sacred essence, thought to be sought by followers that are all found in the Arthurian legends; each of of Odin in their battle for supremacy in religion. It them carrying what I term the “calling card” hint of also explains why ravens in the Tower of London the original name travelling an acceptable linguistic are seen as protective, with Bran/Arthur’s severed path. Yet no one identifies Bran with Odin, because head buried there, for they inflect belief in the pow- Odin has remained hidden in Britain, even though ers of the old god Odin and the associated head- ravens are linguistic and visual symbols of Odin; hunting ritual practices common to the barbarian especially the image of Odin with a raven on his peoples of Europe. shoulder. It is mainly in the fifth and sixth centuries that This raven-shoulder reference caused trouble we find Odin’s avatar Arthur emerging as a clear even in early Roman times: the nemesis of tribes threat to Christians. One clue is in the sudden and their Druidic system before the Boudiccan rise in the immediate post-Roman period of the rebellion in 60 AD was a hated Roman governor name Ceretic (with variants like Cerdic and Corotic), called Ostorius Scapula (“shoulder bone”, named which was applied to many “Saxon” and British corocoid by the Greeks, after a raven): his very leaders in a manner that has seemed puzzling until name mocked the Druidic beliefs that found their now. Not puzzling, however, if we consider that time depth in Odin. We still speak of those feel- there were many heretics. In this period too we ing denigrated, which Odin became, as having “a find that Christian saints were constantly trying, chip on their shoulder” and an old tradition is to as recounted in their hagiographic Lives, to best throw salt (once a precious commodity) over one’s Arthur by using their stronger Christian magic; shoulder “for luck”, for protection by or from Odin. meanwhile a personified Arthur is depicted as try- The Queen dubs her knights on the shoulder. Pall- ing to steal Christian and other insig- bearers uneasily “shoulder” a coffin. nia, such as Bibles, as well as desiring the secrets of Ravens identified Odin, as two were his eyes communion bread and wine. and ears on the world. Corben is the French word Trinitarian Christians in the fifth century also for raven. Corbenic (from corbenrix/rig/ric, mean- turned to proselytising the new Father King as well ing Raven King) was said to be the home of King as discounting the old one. Much confusion about a Arthur, as is also the fortress peak called Dinas historical St Patrick is solved if we postulate a group

Quadrant September 2018 75 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail of missionaries in Ireland using the Patrick name of writing held solely by Christians), a secret musi- to introduce in Roman Latin the new Trinitarian cal notation, a gradale, a rise and fall (as seen in Father King of Christ, for Patrick decodes well a series of unexplained blocks on the walls of the as Pater-Rix (Father King). Legend tells us that engrailed Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland); or a ritual one missionary now called St Patrick saw off the circular “table” encompassing a cosmological court “snakes” (unbelievers) from Ireland and threw his of seekers (recalling, I claim, those circled stand- shoes at ravens (human or avian) on the sacred ing stones the Romans called “tabula”). The Grail mountain in western Ireland now called Croagh legends always feature a memorialised procession, a Patrick. The Christian Father King was fighting graduation or gradale (likely age-old memories, as hard against Odin the All Father of the tribes. steps up to a ritual platform, or along a cursus con- necting stone circles into a wider ritual landscape). This procession entails carrying sacrificial food on Sources of the Grail legends a plate called a gradale (a series of food courses) or rom this ideological contest emerges the main in a drinking cup or basin called a grael. When the tenet of the Grail legends: the legendary mem- cup is a chalice the contents are Christianised into Fory of a struggle over the validity of a forbidden the wine (or wafer) of Holy Communion. In his name and lineage, that of Odin, the Auld King, the shining light, a man (Belinus, a “kenning” of Odin) Fisher King who is called Bron (or Bran, or “raven”). processes with his spear dripping blood, accompa- The Fisher King is wounded in “the thigh”, emas- nied by young warrior males and beautiful women, culated, and can only be cured by Valholl’s cup-bearers bringing restoration of his name which will “the honey mead of inspiration”. also make the Waste Land flour- The Grail provides magically in ish. There are hints in this of the To provoke a food and spirit for onlookers via tradition of killing real underper- Christian awakening, the Indo-European cauldron of forming kings (as Jessie Weston Gildas creates a florid plenty, a bowl of reincarnation, or speculated), but that is hardly the a drinking horn cornucopia; doing main game of the “Holy” Grail. Jeremiad about how as Christ did with some loaves and For this Grail refers to the search the Britons have been fishes. for godhead, pitting a chalice con- To me, the Grail also carries taining priestly access to religious punished by God in an ancient alchemical meaning, truths (transubstantiation) and the the past for cowardice the mystery of metallurgy that awe of Romanitas against the old during Rome’s turned base metals into gold, an varieties of gnosis. allusion back to the ancient smith There is good evidence that initial invasion, and priests who drew hot golden bronze in Roman times early British for straying from swords from a stone mould (as did Christianity was gnostic in its the young Arthur), swords that approach, increasingly villa-cen- Rome’s later gift were then broken and thrown into tred and elitist. We know too that of Christianity. lakes to appease spirits there. Later, by the fifth century post-Roman the Grail concept alluded to wiz- Britain was alive with the Pelagian ards, stargazers like Merlin, who heresy, also rather gnostic. This heresy allowed an were seekers of alchemical knowledge, pondering a unmediated relationship between believers and meteorite “stone” sent from heaven; Merlin, Odin’s the Grace of the Christ, with no need for priests. avatar, who was destroyed in the end as a raven Individual Britons could thus self-seek the numi- or eagle in a moulting cage (an esplumoir). For the nous in Christ’s written word; in the glories of Grail is about transformations, of people as well as nature as Pelagius allowed (turning, as one wag has metals, enshrined in memories of legendary shape- suggested, the British into the inveterate gardeners shifters who left human form. The Grail is also the they are to this day); in the skies and stone monu- Christian “magic” of turning bread into spirit, and ments of an ancient celestial father god (as seen in wine into blood (that substance on which Odinic the English Art Deco sunrise); in the extra-sensory rituals were based), a grasp at the numinous, turn- realm called the music of the spheres; or even as ing self into something other, spiritually “richer”, as medieval stargazers did, in the predictive Zodiac. promised in the recorded name of a “Rich Father”. Religious flux opened the door to a variety of inter- Admitted into the French Grail legends as a pretations of the Grail, symbols of the search. central focus, the British figure of Peridur becomes Variously, the Grail alludes to a book (the Percival, the “perfect fool” who does not know his bejewelled Bible; written incantations, the “magic” own lineage name, yet who is unable to ask the

76 Quadrant September 2018 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail forbidden question about who the Grail procession taken too readily as instructive about general social is for, or he will die. And here we have it: Peridur and historical conditions. These are mentioned is Odin in the idon/idur variant. The prefix per is a only incidentally. They are constructed from a Brythonic word for a ritual container or basin, long mish-mash of mainly oral sources to serve the main associated with ancient king-making sites. Peridur thesis, which is about the need for redemptive sal- appears in folklore as a wholly non-evidenced “ruler” vation due to past and current “sins” in order to stop across northern Britain, known for his legendary the decline in the Church. To provoke a Christian army. “Eliafer of the Great Host in the North” is awakening, Gildas creates a florid Jeremiad about similarly placed, and is also Odin. Neither ever how the Britons have been punished by God in existed. They reference Odin and Arthur. Odin’s the past for cowardice during Rome’s initial inva- lineage becomes shaded into Bron (the raven Bran), sion, and for straying from Rome’s later gift of named as the Fisher King (or “sinner” king via Christianity. He gives a bad press to the Welsh that the French word pecheur), or the (spiritually) Rich lives with them to this day. King, just as Christ is a spiritual king. In this way, Gildas wants a revival of Trinitarian Christianity Arthur attained his “kingship”, in the memories of in a country he sees as both heretic, with the a struggle between rivals, both powerful spiritual Arian and Pelagian heresies rife, and turning kings and king-makers, a struggle which Odin lost, heathen again. In De Excidio, Gildas refers with becoming a king whose kingdom had collapsed and great approval to the Battle of Baden Hill (Mons who no longer had even his name. Until I found it. Badonicus) which was won at some dissembled As perhaps did the Knights Templar (but that is time after Rome departed. The date, I suspect, was another story). deliberately made vague as Gildas had no certainty about the timing. What he wrote was deemed later to refer to a great historical battle, a win for the “Fake news” and the genesis of “the Age Britons against a massive “Saxon invasion”; a later of Arthur” invention gleaned from Gildas’s obvious anxiety as hy is it that the fifth and sixth centuries are heathen Saxon warlords replaced Roman Christians seen as “the Age of Arthur”, a period when a as leaders. Gildas also mentions a “last of the post-RomanW warlord, possibly with a Roman herit- Romans” figure called Ambrosius Aurelianus, and age, revived the enfeebled Britons who were unused a deceiver, a Proud Tyrant (Superbus Tyrannus) who to fighting, and fought off an invasion by “Saxon” let in the “Saxons”. Both of these actors seem to peoples and for a time stopped it? This sits poorly antedate Baden. There is no mention of a “hero” of with recent genetic and archaeological work that Baden. suggests the generic “Saxon invasion” now looks Baden is a clear reference to Odin in the Boden more like a slow North Germanic cultural revival form. Gildas actually calls Baden “a siege” rather in an east coastal population Stephen Oppenheimer than a battle. I claim that Gildas presents a mem- suggests were possibly already speaking a Germanic ory of a historic confrontational religious debate language, which explains the paucity of Brythonic that we know took place in 429 AD between “her- (broadly “Celtic”) terms in early English. The sug- etics” and Trinitarian Christians. I think it was gestion is of an elite takeover rather than an inva- actually very much about belief in Boden/Baden as sion following the departure of Roman authority, All Father versus the Trinitarian Father, reflected involving skirmishes but no major confrontations. too in the choice of place for the debate. Bath and The answer to “the Age of Arthur” lies in misin- Badbury have been suggested, but because Odin/ terpretations made about a curious text we can now Woden has not been on the agenda as the cause as analyse as referring to Odin. well as the place of this struggle, no one has so far Titled On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain (De suggested the most likely place: the only domi- Excidio et Conquistu Britanniae), this long text has nant hill in southern England that had a suitable a loose floruit between the mid-fifth and mid-sixth socio-religious heritage relating to Odin/Woden. centuries and offers few checkable facts or dates. It is Waden (Woden) Hill, still called that today, Apart from the limited writings of St Patrick, De a massive mound next to the sacred constructed Excidio is the only textual material available to us tumulus of Silbury Hill, and part of the extensive for the entire period, so it is quite famous. Written Stonehenge ritual landscape archaeologists are now by a literate but unknown Trinitarian Christian revealing. Waden Hill is a true Mons Badonicus. We “cleric” (we think) called Gildas, De Excidio is do know from archaeology and other sources that mainly a complaint about spiritual ruin (excidio can a new god called Nodens (possibly Nova Odin, a imply that) and the degradation of the post-Roman revised Odin, later Nudd/Nuada) was popular in Christian church in Britain, a sermon that has been this period; so I see Waden Hill as a telling “home

Quadrant September 2018 77 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail ground” for this contested debate. The two memories are conflated into a fabricated The historical background is that by 381 AD all person. There was no Proud Tyrant either, per- forms of heresy and heathenism/paganism were sonified three centuries later by folkloric mem- being suppressed by the Emperor Theodosius, ory into the human figure of Vortigern (meaning spurred on by a theologian from Milan known now Great Leader) who sold Britain out to the hea- as St Ambrose. It may be that such suppression then “Saxons”. The Superbus Tyrannus of Gildas caused Britain to break away from Rome around was Odin, the old All-Father. The earliest Life of 400 AD. Zosimus, a Greek writer of the period, Germanus mentions that the debate was led by a in a rare mention of Britain, says the Britons “man of Tribunican rank”, later tellingly termed “abandoned Roman laws” by 410 AD. They had done Eliafer (All-Father, Arthur) who ends up defeated, this before, joining the breakaway Gallic empire begging Germanus for help. of Carausius in the third century and assisting the To further my case, the fact that neither Gildas Barbarian Conspiracy against Rome in the fourth. nor Bede mentions Arthur has always worried Roman military Restitutors had been required. By scholars, but I am not concerned. No Christian 429 AD British churchmen had asked Rome to send writer would mention him. Gildas, however, if one a revivalist preacher to help return their flocks to reads deeply into his detailing of Britain’s hereti- Christianity. The Pope sent Bishop cal woes, does mention a “devil Germanus from Gaul, an aristocrat father”, a fact missed so far. For displaying a cultured Romanitas, here is sufficient aficionados of Gildas (and there who for a while halted the drift. It T are many) I also have a new view is uncertain if Germanus revisited evidence to declare of the “Kings” sequence in Gildas. circa 447 AD; most historians see that Odin existed in I think he refers in this not to real it as a duplication, perhaps a form kings but to ciphers constructed of wish fulfilment. Britain as a much out of local gossip, ciphers given The earliest Life of Germanus proscribed but secretly many attributes of Odin in their outlines the success of this debate. kingly titles, and his Constantine We can interpret Gildas as longing remembered god, and is simply Constantine III (who for what he only knows as the suc- that the Norse term died in 411 AD), who like Gildas’s cessful struggle against heathens Arthur, meaning All- fake Constantine, killed two royal at Baden to occur again. Eager children (nephews of the Emperor to stress the importance of his Father, became an Honorius) in a church and dragged visit, I suspect that in his debate avatar form for Odin. his own son Constans from life as a Germanus used ammunition gar- holy monk. Thus reading Gildas for nered from a neglected edict known history is a mistake. He uses histor- as a Rescript (an imperial response to a query) that ical memory with unashamed creativity to further I have recently come across: the Rescript Against the impact of his message and to appear wise. Bede, Paganism, made to the Prefect Aurelianus by the like me, seems to doubt the chronology of Gildas Emperor Arcadius in 395 AD, which strongly (used by later annals) and places great emphasis on repeated the anti-heretic and anti-pagan position the visit of Germanus as a defining feature of the of St Ambrose. In heavy terms, it denounced all early post-Roman period. heathen, pagan and non-Trinitarian beliefs. Gildas, Three centuries after Gildas though, Baden is writing as he says without books, has in my read- pulled again into “history”. The Historia Brittonum, ing of his work personified the debating terms of a text from the Welsh area of Gwynedd (includ- this visit of Germanus via bowdlerised accounts of ing old Druidic Anglesey), nominates Arthur as the it, given that his likely access is only through oral hero of Baden. As the historian Nicholas Higham tales. analyses it, Gwynedd seeks a new Welsh hero, a So it was all “fake news”, a tissue of invention Joshua to counter the unflattering vision of the and a later texture of misinterpretation. There was Welsh perpetrated by Gildas and then Bede. The no “Battle” of Baden against a Saxon “invasion”, role falls to Arthur. An old battle poem agglomer- nor was there an Ambrosius Aurelianus, although ating many diverse battles, including one at Baden, some serious historians still refer to both as factual. is used to create “the twelve battles of Arthur”. The life details offered by Gildas for his Ambrosius Arthur is Christianised in this list via some clunky are exactly those of St Ambrose of Milan, creator “shoulder” insignia (in place of Odin’s raven) of the plainsong that Gildas extols, whose father although his battle feats as “Dux” goading real was a Roman prefect and of the gens Aurelius; the kings onward are still beyond human. This shoulder Aurelianus name refers to the Aurelianus Rescript. reference, because contextually it seems implausible

