Peter Coleman issues an invite in The Australian to a shindig celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Centre of Independent Studies.
It should be a swell party!
Spiffing, I’m sure.
Coleman goes on to celebrate the upcoming anniversary of Quadrant.
Which is rather “bohemian”, he says.
It has always lived on a financial precipice. (I once had to flog the office Brett Whiteley around Sydney to pay the bills.)
That’s funny. The one thing Coleman fails to mention is that Quadrant (a “free market” publication) doesn’t live or die by its sales. It gets a public subsidy from The Australia Council.
Now, a la Nelson and the ARC, someone should set up a community committee to scrutinise whether AC grantee publications are ideologically motivated. Perhaps P. P. McGuiness could fearlessly represent the community. Hang on…
Quadrant is “bohemian and irreverant”!
You gotta hand it to Coleman for admiring Quadrant’s “defending the free market in ideas.” This, from a man who was exposed in an ASIO file as one of a list of compliant journalists keen to toe the government line. According to the ASIO file, Coleman among “journalists willing to assist ASIO in the counter-propaganda field.” Coleman, the file says, “is keen to assist” and “has undertaken to let us know any particular requirements for articles, so that we might be able to provide him with material.”
And let’s not forget the well-documented fact — confirmed by a Quadrant editor — that the magazine’s early days were not, as Coleman claims, “literary”, but indirectly funded by the CIA.
I say we crash the party.
Yay Quadrant!
btw, re your last comment– there’s a great feature in this month’s Monthly by Gideon Haigh about the mechanations behind the whole ARC/Nelson business. It’s pretty fascinating.
(This is NOT a plug. I still think The Monthly is a star-struck, Melbourne-centric closed shop that’s stuck up its own arsehole, but this month it has some great features. It IS getting better.)
I’d agree, weathergirl, both about the mag and the feature. Haigh did a top notch job.
Camaradas,
I officially call for expressions of interest in the People’s Sovereign Committee For The Rectification And Redistribution Of Australia Council Grants. Membership is unlimited.
The express aim of the PSCFRAROACG is to eliminate bourgeois and counterrevolutionary elements from the list of AC recipients. Popular justice may take the form of rigorous self-criticism sessions or enforced viewing of movies previously made under the Arts Council scheme, such as Three Dollars.
The revolution may or may not be televised, certainly only after about eleven o’clock or so, or perhaps on Eat Carpet on a bad day.
Hasta la victoria siempre!
weathergirl and Mark: agreed, the Monthly is finally beginning not to suck, but if they publish another line of Malcolm Knox’s excruciatingly banal ‘letters from the future’ or whatever the hell they are I’m going to have to declare vendetta Sicilian-style on him and the publishers – there are some things no one should have to put up with.
I actually enjoyed Knox’s piece on why he decided to send his kids to a public school. But I know what you mean. And it’s still the boys’ club at The Monthly — the only bits written by women are about lame feminist stuff (Kaz Cook on how stars look weird afer they’ve had cosmetic surgery, for example.)
Gideon Haigh’s piece in this issue was tremendously even-handed and insightful. And David Salter’s piece on Alan Jones gives some very surprising statistics to show why “politicians from John Howard down have no real cause to jerk to each pull of [Alan] Jones’s puppet strings.” He shows how Jones’s real “power” is actually sleight-of-hand audience stats & a smoke and mirrors campaign.
But I have it first hand that some of the mag’s erstwhile contributors are jacked off with things.
)ops, when I said “lame feminist” I meant “soft” or “quasi-” of course. I meant not hard-hitting enough.
Yay Quadrant!”
Oh that’s right Rob, you write for Quadrant. Could you personally refund to me your take from the share of my taxes that goes into funding it? If you do, I’ll sign any petition you have going to whittle the Australia Council down.
Sorry folks …. ashamed to admit it now …. but I did open a copy or two of Quadrant a long time ago. It didn’t have no speling misteaks.
But is Quadrant double-dipping by getting middle-class welfare? Heard a thoroughly unsubstantiated story that it was financed by the Cocaine Importers’ Agency or another firm with a similar name.
I would be less critical of Quadrant if it ceased publishing multiple crappy poems by Hal G. P. Colebatch in almost every edition.
CIS is clearly the premier think-tank in Australia.
quadrant has always been an also-ran.
neither fish nor fowl and always subsidized whether ti be CIA or the taxpayer.
Is there anything worse than a Lord Paddy editorial?
I bought an issue of Quadrant once, the one in which Michael Kirby talked about going to an all-boys school and talking to them about homosexuality. It was very moving.
Otherwise it hasn’t seemed very interesting, not that I’ve looked out for it.
Today is the first day that I’m taking off to research/write papers as part of my new working 90% of full-time regime. Hooray!
They never accepted my article about how the Port Arthur Massacre was a hoax. Still, I like the issues where they deny that Aboriginal massacres ever happened. Or where they alert us to the very real and pending Commie threat to Australia. I like it when they find a putative erroneous footnote in the epic writings of a single scholar and expose this as evidence of vast fraud and conspiracy