78 Quadrant September 2018 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail to carry a giant cross or a painted image on a shoul- sleigh. He lives too in the old forest god, the Green der, has been explained away by modern scholars Man, the Green Knight of the legends, who has as a clerical error in transcription, shield and shoul- become Robin Hood, around whom further leg- der being similar Brythonic words. But it is defi- ends accrete. For Robin (Oddin) Red Breast, the nitely no error; the identifying seeing-eye raven on Christmas bird, gives his name to a monk-hooded Arthur’s shoulder has simply been Christianised outlaw, Oddin Hood, beyond the Christian pale, and remains as Odin’s “calling card”. found in the ancient greenwood (and also in Robin The Historia also contains a section on miracles Hood’s Bay near Scarborough and other northern (Mirabilia or folk tales), where Vortigern (Odin) sites as well as in Sherwood Forest). He has his is depicted as becoming a lonely and thin (O-thin) own Virgin Mary, called Maid Marian, he sends up old man wandering in Wales, unable to build a monks (Friar Tuck), and his followers are the com- new castle, and thus fading away in misery. Like mon people who remembered in a nursery rhyme a Arthur in the battle poem, Odin’s avatar Merlin time when “good King Arthur ruled the land”, and is Christianised in the Mirabilia, made Christ- provides his people, believers still, with stolen food. like, becoming Merlin Ambrosius, a “fatherless Odin is the one-eyed Hooded One known as boy” with precocious wisdom, who can do what Grey Cloak, the wise Gandalf wanderer with his Vortigern cannot. We are told here too that Merlin staff, Odin in the fading shadow of his primary provides notable help to build Stonehenge with avatars Arthur, Bran, Vortigern and Merlin; Odin the right sort of stones, a structure which has now who still found a home in the greenwood, although become Christianised, hence the Ambrosius name Christians now called him the Devil, a Grim Reaper of Amesbury appears in the wider Stonehenge rit- playing chess for lives, as Arthur played a form of ual landscape. Only later does Merlin suffer defeat chess over his warriors in Welsh legend. Odin as at the Battle of Arthuret in 575 AD, reverting to a King Idein/Eiddyn, a Neptune Devil with his sea- wild man of the Celydon (Odin) woods, to be res- god Fisher King trident. Odin of many names. cued by a kindly St Ken/tigern (knowledge leader), Hints remain in Shakespeare’s “Full Fathom Five” founder of Glasgow. Merlin finally met his end by as a shipwrecked royal father has a sea-change that the Bronze Age triple death of stabbing, hanging is “rich and strange” on a magical island where airy and drowning. Arthur too was killed off. Annalists sprites imprisoned in Druidic oak trees answer to a introduced a line item for Arthur’s death in 536 Merlin figure called Prospero. AD, a time of a volcanic winter across the world, There is sufficient evidence to declare that Odin when many cultures thought the sun god had died. existed in Britain as a much proscribed but secretly The Mirabilia also refers to Arthur’s “unmeasur- remembered god, and that the Norse term Arthur, able” grave, a Neolithic dolmen. Arthur’s death and meaning All-Father, became an avatar form for grave (the hoax at Glastonbury) probably became Odin. My theories as outlined here break new part of folklore to counter the idea of Arthur’s ground regarding the origin of King Arthur and the return, expressed by Malory’s Rex quondum, rexque history and pseudo-history and false floruit (allo- futurus, best translated by T.H. White’s “the once cated time period) that surrounds this name. I have and future King”. summarised how Alfoor, the All-Father, became euheumised, personalised into a man, although still traceable as originating from Odin. Conclusion: Some enduring avatars of I conclude by offering two incontrovertible Odin All-Father examples of the alignment of Odin with Arthur. din lives on still in memory as Old King The first is in the Battle of Arthuret (a real battle Cole, named after Coelestius (meaning “of the bearing the name of Arthur), in 575 AD, a textually Osky”), the perhaps apocryphal sidekick of Pelagius recorded major and bloody conflict, implied as over the British heretic, and recalled still in the name religious beliefs, which it is known took place two of Colchester (Coel Caester), once Camuloddin, near miles from Scotland’s Longtown just above Carlisle. Sutton Hoo barrows field where I started thinking Arthuret is now deserted. I sat in the lonely church about things Swedish. We have come full circle. there thinking of how James I taxed all of England Arthur also lives on as Britain’s Father Christ­ to rescue this very church, as it was at that time mas, the old Yule Father in his red cloak (the in disrepair, reputed to be still “heathen” with its ancestral Padernus Redraut of the Gododdin), now sacred well, in this land of Reivers (cattle thieves). Christianised as St Nicholas (famed for punch- I felt a certain kinship. My own maternal grandfa- ing the heretic Arius on the nose), a name slowly ther came from a Reivers clan. eroded into Santa Claus, riding Odin’s Wild Hunt This Battle of Arthuret is strongly associated across the skies bringing presents in a reindeer with Peridur (Basin Odin) and Merlin (Mwrddyn,

Quadrant September 2018 79 Decoding King Arthur and the Grail the Great Odin). It was once known in Welsh as the Paganism to Christianity, 1997 Battle of Arderedd, so we are moving back along a Charles Freeman, AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the name-scatter here. It leads to an original Brythonic Christian State, 2008 form I have found, which calls Arthuret the Battle Gildas, De Excidio et Conquistu Britanniae (an of Alfdereiddyn (All-Father Odin). It couldn’t essential early post-Roman sermon) be clearer than that, unremarked for well over a Thomas Green, Concepts of Arthur, 2007 (best millennium. Additionally, Layamon (a traditional recent coverage) Saxon Law Man), the translator of Geoffrey of Nicholas J. Higham, King Arthur: Myth-Making Monmouth’s fabricated “History of the Kings of and History, 2002 (for Historia Brittonum) Britain” from Latin into English, actually writes David Lewis-Williams & David Pearce, Inside the of Arthur initially as Alfaderoder, another direct Neolithic Mind, 2009 (neurology) clarification that Arthur is Odin, but missed for C. Scott Littleton & Linda A. Malcor, From nearly a millennium. Much else has been missed, Scythia to Camelot, 1994 (Sarmartian influences) for so long, which I write here to point out and Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in correct. the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, 1997 David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54BC–409AD, 2006 Bibliography Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A he best of these books for beginners is Snyder, Genetic Detective Story, 2006 then Green, Higham and Freeman. Francis Pryor, Britain BC: Life in Britain and GrahamT Anderson, King Arthur in Antiquity, 2009 Ireland before the Romans, 2003 (Pulitzer Prize winner; the Arcadian thesis) Christopher Snyder, Exploring the World of King Richard Cavendish, King Arthur and The Grail, Arthur, 2000 (collated by an expert) 1978 (dated, but detailed) Richard White (ed.), King Arthur in Legend and Jonathan Clements, The Vikings: The Last Pagans or History, 1999 (provides main original sources) the First Modern Europeans? 2005 John Darrah, Paganism in Arthurian Romance, 1994 Elizabeth Beare lives in Sydney. A longer, annotated (concentrates on “challenge knights”) bibliography appears in the version of this article at Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Quadrant Online.

Beach of Memory

The smack of smell, the wind pushing inside your lungs, its laughing, pungent cries of welcome, that fertile taste of cleanskin sweat, the rush of spinning moon-drawn joy: So same, so separate … Can I just close my eyes, stand here wind-moulded, dissolve into this water at my feet, and be there, then turn to see my mother young, sitting on the beach, and look, my father out there strongly swimming— Could I just do that please?

Katherine Spadaro

80 Quadrant September 2018 BOOKS, ARTS & LIFE

Liverpudlian’s Stellar Career via Oz Peter Smith

The Bootle Boy: An Untidy Life in News but he comes in and out of the story, largely as a by Les Hinton background figure, pulling the strings on Hinton’s Scribe, 2018, 445 pages, $49.99 working life, sending him here and there to fill increasingly senior positions. You never really find was born in Liverpool, the same place as Les out what Murdoch saw in him as opposed to those Hinton, and just a month later. Make no mistake, whom he sacked. A secondary attraction of the book, Iadministrative niceties aside, Bootle is effectively and what I was waiting for as I waded through, was Liverpool. It is centred on Merseyside docklands Hinton’s take on the phone-hacking scandal that about six kilometres from Liverpool’s city centre. He broke in 2011 in the UK and which led to his forced is most definitely as Liverpudlian as I am. But still resignation from News. I will start with this ending. those from Bootle make a point of it as those from “No memory of having starred / Atones for later other suburban areas don’t. And you would expect disregard / Or keeps the end from being hard” is them to make a fuss about all of their famous sons. a stanza from one of Robert Frost’s poems. It’s a Surprised then was I to discover that the Wikipedia salutary sentiment which reminds us that we live entry on notable people born in Bootle does not in the moment and not in the past. This is Hinton include Hinton. reflecting: There are footballers, a comedian, a rock singer, a politician, and a few others, but no newspaper I had long ago made my personal bargain with mogul. Perhaps that reflects Hinton’s ability to mix the restraints and rewards of working for a at the highest social levels while remaining publicly personality like Rupert. I never felt immune; I unnoticed. That might have been important to his had seen the casualties pile up over the years. But longevity at News Corporation. Being out of the I never thought it would end like this for me, as public limelight meant he didn’t cast a shadow over a castaway in a hurricane. Rupert Murdoch. But those out of the limelight have a harder job attracting interest in their life sto- Hinton could not have foreseen that his tenure ries. And I am not sure that Hinton’s tale is told heading News International beginning in 2007— rivetingly enough. almost the climax of his stellar career with News— Murdoch is the principal attraction, of course, would lead to his demise. It was on his “watch”, as

Quadrant September 2018 81 Books he says, that numbers of News of the World reporters who indulgently think it can’t happen again. I was were discovered to have hacked into mobile phones. born about four kilometres from Bootle. We had This became a public scandal when it was revealed a bombed-out site in the next street and one in an that one of the phones hacked into belonged to adjoining street. They were great for us kids setting Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl who bonfires on November 5. Hinton was surrounded was abducted and murdered in 2002. Not only was by bomb sites. The Luftwaffe concentrated a lot of her phone hacked but the messages were re-sorted, bombs on the Liverpool docks in Bootle. An aside, which led her parents to believe that she might still I noticed that his grandmother had a phone. That be alive. It was reckless and disgusting behaviour on was a bit posh, I think. Neither my parents nor the part of the reporters. my grandmothers had phones. Mind you, Hinton’s Those who have lived in England know that the dunny at the bottom of the yard, with newspaper for Sunday papers are a vital part of the tapestry of life. toilet paper, rings an uncomfortable bell. It might have something to do with the weather. I failed to pick Hinton’s politics throughout the Among Sunday newspapers, the News of the World book. His second wife (from Liverpool) worked was peerless. When Murdoch closed it down, as for Gordon Brown so she is certainly of the Left. atonement, it was among the best-selling newspa- He gives the impression of being apolitical. I was pers in the English-speaking world. We used to get amused by his mother’s view that Tories “were better it at home when I was a teenager. It appealed to to rule us than uncouth workers”. My own maternal the working class. It appealed to me. It was a racy grandmother voted Tory because, as she put it, “the publication with mandatory pictures of scantily clad Labour Party people had no money”. young women. Hinton left Bootle for the first time when he The key here is that it was a racy publication. It was just five, returning between his father’s overseas should not have come as a surprise that its reporters postings. His father was a chef and sergeant in the might skate close to the thin ice. Hinton claimed British Army. Hinton, his older sister and younger that he didn’t know what was going on. Recording brother, had stints in Egypt, Eritrea, Tripoli, West his thoughts flying back to New York from a meet- Germany and finally Singapore. Much of the ing in London in 2011, he writes: “What exactly had description of this part of his life, and his bewil- been going on at the News of the World all those years dering array of relatives, is somewhat prosaic. There ago?” And it’s clear he didn’t know. He was accused for the record, I suppose. You could safely skip it of lying to parliament in 2012 but was exonerated by and lose nothing of the main act. At the same time, the privileges committee in 2016. But it’s also clear I liked his story of listening on the radio in West that he doesn’t quite seem to accept accountability. Germany to the ventriloquist Peter Brough with In deciding not to travel to London for a while he his dummy Archie Andrews. I listened too, back in writes, “It made me feel like a fugitive, even though Liverpool. We must have both just assumed Brough I had done nothing wrong.” wasn’t moving his lips. This is one of a number of One or even two reporters going rogue in a news- amusing diversionary vignettes he tells. paper is one thing but phone-hacking (and also pay- He accompanied Norman Scott, the estranged off to police) was systematic. It might not be widely lover of Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe, to a hotel understood—and clearly isn’t by many highly-paid in Devon in the late 1970s, where a gathering of chief executives—but part of the job is to keep a Anglican clergy raised their glasses for the “royal close watch over the behaviour of employees to toast” (a subeditor was needed to change royal into ensure ethical standards are being kept. And this is loyal). At the words “the Queen”, Hinton reports, surely essential when the organisation employs large “Scott staggered quickly to his feet, clattering glass numbers of tabloid newspaper reporters. So it is not at our table and capsizing a bottle of claret ... ‘A a question of whether Hinton should have known. toast for me?’ cried Britain’s most famous gay man It is a question of whether he ever seriously turned to a room of gasping vicars. ‘Oh, how kind of you his mind to the ethical behaviour of those under his all. Thank you so much. I should now like to make charge. There is no indication in his account of the a few remarks in response.’” There are one or two affair that he ever did. other amusing tales in the book. But I have to say that there is also some maudlin banality that the inton starts his story as a young child in afore-mentioned subeditor might have struck out. Bootle. Much of what he says resonates with Of his first-born he writes: “When we met, I me.H And it is useful these days to go back (not really stroked his cheek with the outside of my left index so far) to the second half of the 1940s in Britain, finger.” Having been offered a job in New York by when the scars of war were still vivid. It’s a reminder his then immediate boss he reports, “We stood at the of the horrors and unpredictability of wars for those men’s room door to the sound of flushing urinals.”

82 Quadrant September 2018 Books

Why tell us this kind of thing? He falls into the old he did in Australia. It’s counterfactual but you have trap too of lamenting that his work took him away to doubt it. from his family. “I thought that the job sometimes twisted priorities. It wasn’t the last time I felt that delaide is a nice city, but Hinton wanted Fleet way.” Talk about a cliché. And he wants to second- Street. He sailed off to London in 1965 and got guess his business decisions. “I cut costs, closed aA job with the news agency British United Press. publications and businesses, pushed out editors Meanwhile Murdoch was busy buying up UK news- and executives, always convincing myself it was for papers—the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, the the greater good of the company and its remaining News of the World and the Sun. The Sun was a lan- employees.” And, by the way, none of this “ruthless” guishing newspaper when Murdoch bought it. Nine behaviour is covered in the book, unless I missed it. years later it was Britain’s top-selling daily. This Why isn’t it there? It might have added depth. was just the start for Murdoch. “In the 1980s, he spent billions buying TV stations across America, as is family moved to Adelaide in 1959. His well as the 20th Century Fox film studio, Triangle mother’s sister had emigrated earlier. He was publications, and more newspapers in America and fifteen,H with no education to speak of. I read one Australia. Rupert didn’t like to wake up in a town reviewer who said that Hinton had failed the 11-Plus where he didn’t own a newspaper.” exam. His own account doesn’t quite back that up. Hinton left British United Press after a short He claims that he “must have done all right” but while and started working for the Sun. The right that his expressed ambition to be either an actor step at the right time. From the Sun, he went on an or a motor mechanic had resulted upward trajectory in the Murdoch him being placed into a secondary empire. This included joining the modern school rather than a gram- e became a copy all-Australian News bureau in New mar. He has no idea why “motor H York; becoming news editor at the mechanic” popped into his mouth. boy and seventeen Star (a supermarket sensationalist In any event, Hinton had a discon- months later a cadet periodical), city editor of the Boston certing eye condition (wandering Herald, editor-in-chief of the Star eye), his parents had separated for a reporter. And this was in Manhattan, vice-president of while, and he was moved from place the start of his career Murdoch Magazines; and head of to place. None of this is conducive of fifty years, with one Fox television before Roger Ailes to succeeding at school. took over to give Fox News con- He swapped between acting and short interruption, at servative oomph. Subsequently he journalism as his chosen career, News Corporation. headed to London as head of News before deciding on the latter when International to run the UK news- he was just eleven; inspired, appar- paper business before, after twelve ently, by his regular reading of the Daily Mirror. He years, returning to New York with a five-year con- first applied to the Advertiser in Adelaide and was tract as chief executive of the recently acquired Dow offered a job in accounts, which to his mother’s cha- Jones; which, among other things, published the grin he turned down. He tried the News, Adelaide’s Wall Street Journal. Hinton’s time ran out before his evening paper. He became a copy boy and seventeen contract. months later a cadet reporter. And this was the start Media people will like this book, I think—though of his career of fifty years, with one short interrup- they might have appreciated an index. I am ambiva- tion, at News Corporation. lent. It is readable without ever being gripping. I His first editor, sacked a year later, was Rohan still don’t think I know Hinton. I don’t believe it Rivett. Hinton writes that he knew from Rivett “that added much to our knowledge of Murdoch’s char- Australians were willing to give people a chance”. acter either. According to Hinton, an obituary for a This same kind of sentiment he echoed years later past head of News International read: “The court of in talking about America. “Twenty years before Rupert Murdoch is much like the court of Henry these people [a boardroom table full of lords and III. Men and women are promoted to positions of knights] would have intimidated me but America great power only to be felled on the royal whim, … had inoculated me against the old class divides whether because they cease to be useful or because of Britain.” It is true to say that Australia treated they threaten to gain more fame than the monarch Hinton, as it treated me when I arrived six years himself.” But we know that Murdoch is ruthless in after Hinton, on merit. You have to ask whether business affairs. He would not have been so success- a fifteen-year-old boy, out of secondary modern ful otherwise in the media business. That Hinton school, would make such a good start in England as lasted so long and rose so high, keeping his head

Quadrant September 2018 83 Books while others lost theirs, is a testimony to his survival These days, however, his phone never rang. And technique; and he is charmingly honest about it: therein lay the problem ... Reduced to double- helpings of toast and one-sided conversations “You’ve got it wrong, Rupert. No way am I with his dog, Grafton couldn’t help but reflect doing that job. I keep telling them, but no one that perhaps the scales had tipped too far in will listen to me.” Well, they’re not the words I the other direction: he had pined for greener used. What I said was: “Oh, you’re welcome, Mr pastures but had ended up in a desert. The Murdoch, you’re very welcome.” trouble was that he had no idea of how to tip them back again. Peter Smith contributed the article “Thinking Left and Thinking Right” in the July-August issue. Soon enough Grafton is granted reprieve in the form of an invitation to address the 1066 Committee, a fanatical sub-group of the British Conservative Party, whose enigmatic leader (and party chair- man) Sir Alistair Mandeville is taken with a speech Edward Cr answick Grafton made in the Australian parliament in defence of animals. Sir Alistair’s loyal deputy is the The 1066 Committee and All That chain-smoking Home Secretary, David Mayeux, who is baffled and exasperated by his master’s So Far, So Good insistence on the involvement of Grafton in the by Ross Fitzgerald & Antony Funnell committee’s shadowy plot to launch a neo-Norman Hybrid Publishers, 2018, 214 pages, $22.95 conquest. At the same time, Grafton is shooting to think it was Salman Rushdie who once opined celebrity status owing to an effective social media that the Thatcher era was a great time for sat- campaign run by his sidekick (and his daughter’s ire.I The whiff of ideology is a godsend for the able former nanny) Neal—whose Twitter posts featuring pen—satire the means by which we create distance Grafton’s gnomic pronouncements take all sides of from our partisan hallucinations. the political universe by storm—leftists and rightists The same has not held true—or at least not reading into Grafton’s words whatever they wish to true enough—in our own time. If satire works by hear. Our hero is tugged in all directions by politi- stretching a social or political tendency to its (pre- cal interests and travels between Australia, Britain posterous) logical conclusion, then much of the and the United States—appearing on stages, radio time our political players have beaten us to the programs and television to expatiate on a political punch. It’s hard to land winning blows on millen- philosophy he shows little indication of understand- nial identitarian nitwits or Donald Trump when ing himself. the genuine article is already a parody. The plot (both the novel’s and that of the nefari- Perhaps it is for this reason that So Far, So ous 1066 Committee) comes to a head at the “Great Good—Ross Fitzgerald and Antony Funnell’s new Conference” organised by the ineffectual British “entertainment” featuring Dr Professor Grafton PM Stephen Blight at the urging of Sir Alistair and Everest—is often funny but somehow not quite the Home Secretary. The conference is ostensibly to funny enough. It is the latest in a loosely connected re-launch Britain onto the world stage and solid- series of comic adventures featuring our corpulent ify ties with all manner of Middle Eastern despots (“couldn’t see his cock without the use of a hand- (those who share “our values”) since more congen- mirror and a selfie stick”) anti-hero. It’s the first ial regimes nowadays decline offers of friendship. I’ve read, and I’ll certainly be seeking out the ear- Sir Alistair, who has been funding and fomenting lier volumes, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that civil unrest under the guise of free speech advocacy, its zany plot was crammed full of too many targets sees the conference (and its surrounding chaos) as to hit any one of them with full force. the perfect stage on which to launch a coup against Some time in the near future, the EU has dis- decadent democracy and settle the waters with firm banded and the US President has been assassi- aristocratic virtues. nated. Grafton is apparently recovering from brief Along the way, the novel sends up most of stints as Independent Premier of Mangoland (a the hot political topics one could think of: Tory thinly disguised Queensland) and as balance-of- nostalgia; Brexit; Australia’s educational system; power holder in the Australian Senate. Having left a problematic cultural minority; concerns over public life to “regain some balance” of his own, at artificial intelligence; the revolving door of the novel’s opening Grafton is bored and restless: Australian prime ministers; puerile leftist activism;

84 Quadrant September 2018 Books and foreign interference in the democratic process. be overly surprised if people started going to Even when Fitzgerald and Funnell’s satirical pen ridiculous lengths to pander to the interests of wanders off from the main thrust of the plot, it does that consumer base. “I would have thought that turn up some winning descriptions. Take the descrip- was self-explanatory,” he said. tion of the Prime Minister, Scott Braggadocio, for- merly “Minister for Select Immigration, Forced Yet the authors explain it. While it’s unfair to Repatriation, Coal Extraction and Punitive Justice”: measure this effort against the likes of Lucky Jim, it’s hard to imagine Jim Dixon being so heavy-handed. Braggadocio had the look of a dullard: with The tendency towards over-explanation may be flat brown eyes and a spray-tan complexion, his illustrated with another comparison, this time from face looked like a couple of rissoles thrown into P.G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters. Near a sand pit … The only thing the Braggadocio that book’s opening, Bertie Wooster sees that he administration had going for it was the leader has annoyed his butler, Jeeves. Bertie narrates: “He of the opposition, the eternally unimpressive spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I Stephenson—a man so insignificant in stature could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was and impact that even his mother had forgotten far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the his first name. subject.” Here the wordplay is plainly delivered, and the comic effect heightened by the extra work the Whether or not “Stephenson” is intended as a reader must do pondering “gruntled”. stand-in for “Shorten”, one couldn’t do better than Compare this with a similar attempt made near “eternally unimpressive” as a description. the beginning of So Far, So Good:

he book’s comic effect suffers, however, from a “I wonder why people talk about being tendency to over-explain its own humour. For dishevelled, but never shevelled?” Grafton mused Texample, an acquaintance of Grafton’s explains the aloud. “Or feckless or reckless? We still use the state of the university: antonym, but not the original word. No-one talks about being ‘feck’ or ‘reck’ or ‘whelmed’. “Our VC is trying to clear out all the old lefties Why is that?” and move the university to an industry support model.” She leant in close and whispered into Not quite the same, is it? Grafton’s ear: “Basically using public money to While I’m on the subject of The Code of the fund the research that companies don’t want to Woosters, it’s worth pointing out that in that book pay for themselves.” there is no trade-off between humour and serious- ness. Much as in So Far, So Good, the action revolves The clarifying explanation takes the sting out of around the machinations of a would-be fascist dicta- the initial ridiculousness of pondering higher educa- tor—the imperishable Roderick Spode and his army tion as simply an “industry support model”. of Black Shorts. Spode’s aura of masculine authority Sometimes the authors’ haste to make a point is eventually dispelled when it’s discovered that his comes at the cost of humour altogether. Here is a wealth is derived from his talents as a designer of condensed version of a sermon Grafton delivers when lady’s underwear. Here a serious point is concealed he finds himself on a panel with ideologues Right in a ridiculous plot development. Without spelling and Left to discuss the parlous state of education: it out or distracting us from the inherent absurdity of the plot, Wodehouse gestures to the link between The one sober voice in the ever-maddening the emasculated and the over-masculine in fascist crowd was Grafton’s. Trigger warnings, he said, politics. The denouement of So Far, So Good lacks risked becoming a form of censorship, how quite so finely made a satirical point. could they not. They were the sort of over-the- In any event, to say that So Far, So Good is top middle-class soft-left indulgence that only only half as good as the best of Kingsley Amis or succeeded in irritating fair minded, ordinary P.G. Wodehouse is still to say that it is quite good people. But he also distanced himself from the indeed—and I don’t imagine its authors would mind right-wing reactionaries on the panel by pointing being regarded in that light. Parodying political out that profit-driven education had increased developments that already seem to be parodies debt and disenchantment among the young cannot be easy work, and the authors have made a … if you turned universities into businesses, good attempt at many of them without necessarily education into a product, and students into hitting any one square on. But our cultural discourse fee-paying clients and customers, you shouldn’t today hardly suffers from a surfeit of wit and irony—

Quadrant September 2018 85 Books and deflating the humourless pretensions of political much higher. The colonial assumption was that fantasists is a job that’s never done. To this end, I there was abundant land for all. The law provided do hope that Dr Professor Grafton Everest soon equal rights for the Aborigines. returns to the scene. And it is not just the Aborigines. Like many other writers, and perhaps most people, these Edward Cranswick is a Melbourne writer. He tweets authors seem ill at with the foundation years at @edwardthecran. before about 1850. It is partly the relative scarcity of written records, but also the strangeness of a land where Aborigines, convicts and newcomers alike were all unsure of what to make of this suddenly burgeoning new, alien society, all but townless and Robert Murr ay trackless; it seems to bamboozle writers too. At first the squatters had only grazing licences Country Gents with “run” boundaries vague and customary. After 1847 they had leases over public land, with defined The Vanished Land: Disappearing Dynasties terms and boundaries, the Aborigines retaining of Victoria’s Western District “hunting and roaming” rights. Western District by Richard Zachariah leases were similar in size to those elsewhere. Wakefield, 2017, 316 pages, $34.95 Zachariah is as vague as anybody else in guessing what happened to the Aborigines. Narrapumelap: A Pastoral History The alleged “grab” came a generation later, when by Jennifer F. O’Donnell the Western District squatters were better than Published by the author (available from the most Victorian squatters at beating off the selec- Royal Historical Society of Victoria), 2018, tion rush of the 1860s and 1870s by converting much 141 pages, $30 of their vast leases—usually something like 30,000 acres (12,000 hectares)—into freehold. A “small ocal histories used to begin by saying that the man” could have got by on a few hundred acres. XYZ Aboriginal people first inhabited the dis- The early squatters had lucked into some of the trict.L They then disappeared from the story, and best grazing land on earth, an immense grassy plain pioneering white pastoralists and then councils and with just the right weather and volcanic soil. They dignitaries became the story. Nowadays the author also included some very skilled livestock breeders. tells us tearfully that the XYZ people were dispos- These advantages gave them the financial strength, sessed, and hints at white pioneer responsibility along with steely proprietorial ambition and often for this. There might be a brief lecture about other ruthlessness, to rort the rules. Zachariah touches people forgetting or being silently guilty. The writer briefly on this. then proceeds with the main, white story. Richard Zachariah is better than many of his Both these otherwise good books about south- contemporaries, but still struggles with this period. western Victoria, officially and proudly known as It contrasts with, later, some fine, resonating prose the Western District, have these modern token about the past hundred years or so. He all but mentions of the Aborigines. They should have ignores the “cross-Straiters” from Van Diemen’s done better, even if with only an extra page or two. Land who pioneered grazing in these parts around There is quite a lot of readily available information 1838, bringing with them superior sheep and ex-con- about the indigenous people there, especially the vict workers, as well as sometimes convict ancestry Gunditjmara, who have certainly not disappeared, of their own. Instead he concentrates on the Scots, but the writers seem unaware of it, even in their dis- who others have estimated at about 35 per cent of appointingly thin bibliographies. the pioneer early squatters there—about twice their Richard Zachariah says: “The squatters dispos- proportion in the overall overseas-born population sessed the Indigenous peoples of an area bigger of early Australia, but not the majority he suggests. than England in just six years after 1836. It was a Zachariah is not the first to strive for colour land grab of enormous scale …” No. The Western by exaggerating ethnicity. He throws in an over- District is about half the size of England. Dispossess done jumble of Scottish clichés: stern Calvinism, and land grab are fuzzy words. The Aboriginal pop- Highland clearances, fleeing oppressive, or even ulation of Victoria when white settlement arrived in “British” landlords. Even the Border wars of cen- 1835 is estimated at 10,000, so that of the Western turies earlier send them scuttling to the Antipodes. District would have been perhaps 3000 and in 1843 This is all a small part of the book, but important the white settler population would not have been because it is so common and easily parroted by others,

86 Quadrant September 2018 Books including the media, yet it is about the distinctive Zachariah’s flair. Narrapumelap: A Pastoral History, beginning days of our society. An ABC presenter, is a study of one estate, on the Hopkins River mid- in an interview with Zachariah, quickly drew the way between Ballarat and Hamilton. The name, conclusion that the landlords cleared them out of from the local language, means a string of muddy Scotland, so they then cleared out the Aborigines. water holes. The main Highland Clearances occurred before The founder appears to be John Dickson most Scots began arriving in the 1840s. Most of the Wyselaskie, who took it up in 1841. Wyselaskie squatters were from established, middling farm- was born in Scotland, but his father may have been ing families in the Lowlands, often buying embryo Polish. With “access to capital”, he emigrated in stations from Van Diemenslanders, who had been 1836, at nineteen, to join an uncle’s business in Van more often behind the fairly limited conflict with Diemen’s Land, and crossed the Strait in the rush of the indigenous people. Often these Scots had home 1838 to seek grazing land for the firm. Unlike some capital behind them, allowing a flying start. contemporaries, “convict contamination” did not Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, like some of bother him. He belonged to a squatter group who my forebears, often poor or very poor, were more organised to bring across emancipated convicts as likely to come as assisted immigrants, sponsored by badly needed station workers; to them anti-convict employers to provide station workers and supple- prejudice was “claptrap”. ment the ex-convicts. Like most emigrants, they At the peak, Wyselaskie leased 40,000 acres. came for economic and personal opportunity and Playing the rorting game, he beat off serious selectors space, not fleeing anybody. Some a generation later to keep about 25,000 acres as freehold. O’Donnell became selectors, beginning their own farms. names some of the “dummy” selectors he used to Zachariah seems to love the place. He came to lock up his run. A cut in his domain of less than half the Western District in 1953, aged eight, when his was hardly a cut at all, since freehold allowed much father was appointed principal of the Hamilton and more development. Western District College. This was the time of the He married at forty-four the adopted Hobart- wool boom of the Korean War period, which made born daughter of the local Wickliffe publican. They many already rich graziers very rich, and a squat- had no children. Wyselaskie had started in a slab ter might carry the sheep dogs in his Rolls Royce. hut, but in the 1870s they built the stately, ornately The book’s title refers to the decline since the boom, towered Narrapumelap bluestone homestead, with with estates broken up, more absentee, overseas, stained-glass windows, fifteen rooms, a long avenue hobbyist or corporate new owners, more tree plan- of trees and a garden designed by Ferdinand von tations and cropping. Mueller. They also had a St Kilda town house, a grand Zachariah acknowledges the inequalities, the Victorian mansion on The Esplanade. Wyselaskie social cachet, cliquiness and snobbishness, the died in 1883, then and earlier a munificent benefac- grand bluestone mansions (some now decaying) and tor, especially to the University of Melbourne. sometimes slightly plummy accents, the intermar- The new owner was Gerald Buckley, then twenty- riages with Toorak, the Melbourne Club, the black- seven, Toorak-born son of Mars Buckley, the Irish tie dinners of not so long ago. But he also presents founder of Buckley & Nunn, the Melbourne depart- them as people, nice and less so, good or not so good ment store (now David Jones). He lived lavishly as farmers, punching above their weight in the Liberal a “country squire” there until he died, also child- (not National) Party, good or not so good commu- less, in 1935. The property was gradually subdivided. nity contributors. Buckley was also a generous benefactor (but led the Much of his book is based on interviews with district with non-union shearers in the 1890s). the landholders themselves, and their memories, Jennifer O’Donnell specialises in historic house and with those who worked with or for them or history, and much of the book is about the home- came after them. It is a promising formula for future stead, which was abandoned, vandalised and crum- local history. It can be real country yarning. You can bled into decrepitude. The present owner, Kevin almost smell the sheep dung and hay, the road dust McIntyre, has restored it in recent decades, with and gum leaves. help from the National Trust and others. There are lots of good coloured photographs. ennifer O’Donnell is also scrappy about the Aborigines, but quotes a figure of 645 of them Robert Murray is the author of The Making of Jliving in the Western District in 1863 and brief ref- Australia: A Concise History (Rosenberg). His erences to them living in the district or “employed grandfather and great-grandfather worked as shearers on pastoral stations”. and fencers on Narrapumelap and neighbouring She has a fine eye for detail, though less of stations to supplement their farming.

Quadrant September 2018 87 Joe Dolce

Michael Portillo’s Homage to Victorian Britain

our years after he effectively retired from a for BBC Two. He went on to present other travel long career in politics, Michael Portillo nar- documentaries of this nature, including Great rated a popular series for BBC Two titled Continental Railway Journeys and Great American FGreat British Railway Journeys. Travelling around Railroad Journeys. Britain by train, Portillo followed a descriptive Stuart Heritage said in the Guardian: nineteenth-century railways guide written by George Bradshaw. He wanted to see what remained I have a small apology to make. A little over a of the Britain that Bradshaw had written about year ago, confronted by a new series of Great during the industrial revolution, and the continu- Continental Railway Journeys, I wrote a piece ing effect today of the technology and engineering confessing that I couldn’t stand its presenter. that made it possible, during the era when Britain Michael Portillo, I said, seemed slimy and ill was the world’s leading commercial nation. at ease on camera. I said he looked lacquered, Portillo had been a Conservative cabinet min- that he dressed like an early 1990s gameshow ister, serving as Minister of State for Transport contestant. The show itself was great, but under Margaret Thatcher and Secretary of State I argued that this was despite Portillo, not for Defence under John Major. Later, he was because of him. involved in a controversy over a gay relationship he But now I’m here to apologise. I’ve been had had in the 1970s. A businessman called Nigel watching Portillo’s new series Great American Hart claimed to have been in an eight-year affair Railroad Journeys … and, as much as it pains me with him that ended only when Portillo decided to to admit this, I got it wrong. Portillo is actually marry. Portillo said it had only been an experimen- a weirdly compelling host. In fact, there might tal fling during his Cambridge years, long before not be a presenter as gleefully unselfconscious his political career, but Hart, in an Oscar Wildean working today. Watch any of his train shows comment, replied that Portillo was: “being some- and his passion for their twin subjects—railways what economical with the actualité”. and history—is evident. Portillo retained his popularity throughout the media storm, standing for the leadership of the This article will give an introduction, and Conservatives in 2001, coming in third. He left the highlights, to Series One of Great British Railway House of Commons in 2005, to pursue media, tel- Journeys. But first, a little about the inspiration for evision and radio opportunities. the program, Bradshaw’s Handbook, of which Punch Three years before, Portillo had presented a said in 1865, “Seldom has the gigantic intellect of one-off episode, for BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, man been employed upon a work of greater utility.” titled “Granada to Salamanca”, which illuminated his little-known Spanish roots. Portillo was born eorge Bradshaw was born in Salford in in Hertfordshire, but his father had left Spain 1801, and worked in Belfast as a printer when the Republicans lost the Spanish Civil War. Gand engraver. He returned to England in 1827 to Portillo’s mother was Scottish and her father was become a map-maker, creating Bradshaw’s Maps a wealthy linen-mill owner, John Blyth, from of Inland Navigation, detailing the Lancashire and Kirkcaldy. Portillo’s Spanish passport lists him as Yorkshire canal system. Miguel Portillo (pronounced por-tee-yo) Blyth. When Parliament passed legislation that all Beginning in 2009, using the 1863 Bradshaw, he railway companies had to run at least one train a hosted nine series of Great British Railway Journeys day at affordable rates, Bradshaw saw the need for a

88 Quadrant September 2018 Michael Portillo’s Homage to Victorian Britain uniform railways guide to help people navigate the what we are today, but also to appreciate how much difficulties of time-management in the new public we’ve changed since.” transport system. The first journey is the Liverpool-to-Scarborough Manchester was where the first railways time- line, the oldest railway line in Britain. Liverpool tables started. But time had not yet been stand- was the second-largest port, after London, in the ardised, and until Greenwich Mean Time, chaos 1800s, and this line was designed to take cotton reigned between the multiple railway company from Liverpool’s docks to Manchester’s mills. timetables. Bradshaw gathered all of them together Like many busy ports it was an immigration hub, into one handy guide, interwoven with timeless and Jews made up 10 per cent of the population— insights of Victorian England: Liverpool had seven Jewish mayors—but now com- prise less than 1 per cent. When the great fire of 1666 destroyed almost Portillo learns the “scouse” dialect in Liverpool. the whole city within the walls, London He then walks us through Birkenhead Park, possessed an architect worthy of raising the designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, which inspired fallen capital from her ashes. But the citizens the American landscape architect Frederick Law rejected the beautiful plan of Sir Christopher Olmsted in his design of New York’s Central Park Wren, who proposed to make St Paul’s the in 1850. Olmsted wrote: centre of the metropolis, and to carry spacious streets radiating in direct lines to the principal Five minutes of admiration, and a few more parts of the suburbs. spent studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so The handbook was legendary in its own time. much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in Phileas Fogg mentioned it in Around the World in democratic America there was nothing to be Eighty Days, and Sherlock Holmes referred to it. thought of as comparable with this People’s A religious man, Bradshaw originally followed Garden. the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg but later became a Quaker. His description of Westminster Manchester evolved from the civilian settlement Abbey is transcendental: of the Roman fort of Mamucium, and was known, in Bradshaw’s day, as Cottonopolis, the heart of It is in the Poets’ Corner, however, that the the cotton trade. The Cotton Lords ruled from the pilgrim’s footsteps most fondly linger. It is there Cotton Cathedral where the trading was done. The that his eyes trace and retrace names, and study Manchester Evening News wrote: “On the top of the lineaments, connected with his sublimest and spire [of the Town Hall] is a golden ball with spikes tenderest associations. No place in the world symbolising a cotton bud about to burst, but also is so capable of recalling to “memory’s light” the sun, for wherever the sun shone Manchester so many associations connected with whatever had business ...” is most god-like in human genius … Which Fives miles east of metropolitan Manchester, in is there of modern times that can boast such a Denton, there had once been ninety hat factories name as Shakspeare [sic]? Where shall we look employing half the population. The railways made for the counter-part of the divine Milton? The commuting possible and changed the fortunes of monuments of the Poets’ Corner are blackened people living outside the town centres. by time, but the memory of those to whom In Todmorden, Portillo goes up in the Network they are sacred is still … “that venerable shrine Rail Helicopter, which employs infrared cameras where repose the ashes of our patriots, poets, to safety-inspect Britain’s 20,000 miles of track. In and sages”. Victorian times, linemen carrying lanterns had to walk the tracks at night to do this. Bradshaw died in 1842, in Norway, of Asiatic In Pontefract, we meet the last licorice grower. cholera. Six hundred years ago, licorice was imported from Spain and cultivated by monks. It is still referred n 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.” to locally as a stick of Spanish. The sweet root is Thus Michael Portillo introduces Great British chewed, and Queen Victoria was so fond of it it “RailwayI Journeys. Over the course of the first series, destroyed her teeth. he travels on four distinct routes, to arrive at his The nearby town of Hull once possessed a fleet final destination in London. He aims, he says, “To of sixty whaling ships, the largest in Britain. Up to view Britain through the proud and prudish eyes of twenty fish-trains a day took sea-fish inland. The the Victorians and to learn how much they made us railway was responsible for the spread of fish-and-

Quadrant September 2018 89 Michael Portillo’s Homage to Victorian Britain chips as the “national dish”. Before then, inland He passes through Grasmere in the Lake people had had little access to sea-fish. District, where private steamboats were once hired In seaside towns like Filey, the arrival of the by the wealthy. Wordsworth lived there for four- railways turned old fishing villages into popular teen years, in Dove Cottage. His entire family is resorts. The distinctive knitting of the Filey blue buried in the churchyard of St Oswald’s. Coleridge fishermen’s “ganseys”, worn against the skin, incor- is said to have written some of “The Rime of the porated distinctive patterns. Tony Green, of the Ancient Mariner” while walking the fells. Filey Bay Research Group, said: On the approach to Scotland, Portillo talks of the wild clansmen of Carlisle, the Border Reivers. The intricate patterns knitted into the gansey For seven hundred years, the English and the stylistically represent ropes, pebbles on the Scots argued over the boundary. Reiver families shore and the ups and downs of life. Other sprang up, without allegiance to either England or fishing villages used different patterns, thus Scotland, only to their clans. Official law and jus- when a body was washed up on the shore, it tice were non-existent. was possible to tell from which village the The next stop is Gretna Green, still popular for drowned person came from. As each family had its “fugitive” weddings, and known as the “town “mistakes” incorporated into the style for each built on love”. Couples forbidden to marry in member of the family, it was possible to tell England could wed here because of Scotland’s more exactly who the person was. liberal marriage laws. The local blacksmith’s anvil became the symbol of strong weddings and the he second of Portillo’s journeys is the Preston- good-luck clang lingers on: a sixth of all Scottish to-Kirkcaldy line. There were once fifty cotton weddings still occur here. Tmills in Preston. It was also the home of the early During the First World War, due to its remote- temperance movement. In the 1900s, one out of ten ness Gretna Green became the site of the United took the pledge: total abstinence. Kingdom’s largest cordite factory. “Devil’s por- Portillo boards the Blackpool Belle, a line known ridge”, a combination of nitroglycerine and cotton, for romance. Nineteenth-century couples would used in shells, was produced in quantity, mostly often meet on board. Light-globes were removed mixed by women, resulting in discoloured teeth from overhead booths for privacy (the entire train and orange hair. Workers became known as “canary went dark) and replaced just before arrival at the girls” because of their yellow skin from frequent destination. Blackpool was a holiday spot created contact with sulphur. by the railways. Local entertainers wrote songs Portillo goes on to Lockerbie, which in 1988 felt about Bradshaw: the fallout from a terrorist attack. Transatlantic flight PanAm 103, from Frankfurt to Detroit via I had to make a journey a little while ago, London, was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 Somewhere down the Midland Counties, you passengers and sixteen crew. Large sections of must know; the aircraft crashed onto the residential areas of A charming little creature was seated by my Lockerbie, killing eleven residents on the ground. side, Lockerbie had suffered another horrendous Who asked if I would lend her my Bradshaw’s accident in 1915, when a troop train crashed into Guide. two other trains. There was a ball of fire and 227 men died. The blame was placed on signalmen. The Portillo then walks across Morecambe Bay, the accident was under-reported, due to war censorship, largest expanse of tidal mudflats in Britain, requir- but it led to the banning of gas lighting on trains. ing the assistance of a “government guide”, due Portillo finally arrives in Edinburgh, where to dangerous quicksand. Tourists have perished nearby Fife was the home of his grandfather, John attempting this unaccompanied at low tide. Waldegrave Blyth, a prosperous linen merchant The town of Settle is special to Portillo, as he and art collector. was instrumental in saving its rail line from clo- In the foreword to the book The Taste of J.W. sure by British Rail in the 1980s. The viaducts were Blyth, Portillo writes: falling apart and patronage was low. Portillo con- sidered it historically important, and persuaded I knew my grandfather ... and he played with Margaret Thatcher, another history buff, to inter- us well, especially when we went to the linen vene. The resulting publicity resulted in ticket sales factory ... and he could wheel us around on the of 300,000 a year. Portillo considers this his most trolleys that had once moved product … When satisfying achievement in public service. we descended wearily from the overnight train

90 Quadrant September 2018 Michael Portillo’s Homage to Victorian Britain

from London, having spent the night in its on Green Power and renewable energies. Taxis cheapest seats, a chauffeur in double-breasted run on recycled cooking oil. Totnes has its own coat, peaked cap and massive driving gloves, currency, the Totnes Pound (equal to one British was there to whisk us in a monogrammed pound), whose purpose is to encourage people to Daimler to breakfast … even then, the buy locally and keep money in the town. Signs in paintings were what drew my naive attention … the windows of eighty shops say, “Totnes Pounds [he] had a passionate commitment to Scottish accepted here”. artists. He collected them, befriended them and In St Austell, Portillo goes down into the fought for them to be recognized. Littlejohn’s Clay pit mine, 500 acres in extent, still in service after 180 years. Its chinastone clay, due to Blyth’s collection of artworks, at the time of his its durability and brilliant white colour, is in great death in 1962, included eighty-four Peploes, forty- demand in the manufacture of paper. five McTaggarts and twenty-four Sickerts. St Ives is next, named after Saint Ia of Cornwall, a fifth-century Irish princess and martyr. The leg- he Swindon-to-Penzance line, our third jour- end is that Ia was grief-stricken, praying by the ney, was once known as the “holiday line”. sea, when she saw a leaf floating on the water. BeforeT railways, seaside escapes were rare for She touched it with a stick and it began to grow, average people. Trains changed the way people and carried her across the Irish Sea to Cornwall vacationed. where she founded a parish. St Ives The town of Swindon was the started attracting artists in great headquarters of the Great Western or the most numbers in 1877 following the rail Railway and the trains were built F extension to West Cornwall, and there by Isambard Kingdom part, the visionary later fostered an artist’s colony, Brunel, who also designed dock- infrastructure put which sprung up after the First yards, bridges, tunnels and the World War. first propeller-driven transatlantic in place during steamship. The company estab- the Victorian ourney Four, the Buxton-to- lished thousands of houses for industrial revolution London line, begins in the spa workers and their families, and townJ of Buxton, Derbyshire, three-quarters of the town was still remains: the where warm springs were first dis- employed by the railway. Every railway system, the covered in nearby Matlock Bath in July workers were offered “free trip” 1698. Lord Byron was a frequent month—no fares were charged and factory system, the visitor, dubbing the area “Little the town stopped for a week. communications and Switzerland”. One of the spots that workers banking systems. Portillo investigates the Peak and their families visited was Bath. District and the dark moorlands, Before trains, only the wealthy which have been inhabited from could afford to “take the waters” at the Roman- the Mesolithic era. They are a tragic illustration built bathhouses; the water was said to have heal- of how pollution from the industrial revolution is ing powers. affecting the present generation, with fatal damage Further on, Portillo visits Cheddar, the home of to the peat bog due to acidic rain from the many Cheddar cheese, created from local ingredients and coal-fired cotton, lead smelting and timber mills left to mature underground in a labyrinth of caves that once commanded the area. in Cheddar Gorge. A complete 9000-year-old set Two hundred and forty years ago, there were of bones, Cheddar Man, was found in Gough’s no factories. In Cromford, Portillo visits the old- Cave in 1903, and remains Britain’s oldest complete est one still in service, an example of the modern skeleton. mass production system designed by Sir Richard On to Weston-super-Mare, and Birnbeck Pier, Arkwright, whose skills of organisation combined one of the oldest piers in Britain. In the Second power, machinery, semi-skilled labour and the new World War the pier was taken over by the Directorate raw material of cotton to create yarn for the masses. of Miscellaneous Weapons Development, and re- Portillo explores Birmingham, Britain’s second- christened HMS Birnbeck. The “Bouncing Bomb”, largest city, which was almost destroyed in the designed to skip to a target across water to avoid Second World War during the Birmingham Blitz. torpedo nets, was developed and tested here, as the Ugly structures were hastily put up to replace lost pier allowed access to deep water. buildings, but the town is now renovating its cul- Portillo stops in nearby Totnes, a town focused tural history.

Quadrant September 2018 91 Michael Portillo’s Homage to Victorian Britain

In nearby Bournville, the home of Cadbury trial revolution still remains: the railway system, chocolate, he finds an isolated fishbowl of his- the factory system, the communications and bank- tory. George Bradshaw, with his Quaker beliefs, ing systems. Yet, as Portillo notes, “nothing dates would have felt at home here. George and Richard faster than yesterday’s view of the future”. Cadbury came from a wealthy Quaker family, and Professor Robert Allen, of Nuffield College, designed the town as a sustainable model commu- Oxford, believes the industrial revolution was nity. With their strict religious upbringing, attend- invented in Britain in the eighteenth century ing university was denied to them, but capitalism “because that was where it paid to invent it”. It was not. was a successful response to the emergence of a Quakers forbid the drinking of alcohol, and no global economy. In his book The British Industrial pub has ever been built in Bournville. Sir Dominic Revolution in Global Perspective, Allen writes: Cadbury, the last member of the dynasty to sit on the company’s board, advocated “Quaker capital- This was a two-step process. In the late ism” and values to help companies to regain their sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a moral compass. He said Quakers “saw their busi- European-wide market emerged. England took ness as a means to build a better world and their a commanding position in this new order as wealth as an asset to be used for the improvement her wool textile industry out-competed the of their communities and society”. established producers in Italy and the Low Bradshaw’s Quaker beliefs can also be seen in Countries. England extended her lead in the the early editions of his handbook, when he avoided late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries using the names of months and days, which were by creating an intercontinental trading based on pagan deities, instead substituting “First network, including the Americas and India. month” for January, “First day” for Sunday, and so Intercontinental trade expansion depended on on. the acquisition of colonies, mercantilist trade Portillo disembarks in Coventry, walking promotion and naval power. through the ruins of St Michael’s Cathedral, built in the fourteenth century, but destroyed during the London exploded from a population of 50,000 Coventry Blitz of 1940. The Luftwaffe bombarded in 1500, to one million in 1800, and nine million the city, leaving 500 dead. One survivor commented, in 2016. “You could chew the dust.” Sir Basil Spence under- One clear change Portillo observes is that many took the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, incor- towns are returning to localised production, individ- porating the rubble of the ruined church into the ual expression and creativity, and conscious efforts new structure so that the new appeared to rise from towards keeping small businesses alive in their the old. communities. Railways once brought milk, sea-fish In Aylesbury, Portillo visits Hartwell House, a and other food to hard-to-reach communities, but property first mentioned in 1086 in the Domesday now, in many places throughout Britain, it is almost Book. He stops in Watford Junction and we hear reverse-motion—emphasis on things locally grown about the London evacuation of 1939, when trains and made. Paradoxically, this also means a return helped transport 1.5 million London children to to one of the strengths of Bradshaw’s Britain: pride safety. In St Pancras, he visits the Renaissance in unique individual creative output—quality over London Hotel and Railway Station, saved from quantity. For instance, in Walsall today, one sad- demolition by a group that included the poet John dler makes only two or three custom saddles per Betjeman, who called the plan a “criminal folly”. A week, all the bits, from start to finish. statue of Betjeman was erected on the successful Portillo says, “Bradshaw told people: ‘Where reopening of the station in 2007. to travel, what to see and where to stay’,” and one thing that has not changed is that then, as now, the t is difficult to answer definitively Portillo’s fun- smallest towns sometimes have the richest stories. damental inquiry, “What remains of Bradshaw’s IBritain?” For the most part, the visionary infra- Joe Dolce reviewed the television series of John le structure put in place during the Victorian indus- Carré’s The Night Manager in the July-August issue.

92 Quadrant September 2018 Old Age

Judge Sisamnes was brought in front of his betters For selling justice. Sentence: to be skinned. I saw the Gerard David decades ago In Bruges. I returned to it time and again To see the details: how his scarlet coat Was dropped in a pile under the table While the workers cut his skin with care Like opening an envelope. One undid His breast’s buttons to show the red Of his person. How one put a knife Between his teeth white pulling, carefully at the skin Of his legs, like a a little too tight. As if a man’s skin should be shed. I returned Again to scrutinize the leg’s burning underskin Free of the dermis’s net, as nude As the citizens’ eyes, as they watched in silence. And I noticed the lap dog scratching a fleabite With its back leg, hoping, perhaps, for a drop of blood To lick. I stared at the soft leather shoe of the man on the right. Sisamnes is groaning through his teeth, neck sinews A rigging of pain. His executioners Are craftsmen, working slowly to prevent tearing The former judge’s thin skin. Like pulling a trout From its armour. The air Was like stinging nettles on his body’s wound. Old age is a martyrdom. Now I watch my father Struggling to walk as the skin on his soles Is too thin—like mermaids’ feet! I know of others Under the lash of that infidel, time—their tongues Cut out, yet they live, understand. Others have broken legs, Or hearts and survive or they’re in the baffling forest Of dementia and counting their blessings. When Sisamnes died, his son was set To sit in the judge’s chair, that skin Beneath him, leather. Each time His subjects came before him for justice, He burned on the throne of his shame.

Gwyneth Lewis Translated from Welsh by the author

Quadrant September 2018 93 John Whitworth

Words May Fly Abroad The Unique Career of J.L. Carr

Born at , educated at Carlton Miniott village Oh bear me back to Purbeck school in the North Riding and at Castleford Secondary And ever let me lie School. Teacher. RAF Officer, Headmaster, Publisher Where bells from ten tall belfries and Novelist. Author of Carr’s County Maps, over Sound faintly down the sky. ninety Pocket Books and eight novels. —From the Pocket Book on J.L. Carr He was also a sculptor (his garden was full of their spiky presence), footballer and cricketer—a t was that excellent, lisping dandy, Frank Muir, neat, dapper batsman of good club standard—map- the one who co-wrote Take It from Here, the maker (I’ll come to the maps later) and publisher. 1950s radio show, with Denis Norden—I lis- When he gave up teaching suddenly and for ever, Itened to it from the age of ten, on my crystal set— he needed an income. And the publishing supplied who introduced me to Jim Carr. He told us all to that. read The Harpole Report, Carr’s novel based very What did he publish? The ninety small books loosely on his experience as a primary school head- were mostly English poetry—Blake and Marvell master in Kettering. (That thing about the crystal went well, but he said he could not sell Pope or set is a dramatic truth but not true in any other way, Dryden to his countrymen at any price—but also something Carr himself went in for rather.) English Kings and Queens, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Let us start with his name. His Sunday Best Dictionary and, best of all to my mind, Extraordinary name was Joseph Lloyd Carr, the Joseph of which English Cricketers, containing entries like these: he soon got rid of. Joseph for Joseph Chamberlain and Lloyd for Lloyd George. Carr was quirky, like PERCY HOLMES, Yorks, d. 1971, an unusually them. “Jim” he invented. James is on the spine of his straight-backed opening bat who, in 1925, scored penultimate novel, What Hetty Did. The real Carr 2,453 runs. As he made his jaunty way from remains elusive. pavilion to wicket, discerning spectators received Schoolmaster and novelist. But also a poet with the impression that he was off for a day at the a Housman flavour: races, whilst his partner, Herbert Sutcliffe, had been called upon to lay an Aldermanic stone. A Deserted Cricket Field near Clifton He once described an innings on a broken, dusty pitch as like batting on Blackpool sands. Ah far off is that country HORACE, c. 1890, a horse of such exquisite And distant is that shire sensibility that, when Fred Morley, the invariable And long’s the road to Purbeck Isle Notts last man, left the Trent Bridge pavilion, he The land that I desire sidled unobtrusively towards the roller. The land I most admire. D.R. JARDINE, , d. 1958, sailed to Australia in 1932 to bring back the Ashes. And When I return to Purbeck he did. I think I know a tree Where bells from seven churches We can see from these entries that Carr had an And three across the sea exquisite style and the driest of wits. Can all be heard by me. ow for the novels. He wrote eight, none of But if I never come there them very long. The first two are rather stark, And far away must die Ncontaining violence and death. The later books tend

94 Quadrant September 2018 Words May Fly Abroad to be more benign. I remember shivering in the baffling heat. A Day in Summer, his first, was published in Then sobbing on and off until darkness fell, 1964 by Barrie and Rockliff, then by Quartet, then bringing the rain. Hogarth Press, and lastly by Jim himself. This pattern tends to be followed, which argues that the At such moments the author disappears, becomes first publishers printed very short print runs, not invisible, as I think Joyce says (though God knows, having much confidence in the books, and were he does not follow his own precept). later proved wrong. Carr didn’t help himself by never producing a similar book to his last, which is nd now we come to The Harpole Report (1972), what publishers like, forty Poirot books and forty Secker, Quartet, Penguin and Carr’s own Miss Marple books. Carr thought that would be QuinceA Tree Press, whose book I hold in my hand. boring. It contains wonderful photographs of Carr’s own Here is a paragraph from the middle of the book: school—Carr batting in the playground, children dancing round a maypole, all redolent of my own Faces turned towards the afternoon. The face of primary school in the early 1950s; I am sure there is Edward Bellenger, still as soon it would be in raffia work somewhere and the smell of plasticine. death, a blind drawn over a mind groping deeper It is here Carr begins his practice of and deeper into memories of a past summer, reintroducing characters from old novels. Croser, Herbert Ruskin’s face, like the face on a Roman the useless and idle young teacher, comes from A coin, lip trembling, eyelid twitching and, Day in Summer. The novel is told through letters sometimes, passing across it like a shadow, the and journals, a practice hallowed by time from the face of another man. eighteenth century. But it is difficult. Carr succeeds triumphantly. This is fine writing, writing designed to impress, The extract here tells part of the tale of Titus by a new writer feeling his way. And he does impress Fawcett, a clever and independent-minded boy, D.J. Taylor, a critic of distinction who speaks of who finds a different solution to an arithmetic “soured sweetness”. Good, but in my opinion no problem from the one at the back of the book, thus cigar. bringing down the wrath of his teacher, Mr Pintle, A Season in Sinji (1967) is the real thing, perhaps for whom authority is sacrosanct. You will doubtless partly because Carr draws on his experiences in the guess that Titus is proved right; the book’s author RAF in West Africa during the Second World War. later confesses that he made a mistake. One of the He knew the Catalina flying boat, which would teachers, Emma Foxberrow, describes the events in take off with “the ghastly scraping din under her a letter to her sister: keel, like a rake being dragged across a corrugated iron roof”. ... roaring noise from Jas. Pintle’s (One of the The first-person narration is more trenchant: Old School!) room, so went into my stockroom and pinned an ear to the party-wall. Perhaps I’ve given the impression that RAF Sinji “IF I SAY IT IS WRONG IT IS WRONG,” was a cross between a Butlin’s and Pentonville. Pintle is bellowing, plainly beside himself with Most of the time it was. But, for the record, rage. sometimes there was a moment—like the deep “But sir,” some boy replies in calm and roar of a kite overhead flying low as she comes reasonable tones, “I have gone through my in to glide down to the creek—when you felt a working three times and carefully checked each sudden thrill to be there, with but an obscure process ...” part, in this great catalogue of war. “BE STILL! I’LL HAVE NO MORE OF YOUR CONFOUNDED IMPERTINENCE. This is plain speaking. So, when at the end of the ANOTHER WORD AND BACK INTO book, the narrator speaks out in despair at the death THE CORRIDOR YOU GO. IF I SAY IT IS of Caroline, the girl he loves, we feel keenly his pain WRONG, IT IS WRONG.” Silence ... Mutiny and his anger: quelled. Ten minutes. More cries of rage. Hurry back Plan! There was no plan. You could organize to pin ear. Pintle bending slightly. “My answer- the little things and kid yourself there was book says it is wrong. So it is wrong. NO, YOU some system, but the big thing, Life itself, was MUST NOT DO IT AGAIN. It is plain your a sprawling, shapeless, disgusting mess. It had poor little brain cannot cope with it. Go on at about as much plan as a sow’s litter. No. 47.”

Quadrant September 2018 95 Words May Fly Abroad

An extract from Harpole’s journal follows: In the film the rendering of the painting is particularly fine. Firth, who was then relatively Found Titus Fawcett sitting in solitary state at a unknown, is superb as the shellshocked veteran desk in the upper corridor, looking surprisingly Birkin. calm in mind. He acknowledged my approach The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (1985) is set in with a mild smile and continued working. South Dakota, where Carr taught on exchange in “What is all this argy-bargy about?” I the 1930s. We can note in passing that each book demanded. takes three or four years, even though they are all “Mr Pintle and I had a disagreement,” he short, so we can say that Carr, like the medieval replied simply. artist, was a meticulous worker. This book gave him particular trouble, probably because it is Mr Pintle here appears in a ridiculous light, untransmuted autobiography. George Gidner is Jim but elsewhere he is treated with respect. Emma Carr or Jimmy as his pupils at Palisades called him. Foxberrow, the young Cambridge There is a photograph of Carr with graduate who upsets the apple cart his wife Sally and his son Bob in whenever she can, and George have arr didn’t help front of The Little School on the an affair and turn up in two more C Prairie on Jim’s second visit in 1987 books. himself by never to what, in Bob’s case, was The producing a similar Land of Ice Cream. ow Steeple Sinderby Wanderers What Hetty Did (1988) is probably Won the FA Cup (1975) is only book to his last, my second favourite of the novels. justH over a hundred pages long. It is which is what The character of Hetty, a teenage autobiographical inasmuch as Carr girl, is so attractive, so dauntless, did play for a local side which won publishers like, forty and George and Emma are back against the odds. “I dredged up Poirot books and again, as well as seventeen others. memories of 1930 when I was an forty Miss Marple Old Emma cries in the night unqualified teacher eighteen years because she has lost George for old and playing for South Milford books. Carr thought ever, but fear not, gentle reader. He White Rose when we won a final that would be boring. is there to sweep her off her feet. which never ended.” This was due Harpole and Foxberrow General to fighting among the spectators Publishers (1992) is Jim’s Tempest, the and pitch invasion, so football violence is no new calm after the storm, and his last word. He is back thing. in the printing office, where he began. George says Now we come to the book which made him to Hetty: famous, A Month in the Country (1980), which is the same length as Steeple Sinderby, more of a novella. Hetty dear, you ask what brought things to The fame is mainly because it was made into a a finish. Well ... I’m not sure. Anyway, not film in 1987 with Natasha Richardson and Colin absolutely sure. You see one thing seemed to Firth, which boosted Carr’s pay rate for fiction spring from another as though, in its ups and which, he said, “formerly stood at 17 p an hour”. I downs, our little business had a mind of its had always thought Carr’s fiction to be essentially own. As often as not, we didn’t need to agonize unfilmable, but it is a remarkably good film. The over decisions: inevitably there was no other tale is not really one of love, which is what films course but to hang on and hope all would be are usually about, but a painting which Birkin, the well. Then, without breast-beating, heart- protagonist, discovers under whitewash in the local burning, it came to a full stop. And no one church: seemed to mind. Anyhow, that’s how I saw it. Of course I It was the most extraordinary detail of a can’t answer for Emma. Who could? Emma medieval painting that I had ever seen, was Emma. Need I say more? anticipating the Breughels by a hundred years ... It was breathtaking. (Anyway, it took my nd that is that. Except that it isn’t. There is still breath.) A tremendous waterfall of colour, the the matter of those wonderful maps. I possess blues of the apex falling then seething into a theA one of Kent. It is not exactly a map, covered as it turbulence of red; like all truly great works is with people and places, all drawn meticulously by of art, hammering you with its whole before Jim Carr himself. There is the Cathedral. And there beguiling you with its parts. is Alfred Mynn, the Lion of Kent, twenty stone of

96 Quadrant September 2018 Words May Fly Abroad bone and muscle who could bat better than any man From this place Words may fly abroad in England and bowl too at a terrific pace. Buy one Not to perish as Waves of Sound but fix’d in Time, of those. And buy the books. And anything else Not corrupted by the hurrying Hand but verified in from Quince Tree Press that may take your fancy. Proof. All the Quince Tree Press books carry this Friend, you are on safe ground: reassuring inscription: This is a Printing Office.

This is a Printing Office, John Whitworth lives in Kent. He recommends The Cross-roads of Civilisation, Last Englishman (2003), Byron Rogers’s biography Refuge of all the Arts against the Ravages of Time. of Carr.

Distinguished Transported

Daniel Connor. Seven years for sheep stealing. One of largest landowners in central Perth. Jørgen Jørgensen. Eccentric Danish adventurer, declared himself ruler of Iceland, later became a spy in Britain. . Founded The Mercury newspaper. William Henry Groom. Politician, member of inaugural Australian Parliament. . Founder of Sydney Grammar School. Francis “” McNamara. Composer of convict ballads, including The Convict’s Tour to Hell. William Chopin. Chemist at the Colonial Hospital. Later convicted as abortionist. . Australia’s first Postmaster. . Australia’s first brewer. . Author of Australia’s first full-length autobiography and dictionary. . Youngest female convict (11 years of age), 21 children. At the time of her death, over 300 living descendants. John “Red” Kelly. Father of Ned Kelly.

Joe Dolce

Quadrant September 2018 97 Diana Figgis

Australia Cor Unum Literary Heartbeats from Turner, Unaipon, Neilson and Gilmore

thel Turner wrote Seven Little Australians read their books, their anthologies, for pleasure. in a house just up the road from me. “Well, But why mythologise the lives of Australian writ- bully for you.” That’s a voice in my head ers now dead? Why try to get to know them? Why Etalking. But it’s not my voice; it’s the voice of that ferret about in the letters they sent and received? practised spiritual ventriloquist, and my old adver- Why read what they’ve written in their fiction and sary—the Great Australian Put-Downer. poems and align it with events in their lives? My own voice is silent. But, just on the quiet, I’m happy to know that this girl, then in her early erhaps some day Australian writers will use twenties, lived at “Inglewood” between 1891 and Aboriginal myths and weave literature from 1894, before her family moved round the corner to them,“P the same way as other writers have done another house even closer to where I’m living. Her with the Roman, Greek, Norse and Arthurian novels had come to me early in life, as birthday legends.” Thus wrote David Unaipon in the mid- and Christmas presents, and from my mother’s 1920s. By then in his early fifties, he had written girlhood collection from the 1930s. down about thirty stories and essays, assembled Does it matter that Ethel Turner lived at from the vast store of Aboriginal legends and “Inglewood” between 1891 and 1894? Does it mat- traditions passed down through the generations ter that I know that? Does it matter that David by oral story-telling. His aim, he said, was “to Unaipon and John Shaw Neilson were born in the produce an enduring history of our customs, beliefs same year—1872—less than a couple of hundred and imaginings”. His work was published without miles from each other in South Australia? Or that attribution in 1930 in a collection titled Myths and they’re contemporaries of Ethel Turner, who was Legends of the Australian Aborigines. His stories born in Yorkshire? were not published under his own name until 2001, The collective consciousness of Australia—I am that is, more than seventy years after their original thinking about the nineteenth and early twenti- publication, and more than thirty years after his eth centuries—wasn’t the exclusive creation of death in 1967. The collection is titled Legendary writers, and the story of any individual can be a Tales of the Australian Aborigines. fascinating peephole into history. Letters of our Disregarding the question of acknowledgment soldiers and settlers, our own ancestors, have been of authorship, the fact remains that because of preserved—people can read them to discover the Unaipon these stories had at last been commit- mental ingredients that went into the making of ted to writing, in the English language, by some- the social landscape in which Australians now live. one who was born into the culture from whence That there is an appetite for doing so is shown by they came. Thanks to his endeavours, they were the fact that A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life, cover- in circulation among English speakers from 1930. ing the period in Australia from 1894, is never out Moreover, he wrote eloquently, with feeling and of print. charm. In the preface he says that when he was What does it matter to modern Australians that writing the stories down, he tried to use “the sim- our landscape is dotted with literary references, plest forms of expression in order that neither the places that our novelists and poets wrote about, meaning, nor the ‘atmosphere’ may be lost”. places in which they lived? On a practical level, we On the strength of these stories alone, his can milk their memory with festivals and prizes role as a bridge-builder between European and and streets named after them. In our leisure, we can Aboriginal Australians was, and therefore is, of

98 Quadrant September 2018 Australia Cor Unum immense importance, but this was in fact the way ity of the poetical lay between the native speech he lived his whole life. and the Gaelic, and was lost for want of shades of As he says in My Life Story: “I made my advent meaning in direct translation into English.” into this world in a native wurley along the banks In a letter John Shaw Neilson wrote to her in of the River Murray on Tailem Bend.” His earliest 1927 from Footscray—his correspondence to her is memories were of learning to track animals and always addressed “Dear Mrs Gilmore”—he raised to find honey and birds’ eggs, and to use the net the subject of the articles, and wrote that he was and the line to catch fish. He says that the com- “deeply interested ... I never saw it pointed out ing of the white man into tribal lands in the area before we had lost a great chance in our literature”. caused great disturbance, and acknowledges that The fact that Neilson was of Scottish stock, and the language barrier between the Europeans and had grown up in an era when some of the older Aborigines had blocked a proper understanding Scots and Irish in Australia were still speaking between them. Gaelic, may well have made him more open to the At seven he went to a mission school at Point potentialities revealed in Gilmore’s argument. Macleay, centred at Raukkan (“ancient meeting He had grown up in a strict Presbyterian house- place”), for thousands of years an hold where music was an integral important site of assembly for the part of household life—hymns Ngarrindjeri. Of his education at and border ballads on piano and the mission he writes that he “there At the mission violin. “Music means so much in entered a new mental world”. he “entered a new verse, and, in many a thing beside,” He read voraciously in English, he wrote to “a brother Rhymer”, including scientific journals, and mental world”. He Victor Kennedy, in 1916. “Repeat was eventually appointed the read voraciously in your lines over and over till you get church organist at Point Macleay. weight in the right places. If you He could see the beauty in both English, including listen to a band you will get some cultures. He had respect for both. scientific journals, notion of this.” Of all the poets he read, Milton From his early teens, Neilson became his favourite. His strong and was eventually was a manual worker in the bush, Christian beliefs co-existed with appointed the struggling with drought on his his indigenous spirituality. In an family’s selections or else as an essay in the collection, “Panp Parl church organist at employee, land-clearing, timber- Lowa: Spirit of Help among the Point Macleay. cutting, stone quarrying, sowing Aborigines”, he points out that and harvesting, living much of the the Golden Rule is the foundation time in tents and navvy camps. of indigenous social and religious life. Under the The critic and publisher A.G. Stephens recalled heading “Belief of the Aborigine in a Great Spirit”, in correspondence with a teacher, Kate Baker, that he writes: on reading one of Neilson’s early poems, he had been “struck by the sympathy, the truth, the heart The belief in a Supreme Being ... is universal in it”. Neilson, writing to the poet and author and belongs to every age ... Wonderful is the James Devaney from Footscray in 1934, by which soul of Man. A capacity for the Great Spirit time he was in his sixties, described the way in of the Eternal God ... Man is a worshipping which poems came to him in his itinerant days. He creature irrespective of colour, language or might be sitting on a “quiet hack” and would start clime. humming a tune he knew. Then he would try to make one up, fail and, “as a sort of consolation to n October and November 1927—that is, halfway my wounded pride I would start to make a rhyme”. between the time David Unaipon wrote the sto- “Let your song be delicate ... Let your voice be riesI and the time of their publication—a series of delicate” was the poetic exhortation of a man who, articles appeared in the Saturday Sydney Morning at the time he penned it, was in the thick of hard Herald headed “Our Lost Field”, written by Mary bush labour. In that same period of his life, in a let- Gilmore. In the articles, she argued for the greater ter to the editor of the 1906 Anthology of Australian incorporation of Aboriginal words into Australian Verse, Neilson nominated among the three poems writing. She said that her father, when translat- in the collection he liked best “Trembling Star” by ing Aboriginal language into English, used Gaelic Ethel Turner, which she had described in her 1898 as the intermediary language. “My father always journal as “a Child Song”. One can see its appeal translated this way,” she wrote, “as he said the affin- to him in its sweet economy:

Quadrant September 2018 99 Australia Cor Unum

And nowhere yet in all that young night sky published in 1924. Nicola and her family, includ- Was any star, ing a brother, Rhys, returned from war service, But one that hung above the sea. Not high, live on a farm at some unspecified distance from Nor very far Sydney. Among other tasks, her father spends his Away ... days swinging a mattock, trying to shore up the soil on the hill on which the farm is situated, and In “For a Child” Neilson writes: he requires hard physical work from his family as well. At dinner he sits reading Carlyle’s history of The sunbeam, the moon-mist, the French Revolution. In Rhys’s words, Nicola, just Were one with you turned fifteen at the outset of the novel, is “eating And all the sighing bloom her heart out up here with loneliness. Has never That takes the dew. seen a city. Has never been anywhere.” She has no novels on the hill: sometimes there’s “an odd chap- Mary Gilmore’s phrase “the affinity of the poeti- ter” in newspapers—in one case, in scraps of news- cal” comes to mind. paper wrapped around some cooking apples that And one can trace another kind of affinity came from Tasmania. She reads her father’s ency- between the two because, while Ethel Turner lived clopedias and Trevelyan’s three volumes on the life a town life, marrying a barrister in 1896, her novels of Garibaldi. She is given the opportunity to visit include themes and characters reflecting the reality Sydney for a week. The experience triggers in her a of life for those in Australia on the land, including desire, once back on the hill, to continue in writing Neilson. the conversations she has started in the city. When In December 1912, he responds to a letter from she runs out of space in exercise books, she writes Mary Gilmore, in which she has mentioned prob- on brown paper. Once the watered-down ink supply lems with her eyes, by telling her he too has had to dries up, and all available pen-nibs have been worn curtail his reading due to weak eyesight. “The bush out, she resorts to a fowl quill and inkweed. And, is dreadfully monotonous when one can’t read,” after all, it’s not her city experience which continues he says. “In your writings I have noticed your love to fuel her writing, but the natural world which sur- of books. Books are really other people’s mind[s] rounds her. spread out before us.” My answer to my original inquiry: “Why In a letter to Mary Gilmore in 1922 he writes: bother getting to know the life stories of writers in Australia?” can only be this: by observing how all As one who is not very fond of company, and the tributaries of each individual’s thinking found who has lived in rather lonely places, I think its way to all the others, we see that, collectively, the value of Solitude has been altogether their biographies coalesce into a cohesive, unique overboomed. It is no wonder that people, and moving tale, often a poignant one, that can especially women, crowd into the cities. make the place a whole lot more interesting. Our People who write in praise of the Bush literary pantheon can be an influence for good to rather hysterically often keep very comfortable this day. In getting to know these people, we can jobs in up to date towns ... Closer settlement is feel the heart of Australia beating. We may even what we want. find our own heart beating right along.

The hunger for books, the loneliness, the dis- Diana Figgis lives in Sydney. She contributed the comforts and inconvenience of bush life—all these story-essay “The Vision Splendid of Charles Haddon themes appear in Ethel Turner’s novel Nicola Silver, Chambers” to the July-August issue.

Haiku

expanding world our grandson empties the toy box

Gary Hotham

100 Quadrant September 2018 Beyond Posterity

My aunt, the architect, left monuments to herself throughout the district where we lived, a wealth of great houses, a school, the church. Could she achieve immortality through the cool distinctive form of each brick-built structure? You’d assume a house would outlast words on paper, or a picture; in the past that was the case, of course: the buildings preserved for the future’s eye, the monasteries and forts autumnal sunlight, and passed on the bone-dry a house the local guide hilltops of Spain, the relics attributes to my aunt, I noticed in Rome and Palmyra, it had been destroyed; have survived to awe and perplex a heap of broken stone tourist and terror was all that remained group alike over centuries. of the archways and mezzanine Yet as I went levels, the shuttered down the street on one of those days windows in the asymmetric of pleasant façade; all of my aunt’s creation was reduced to brick dust and bent metal fragments as fragile, after all, as a sheet of paper, or a pile of ashes. The street would not be the same. Within a matter of weeks a featureless box had come to take the place of my aunt’s unique design. More such boxes had grown nearby. How long would it be before the church was gone beyond posterity?

Jamie Grant

Quadrant September 2018 101 David Mason

The Voice of Pablo Neruda

I live, I still live, and I think many of us live inside flawless saint; either you’re a libertarian or you’re a the world Neruda discovered. Stalinist; either you’re with us or you’re against us. —Ariel Dorfman Neruda frustrates contemporary appetites for cor- rectness and justice, and some readers will dismiss The voice is perhaps the most lasting incarnation of any him precisely on such limited grounds, as if the past existence ... It is in voices ... that the dead continue to could be purified to meet our astringent demands. live. To say Neruda was flawed is laughable. Humanity is —Alastair Reid flawed. That’s what makes us human. This solid new biography of Neruda by Mark There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to Eisner frets at the issue of reception. In an epilogue, the same goal: to convey to others what we are. Eisner quotes a handful of Chilean university stu- —Pablo Neruda dents—millennials in 2014, who sound a lot like my own students now. One of them offers, “Poetry that orty-five years after his death, Pablo Neruda’s idealizes the feminine image, highlighting only its poetry still has the power to astonish and physical attributes from a male perspective, doesn’t appal, awaken and chill us and leave us shak- work as well in the twenty-first century as it did Fing our heads in bafflement or respect. There is such before, at least for me and my friends.” It’s a perfectly breadth and profligate intelligence in the work, legitimate complaint that might help male poets which ranges from opaque surrealism to big-hearted find new ways of writing about erotic love—awfully populism to Pan-American epic to shocking propa- hard to do without an “object”. Yet the student is ganda, that one hardly knows where to place it in also erasing aspects of the past that do not conform our era of thwarted emotions. Clearly it is not of to present views, upheld by the authority of one gen- our time. Given Neruda’s relations with women, it eration’s perspective, and I can’t help feeling that, is certainly not of the time of #MeToo. The work somewhere, a living baby is being thrown out with will not always sit well beside a mature feminist the foul old bathwater. (This “presentism” comes in a consciousness, and of course it will not please ide- decade when the study of history on university cam- ologues who can’t tell one form of socialism from puses is at an all-time low.) Another student says, another. Neruda changed, and his circumstances “Neruda seems to be loaded with a basic machismo, changed. As a man he could be a monster of egotism good bourgeois taste with the Communist flag in and a courageous dissident, a purblind Stalinist and hand, and a pompous heroism that seems very far a Roosevelt democrat. His poetry incarnates these from us.” Very far from us. Again, I question any shifts and siftings and restless experiments. The past education that assumes its purpose is to reify the is a moving target. Poetry keeps it alive. present without trying to understand the past. A Neruda’s poetry is embodied, contradictory, third student opines, “In my opinion, Pablo Neruda expressing public and private iterations of the life of seems an ideal example of what’s happening today a man, but we live in a time straitjacketed by either- with the ‘authority figure’ in diverse subjects, like or thinking: either you’re a womaniser or you’re a politics and religion ... Neruda is the figure of a poet fallen from the heavens, a fallen angel, as certain truths about him have come to light and knocked Neruda: The Poet’s Calling him from his pedestal ... Neruda’s consecration as a by Mark Eisner poet is not enough in our culture now; his failings as Ecco Press, 2018, 640 pages, $52.99 a human being must also be acknowledged.”

102 Quadrant September 2018 The Voice of Pablo Neruda

Valid as these feelings may be, they arise from regarded as Whitman’s truest heir. The poet of Canto another fallacy—that admiration of a poet must per- General is a worthier rival than any other descendant force be consecration. Either-or. Between extremi- of Leaves of Grass.’” Bloom’s narrative of heirs and ties we run our course. If Neruda was turned into a anxieties is easy to dismiss, yet it accurately identi- posthumous object of veneration, that is hardly the fies a level of magnitude in Neruda’s accomplish- fault of his poetry. And his poetry means his voice ment. Nerudismo, to use a term of derision sometimes as a human being, which his friend and translator applied by Neruda’s own contemporaries, can feel Alastair Reid called “the most lasting legacy of any positively Whitmanesque: big-shouldered, open- existence”. We live in a time of absolutist judgments, armed. Yet Neruda as a teenager was producing gor- when as Auden put it, dead writers are “punished geous delicate love poems, and soon after that prose under a foreign code of conscience”. It’s inevitable, I of hermetic surrealism, and soon after that a poetry suppose: “The words of a dead man / Are modified with grand historical vision of a sort we’d be hard- in the guts of the living.” Yet even pressed to find in North America. our desire for just goals like diversity He had his phases of socialist real- too often denies diversity by polic- ven our desire ism, wrote a perfectly awful ode on ing the past, trying to cleanse it of E Stalin’s death, and accepted prizes anything incorrect or unseemly. We for just goals like from the Soviets, yet the great odes must be able to reside with human diversity too often and “thing poems” of his later years imperfection, critical but compas- are delightful. Did he contradict sionate and curious, or we will lose denies diversity by himself? Most certainly. Another the diversity of art. policing the past, poet I would compare him to is trying to cleanse it of Yeats, both for his public life and ustice for Pablo Neruda, and for his personal idiocies. Flawed men his readers, would be to acknowl- anything incorrect or who wrote some great poetry— edgeJ his sins without losing sight of unseemly. We must I wouldn’t want to live in a world his accomplishment—meaning his without them. voice. While writing this, I listened be able to reside with I knew Alastair Reid, the on YouTube to Neruda’s cultivated human imperfection. Scottish poet who superbly trans- tenor declaiming lines of his mas- lated Borges and Neruda—writers terpiece, “The Heights of Machu of the Right and the Left—and Picchu”, which some have called the greatest poem loved them both as men, loved their voices. Eisner of the Spanish language, and I found its rhythms quotes from Alastair’s memoir of these two men a compelling—big breaths of chanted sound. Here lovely anecdote of Neruda’s generosity: “Once, in are a few lines in Eisner’s translation: Paris, while I was explaining some liberty I had taken, he stopped me and put his hand on my Rise up and be born with me, brother. shoulder: ‘Alastair, don’t just translate my poems. I want you to improve them.’” Later, Alastair would From the deepest reaches of your write a very fine poem, “1973”, about Neruda dying disseminated sorrow, give me your hand. right at the moment the coup toppled Chile’s first You will not return from the depths of rock. truly popular government and rolled in seventeen You will not return from the subterranean time. years of dictatorship under Pinochet. I remember It will not return, your hardened voice. that autumn. Auden died just a week after Neruda, They will not return, your drilled eyes. and it seemed two giants of world poetry had been Look at me from the depths of the earth, felled. I met Alastair soon after, when he came to plowman, weaver, silent shepherd: teach at the college where I was a student, and I tender of the guardian guanacos: remember him reading another tribute, “Translator mason of the impossible scaffold: to Poet”, which Eisner quotes late in his book: water-bearer of Andean tears: goldsmith of crushed fingers: There are only the words left now. They lie like farmer trembling on the seed: tombstones potter poured out into your clay: or the stone Andes where the green scrub ends. bring all your old buried sorrows I do not have the heart to chip away to the cup of this new life. at your long lists of joy, which alternate their iron and velvet, all the vegetation As Eisner points out, no less a purveyor of opin- and whalebone of your chosen stormy coast. ions than Harold Bloom “claims that Neruda ‘can be So much was written hope, with every line

Quadrant September 2018 103 The Voice of Pablo Neruda

extending life by saying, every meeting temporary, Auden, he pursued an international life, ending in expectation of the next. much of it free of political ideology, following his It was your slow intoning voice which counted, own passions and proclivities. Younger than the bringing a living Chile into being modernists then ascendant in Europe, Neruda’s where poetry was bread, where books were generation was sympathetic to their experiments, banquets. particularly to surrealism. His international experi- Now they are silent, stony on the shelf. ence would eventually contribute to the global fame I cannot read them for the thunderous silence, of a literary rock star, but in those early diplomatic the grief of Chile’s dying and your own, years he was poor and isolated. Eisner confesses to death being the one definitive translation. some queasiness about Neruda’s racial attitudes in Asia, particularly his treatment of local women and What Alastair taught was the joyful humility of prostitutes. He records several encounters, versions reading, allowing other presences their imperfect of which appear in the poet’s memoirs, one of which existences—that final translation being the limit of may have been a rape: all our lives. Neruda’s life, then, to the degree that we can know it, is instructive, even as a fading coex- Neruda’s behavior, both here and throughout his istence with the poems. time in Asia, was imperialism perpetrated on a human scale, an exact replica of the imperialism iterary biography is a strange addiction. One perpetrated on a geopolitical scale against which knows it’s all provisional, and one learns scep- he ranted both while in Asia and while writing ticismL about any connection between the life and his memoirs ... the work. The self is so unknowable, flickering and His narcissism is further expressed in the transient, so how can we know another? Reading way he integrates the woman’s duty of cleaning a life is like reading a poem—full of ambiguity, his personal excrement into the story of his which involves consciousness that we are read- violation of her. It amounts to the divinization ing. Was there ever a time when no one doubted of his excrement, as it is a sublime goddess who authority? Even the great biographer Richard empties his chamber pot. The goddess merits Holmes has said in a recent interview with Andrew less consideration than even a prostitute, who Motion that “biographies take place cumulatively Neruda would at least have paid for her services. on the subject. There’s very rarely one biography. They build through time ...” If Mark Eisner’s life Eisner sees Neruda’s opium use and sex life in of Neruda sometimes feels a bit flat and declarative Asia as a drama of the suffering ego, the agon from in style, it’s still a thoughtful and valuable book, which the early poetry was made. Surrounded by linking the meaning of Neruda’s public life to the Buddhists, Neruda rejected their vision of enlight- state of our world now, with versions of fascism enment in favour of a more personal drama, a strug- ascendant on both the Right and the Left. gle that would eventually have its parallel in politics. Like most biographies, this one begins with a He was working on poems that would eventually blur of begats. Neruda was born Ricardo Eliecer comprise the three volumes of Residence on Earth— Neftali Reyes Basoalto in southern Chile in 1904. that marvellous visionary title—and would contain I was jet-lagged while reading the early pages, and some of his most popular poems, like “Walking couldn’t recount them to you if I tried. I began to Around”: wake up when the boy Neftali took the name Pablo Neruda at the age of sixteen, by which time he had Comes a time I’m tired of being a man. already developed sympathies for the indigenous Comes a time I check out the tailor’s or the movies Mapuche people of Chile and a grasp of class dif- shriveled, impenetrable, like a felt swan ferences. Prodigious in both poetry and romance, launched into waters of origin and ashes. he was nineteen when he published The Book of Twilights, twenty when he produced a book that has A whiff from the barber shops has me wailing. now sold well over a million copies, Twenty Love All I want is a break from rocks and wool, Poems and a Desperate Song. For a while he studied all I want is to see neither buildings nor gardens, French pedagogy at university in Santiago, but the no shopping centers, no bifocals, no elevators. distractions of literature and sex already dominated his life. Comes a time I’m tired of my feet and my The universal struggle of getting a living led him fingernails to the foreign service, and he was posted at twenty- and my hair and my shadow. three as Chilean consul in Rangoon. Like his con- Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.

104 Quadrant September 2018 The Voice of Pablo Neruda

The poem extends its list of injustices, some more Lorca’s fate moved the poets to become active trivial than others. It’s a howl long before Howl, participants in the war, not just observers. Pablo and indeed the Beats felt they owed a great deal to Neruda had become a different poet; now he Neruda. became a different man. There were no more But his life at this point was a series of evasions, surrealist dead doves or pumpkins listening. and when almost by accident he found himself con- There was the blood of children. There was sul in Batavia (now Jakarta) his precipitous marriage Lorca’s blood, and much more to follow. to Maria Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang, a woman unsympathetic to literature, seems part of a des- Neruda and his new partner, Delia, escaped first perate pattern. Pablo and Maruca, as she was more to France, then to Chile, where he worked valiantly affectionately known, eventually had a daughter to resettle Spanish refugees. To make his love life together, Malva Marina, who suffered from hydro- possible he was acting the cad towards Maruca, but cephaly, and whose neglect was one of Neruda’s in politics he was genuinely intrepid. He didn’t see worst actions. The girl would die at the age of eight, the Stalinist takeover of the Spanish Left as a dan- by which time Neruda and Maruca were separated. ger the way Orwell did, largely because he focused The poet’s vitality was sometimes on the suffering of the Spanish sustained by a clueless ego, and this people and tried to do something was not the only time he turned his about it. His blindness to Stalin’s back on the suffering of others. He’s one of the crimes would blight his biography, Eisner’s book really comes to life instantly recognisable to be sure, but in the 1940s he was when Neruda, at thirty, takes dip- figures of modern more a compassionate politician lomatic posts in Spain, developing than an ideologue. his connection to Spanish writers art, like another Neruda set himself in opposi- like Federico Garcia Lorca, deep- Pablo, his good friend tion to the conservative government ening his relationship to Chile’s of his homeland, formally joining mother country. In Spain Neruda Picasso, who had the Communist Party in 1945. In developed his theory of “A poetry also worked through hindsight, of course, this seems a impure as old clothes, as a body, multiple phases of blunder, but Eisner makes a good with its food stains and shame, case that Neruda saw communism with wrinkles, observations, dream, creativity and danced as the only viable way to oppose vigilance, prophecies, declarations awkwardly with the economic and political corrup- of love and hate, beasts, blows, tion of his country. In 1947, now a idylls, manifestos, denials, doubts, Stalinism. Genius is senator, he addressed the Chilean affirmations, taxes.” As civil war no proof of wisdom. senate in defence of an article he erupted in 1936, Neruda took on a had published on the “Crisis of heroic stature that was not a pose. Democracy”. Here again his ideas The stakes were real and vital, and he was one of do not seem Stalinist, but responsible criticisms the poets who could see them clearly. Like Auden, of an untenable status quo. He quoted Franklin Orwell and Hemingway, he witnessed history being Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms—as succinct a made, but as a diplomat he had additional responsi- formula for a just society as any I know: “freedom bility for the people involved and acquitted himself of speech and expression; freedom of every person well. Poems like “I Explain Some Things” brought to worship God in his own way; freedom from stark reportage of events into literature: want; freedom from fear”. This public stance was not easy. In an intoler- You will ask why his poetry ant state, he was putting his life in danger, and he doesn’t speak to us of dreams, of the leaves, was not fearless of the prospect of incarceration of the great volcanoes of his native land? and worse. When the state issued a warrant for his arrest, Neruda went into hiding, protected by liter- Come and see the blood in the streets, ary friends and fellow communists. This is another come and see of the best chapters in Eisner’s book, recounting the blood in the streets, Neruda’s escape over the Andes to Argentina. His come and see the blood fame made him into a Robin Hood figure, sup- in the streets! ported by the very people who were the subjects of his poems. He spoke of these trials in his Nobel In 1936 Garcia Lorca’s execution by fascists lecture in 1971, relating a beautiful story of aid affected Neruda profoundly: received from mountain peasants:

Quadrant September 2018 105 The Voice of Pablo Neruda

And I remember vividly: when we wanted to On YouTube you can find films of the give the people of the mountain a few coins corpulent, dignified Neruda from these years, for their songs, their food, the water, the beds, and see in him both gravitas and clownishness, and the roof over our heads—the unexpected a face easy to caricature, giving him an aspect shelter we had found—they refused our offering of the Chaplinesque. He’s one of the instantly without even a gesture. They had done what recognisable figures of modern art, like another they could for us, and nothing more. And in Pablo, his good friend Picasso, who had also that silent “nothing more”, many things were worked through multiple phases of creativity and understood; perhaps acknowledgement, perhaps danced awkwardly with Stalinism. Genius is no dreams themselves. proof of wisdom.

Always seeking connection, Neruda links the e are left with Neruda’s death from prostate politics of the time and the lives of “ordinary peo- cancer, and for a time the death of Chile, the ple”, whatever we take such a phrase to mean, with latterW partly orchestrated by the CIA. If Neruda’s the imaginative work of the poet. In this he seems death was brought about in the same way, the evi- Emersonian, a representative man. dence has not yet been produced, despite many Yet there remain just as many stories of Neruda attempts to make it so. Eisner reports that new as the “Champagne Communist” whose devotion genetic tests on Neruda’s exhumed bones may yet to pleasure proved constantly distracting. He was have another story to tell. Or may not. in many ways a coward with women, hiding from And we are left with Neruda’s voice. Watch his Delia his love for the woman who would become dignified manner in interviews with the likes of his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, and eventually hid- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or listen to him recit- ing from Matilde his affair with her niece. If you ing “The Heights of Machu Picchu”, or consider want your poets to be saints, don’t look to Neruda Eisner’s account of a reading Neruda gave at the for the model. Royal Festival Hall in London in April 1972 with He went into public exile, living in Europe, vis- his friend Alastair Reid: iting the Soviet Union. He was mobbed by fans at airports and in restaurants. He got fat. His political Reid read the English first, followed by poems were more strident and sentimental, though Neruda reading the Spanish, in sections, so in 1963 he finally managed to denounce communist that the “sense comes first and the sound totalitarianism. Decades of silence about Stalin’s follows,” as Reid put it. If four decades earlier crimes, years in which he turned his back on friends Neruda’s voice had been nasal and monotone, who suffered under Stalin, could hardly be assuaged now it resounded, especially pronounced by by these changes of heart. Neruda even slandered the crisscross rhythm between the Spanish his friend Czeslaw Milosz, who had left Poland and the English, alternating long strands or for France, in an article titled “The Man Who stanzas or just couplets back and forth, the Ran Away”, calling Milosz “an agent of American poems broken up as if into meter, creating imperialism”. Years later, Neruda remained incapa- varying speeds and tension and song. Reid ble of understanding what he had done: had heard Neruda read many times, but on that night he sensed something truly special: A decade and a half after Neruda wrote his the Chilean’s voice was “spreading itself like denunciation of his former friend, the two saw a balm over the English audience.” It was “a each other at the 1966 PEN Conference in New magical sound.” York. Neruda saw Milosz across the room, cried, “Czeslaw!” and rushed to embrace him. David Mason, a former Poet Laureate of Colorado, is Milosz turned his face away and Neruda said, now living in Tasmania. He wrote on the American “But, Czeslaw, that was politics.” poet Richard Wilbur in the July-August issue.

106 Quadrant September 2018 S t o r y

Painting with My Father Roby n O’Sullivan

n elderly gent ambled towards me on the walking track. He spoke into his mobile phone, “G’day cobber.” I hadn’t heard that typically Aussie phrase for years. It brought the face of my dad to mind, and a recollection of the time we painted the house together. The image of Dad with paint cans and brushes made me smile. I remember the old house in Murrumbeena clearly: double-fronted California bungalow with a haphazard garden. Mum loved plants but she just popped them in whereverA there was a space. The house was always painted grey with white trim and Dad never let it get out of hand. On a warm day in late spring, about twenty years ago, I visited after a work conference before going home to Sydney. Dad was getting ready to paint the west wall of the house. I didn’t need to be back right away, so I offered to stay and help. A few days wielding a brush would be calming after the stress of presenting a paper and making new contacts.

Day one Dad held out a well-patched pair of grey . “My old ones. Turn ’em up.” He was thrifty with words. I obediently climbed into the overalls and, having long ago learned to interpret his truncated comments, rolled up the legs and sleeves a few times. We spent the morning preparing the surface to be painted. “Never stint,” he said. “Do it right, do it once.” Dad had already done the sanding, so we scrubbed those weatherboards with sugar soap until they gleamed. While they dried, we made a list of the equipment we needed. For a man who didn’t say much, Dad certainly liked encyclopedic details in a list. I’ve still got the one he dictated to me:

• gap filler—for holes or splits in the paint or the boards • primer—to paint over the sanded bits so the top coat sticks • paint—ask your mother for the paint chart and mark the colour she wants • brushes—always use the best you can afford because quality tools result in a quality finish • ladders—you’ll find them just inside the shed door and be careful not to knock anything over when you bring them out • planks—standing against the wall by the ladders and don’t knock anything over with them either • turps—I don’t know if we’ll need this but it’s in the poisons cupboard over the

Quadrant September 2018 107 Story

freezer at the back of the garage (odd place to keep poisons, Dad!) • masking tape and a Stanley knife—for windows because it’s easier to get tape off than dried-on paint • plastic sheets—to keep paint off the ground and the garden and everything else that isn’t the house walls • safety goggles—so you don’t get paint in your eyes because you’re not an experienced painter • ice-cream containers of water—to clean the brushes when we take a break and at the end of the day • rags—to wipe drips, spills and hands, and your mother knows where they are • a mask—so the blasted paint fumes don’t make me cough

Day two We set off to the hardware store first thing in the morning. When we arrived, Dad made his way to the paint section. “G’day, cobber,” he said to the man at the counter. “Name’s Doug. What can I do for you, mate?” I produced the paint chart and pointed out Mum’s chosen colour to Doug, who then completely ignored me and discussed the tinting options with my father. There were so many decisions to make: best paint brand for the job, size of paint can, number of cans required, available stock, base colour. My assumption that you just use white was wrong because there are subtle shade differences that can enhance or ruin your final colour—this information delivered by the salesman with an unsubtle wink to Dad. Losing interest, I wandered off to the paintbrush aisle. Dad joined me when the tinting was settled. “Patience, girlie. Listen and learn.” “Really, Dad? Girlie? I’m forty years old.” “You can still be a bit of a dill at times.” He then selected the brushes—75mm wall brush with long bristles for the weatherboards, 38mm cutter for window and door frames and cutting in. All the while, he pointed out the features of a good brush: quality bristles, flagged ends, balanced wooden handle. Dad shared more of his practical knowledge with me in that ten minutes than he had in the past twenty years. I paid careful attention. We added gap filler, masking tape and plastic drop sheets to the basket of brushes, picked up the paint and joined the queue at the checkout. Dad took a pot of pansies from a “Brighten Your Spring Garden” plant display and put it in the basket. He winked at me. “For the cheese ’n’ kisses.” “The what?” “Cheese ’n’ kisses—the missus.” I rolled my eyes and Dad’s weathered face creased into a smile. We laughed together. Out in the carpark, Dad unlocked the white Holden panel van. He’d driven this type of car for as long as I could remember: the refrigeration repair firm he worked for supplied them. When he retired, he’d been allowed to take this one with him for a paltry sum. He loaded our stuff into the back, then we headed home. Bing Crosby crooned from the cassette player. Dad’s hands were steady on the steering wheel. They were work-worn and gnarled. Ageing. I turned my gaze to the side window and watched the world go by. Mum met us at the door, her pinnie-style apron tight over the sensible house skirt and . She tutted as Dad handed over the pansies. “Always trying to get into my good books.”

108 Quadrant September 2018 Story

Dad pecked her cheek and ran his hand over her head. “Shame you didn’t get your mother’s hair,” he said to me. “Nary a grey to be seen.” “Pies are ready,” Mum said. “You two wash your hands while I serve up.” Dad sat in his usual chair at the head of the table. He proffered the sauce bottle. “Horse?” Dead horse. The rhyming slang was coming back to me. After lunch, we laid drop sheets, set out brushes and stirred the primer. Finally, he declared us ready to begin. I selected a brush but Dad took it from me. “Masking tape for you.” “Boring,” I muttered, but not so he’d hear me. When I finished preparing the windows, I was directed to spend some time with Mum. As I dragged off my overalls, I reminded him that I only had two more days. And he reminded me that he needed to be “morning fresh” in order to teach me how to paint properly. “Patience, girlie.” I went into the kitchen where Mum was busy starting dinner. Lamb chops and mash. She handed me a bowl of potatoes and a peeler. “I’m glad you’re here. Your father could do with some help, though he won’t admit it.” “He’s not letting me do much.” “Well, I’m not allowed to paint at all, so you’re doing better than me.” I laughed. “Apparently he can only teach me to paint in the morning, not the afternoon!” “The emphysema makes him tired. You know how it is …” I soaked the peeled potatoes in water then wandered out to watch Dad at work. It was a sunny afternoon and a hankie knotted at the four corners covered his balding head. Wisps of silvery hair nestled into the nape of his neck. When he was finished priming I helped him clean up. I folded the plastic sheets. There wasn’t a drop of paint on them. We stored everything in the garage for the night. He locked the door and slid the key into his pocket. “Thirsty work. Time for a beer, eh?” After dinner, Mum and I watched TV. Dad went into the back room to use his nebuliser. The bubbling sound of the liquid as it condensed and pumped into his lungs was familiar. He joined us when he’d finished, but was soon asleep in the chair.

Day three My job was cutting in. I could not do the actual weatherboards because I might leave brush strokes. Not an easy thing to avoid; apparently achievable only by long years of experience. Dad showed me how to dip the brush in the paint and wipe it on the can without slopping the precious liquid over the edges and down the sides. I told him that this was not the first time I’d painted. “In fact,” I said. “I’ve done a fair bit of painting at my own house over the years.” “Even so, girlie, listen to me. No waste, no mess.” As instructed, I plied my brush around the window frames and kept my paint can clean. Dad came to check periodically. He looked pleased. “No doubt about it. You’re a chip off the old block.” After lunch, I cut in around the front door. Then I was allowed to paint the window frames. It was almost dark by the time we packed up. “Good day’s work. Let’s have a beer.” Mum served what Dad described as a “flash meal”. Roast chicken with stuffing. Gravy made from pan juices and flour. Crispy baked potatoes and pumpkin. Shelled

Quadrant September 2018 109 Story

peas. Mum made the best roast dinner in Christendom. Always had. Dad wiped his plate with a flourish and popped the last piece of buttered bread into his mouth. “Why would you go out when you can get a meal like that in your own home? Bloody good cook, your mum.” “Amen to that.” “I tell you what,” said Dad. “I’ll do my nebuliser, then we’ll play some cards.”

Day four Wonder of wonders. My job for the day was the wrought-iron screen door. A typical 1960s affair, it had numerous curlicues and a peacock with a cascading tail. A quick instruction on how to avoid painting the mesh and I was left alone to get on with it. I had the devil of a job to cover the joins properly without leaving stray paint where it had no place to be. Before long, Dad tapped my shoulder. “Told Mum we’re right for lunch. We’ll go for a counter meal. Get out of those overalls and wash your hands, then we’ll be off.” Dad got into the panel van and settled himself on the seat gingerly. “I think you’ll have to do the rest of the ground-level weatherboards, girlie. Squatting’s a bugger on the Farmer Giles.” “The what?” “The piles.” He grinned. “Too much information, Dad! Just hit the frog and toad.” I grinned too. We each had a parma and a pot for lunch and talked about Mum and Dad’s plans to take a little drive to Queensland in the panel van. “Before we’re too old,” he added. “You’re only seventy-one. You’ve got loads of time for travel.” I hope. The thought surprised me as it crossed my mind. By the end of the day, I’d completed the screen door and top-coated the bottom weatherboards. Dad and I stepped back from the house and admired the wall we’d painted together. “Grand job. Thanks.” Mum did a stew for dinner and Dad enjoyed every mouthful. “A solid day’s work and a full belly.” He leaned back in his chair. “Ahh, you wouldn’t be dead for quids.” I smiled at Mum, and Dad winked at us then stood up. “I think I’ll go lay down for a while and listen to a cassette.” He kissed Mum’s cheek. “Night, love.” Then he kissed the top of my head. “Night, darling girl.” He walked to the kitchen door, then turned back. “I’ll be sorry to see you go tomorrow.” Mum and I settled in the lounge room to watch a movie she’d taped. Before long we heard the bubbling sound beneath the crooning of Bing Crosby, followed soon after by snoring. “He’s tired out,” Mum said. “Sometimes I wonder how much longer he’ll last.” I couldn’t trust my voice, so I just nodded.

Robyn O’Sullivan, a professional writer and editor, lives in South Gippsland.

110 Quadrant September 2018 sweetness & l i g h t

Tim Blair

here are fancy neurological terms to describe even if the object in front of me was a camera and what happened, but from my perspective not, say, a hostile Dalek. Afterwards, host Chris the event was fairly straightforward. My Kenny very kindly drove me home, going quite eyeballs,T which had co-operated in perfect Simon some distance out of his way. I’d have become a Sky and Garfunkel harmony for more than fifty years, News resident otherwise. abruptly decided to pursue solo careers. An optometrist the next morning confirmed my They were no longer seeing eye-to-eye, you might eyes were no longer in sync, and found a quick way say. They literally took a different view of things. So, to set matters straight. She attached an additional just like Simon and Garfunkel in 1970, they went thin plastic lens, known as a Fresnel prism, inside their separate ways. the right side of my glasses. Order was restored. A It was all very sudden. I went to sleep one night US medical website explains how such lenses work: with vision easily corrected by relatively weak lenses and woke to a world seemingly designed by M.C. Fresnel prisms are used by patients who are Escher. Everything ran at strange angles. Reading experiencing a visual disturbance or abnormality. was possible, at a very close distance, but only by They effectively trick the brain into thinking clenching shut one of those warring orbs. Any eye- that the eyes are working together, when, in fact, sight challenge more advanced defeated me. they are not. The glasses are designed to bend Exterior-wise, this change wasn’t noticeable. light, shifting the image into proper alignment It wasn’t as though I’d suddenly turned into some for both eyes. The adjustment then allows the wall-eyed Jean-Paul Sartre or a swivel-visioned cha- brain to process visual information correctly. meleon. But the effect of even a minor disagreement between eyes is somewhat dramatic for their owner, There I was, with a freshly-tricked brain and no let me tell you. visual complications at all. My optometrist then Imagine you’re looking at something that in told me Hillary Clinton has similar vision prob- visual terms is constructed mainly of straight hori- lems, and that the installation of her own prism was zontal lines—a staircase, for example. For me, all of so clumsy that it scandalised the global corrective- those straight lines were still there, but each one was sight community. accompanied by another straight line shooting off at So I was now seeing the world as did Hillary, forty-five degrees and equally visually convincing. It modern America’s worst presidential candidate. was difficult to tell which individual stair was real Great. Just great. and which was its illusory shadow. We chatted for a further few minutes, but the My house has stairs. Many stairs. That day fea- optometrist’s tone shifted after she asked how long tured more falls than the entire World Cup, with the I’d put up with my feuding eyes. “It happened yes- main difference being none of mine were deliberate. terday,” I answered brightly. “Just like that.” Hillary- The multi-angle effect was massively more pro- vision aside, I was in a relieved state of mind, what nounced at night in traffic and under Sydney’s street with my restored optical clarity. I wasn’t relieved for illumination. Driving anywhere was obviously out long. The sudden occurrence of such a condition, she of the question. After somehow filing editorials for gently but with some gravity informed me, may be the Daily Telegraph, I caught a cab to that evening’s due to a brain tumour. scheduled Sky News appearance. And I managed to I went from the optometrist’s office to a quickly- bewilder the taxi driver so much with my directional arranged brain scan. There wasn’t much time to guesses that we became lost, on a trip I’d taken begin feeling sorry for myself, but in any case self- without problem hundreds of times previously. pity would have instantly evaporated the moment I It beats me how I made it through the broadcast, stepped inside the scan centre, where the waiting because I couldn’t tell which camera to look at or room was filled with very young children awaiting

Quadrant September 2018 111 sweetness & light their own examinations. They were in the company You weren’t wrong. Over the middle to long of plainly terrified parents. term, your average leftists—not all of them, mind, That’ll knock the levity out of even the most but most—will invariably reveal their true natures. flippant idiot (that is, me). Meeting children who Most often they’ll reveal those natures to other left- haven’t yet reached double-figure ages before con- ists, because we’re dealing here with people who are fronting the possibility of death is infinitely worse intrinsically collectivists. than contemplating your own middle-aged mortal- Thus, leftists end up warring with their fellow ity. Every adult in that room would have immedi- leftists. And then, as parodied in Monty Python’s ately accepted a negative prognosis if it spared one “splitters” sketch, those disputative factions com- of those kids. mence breaking up into ever-smaller factions, always The scanning process itself is relatively non-inva- at war, all the time. sive and painless. You lie down on a platform that We see this process in the Greens. Frequent is slowly drawn into a large technology-filled dome, failure candidate Alex Bhathal recently announced whereupon the scanning takes place. Then you’re she wouldn’t run again for the seat of Batman, now wheeled back out, injected with a kind of low-buzz renamed Cooper, at the next federal election. This radioactive dye, and the process is repeated. follows a classic internal Greens war during an Except in my case, because in between scans the earlier by-election for the seat, which was held by machine up and quit. Now I faced a waiting room Labor. full of distressed parents who in their exhausted “I never expected that we’d face internal sabo- and worried state clearly blamed me for breaking tage in the middle of our most winnable campaign, the device and delaying their children’s diagnoses. with some people choosing to anonymously brief the We all had to return the following day for scan Murdoch media and actively aid our opponents,” completion. Bhathal said during her announcement, blaming A week or so later the clinic called and a doctor Greens-generated “threats, slurs and aggressions” told me I didn’t have a brain tumour. To this day for the by-election defeat and ongoing pressure on I wonder how many of those parents received the her family. same welcome news. All of them, I hope. Rather Now, infighting and loathing are by no means fewer than that, I know. traits held in isolation by the Left. They may have This all happened a couple of years ago. Since mastered them, but such negative qualities are found then I’ve obtained a new pair of glasses, with the throughout human history. transformative Fresnel prism invisibly embedded. If At a lunch during P.J. O’Rourke’s last Australian you have normal eyesight and wish to provoke an visit, in 2016, the great American conservative instant headache, just try my non-symmetrical specs humorist amused nine or ten of us with tales from for a couple of minutes. his time in the late 1970s and early 1980s as edi- A few months ago, however, something very curi- tor in chief of National Lampoon, perhaps the least ous took place. I’d picked up a book and was read- politically-correct magazine ever published. ing it—without, I eventually realised, wearing those The magazine was consistently hilarious, but miracle spectacles. Not a single word was blurred or working there was hell, O’Rourke explained. There angled, at least at normal reading distance. were rivalries between star writers that ran so deep It was like Simon and Garfunkel’s 1981 reunion and began so long ago that nobody was even sure concert in New York’s Central Park, minus the songs why those rivalries existed in the first place. It was and the 500,000 crowd. They’re still not completely one of the few workplaces on earth, he said, where reconciled, but my eyes are back on speaking terms. the actual work was more fun than the usual office socialising, flirting and time-wasting. ocialism is basically envy converted to econom- In terms of pure leftist self-destruction, the ics. And because envy is such a corrosive, malig- #MeToo movement and associated war on “privi- Snant force, those economics tend to be more than lege” have opened new battlefronts—all of them slightly inaccurate. damaging to leftism. It’s as though these people Socialism’s jealous core is also why it, and leftist cannot help not getting along. movements in general, tend to attract bitter, envious John O’Sullivan may need to add an addendum people. These types can be tolerable, or even enjoy- to his famous First Law, which states: “All organisa- able, company in the short term. We’ve all been to tions that are not actually right-wing will over time parties and found entertainment in conversations become left-wing.” with leftists. “Why, they almost seemed like normal How about: “All organisations that are left-wing humans,” you might reflect afterwards, wondering if will over time come to hate themselves even more you’ve been wrong all these years. than they hate the right.”

112 Quadrant September 2018 33011 sign.com.au R e nod e r

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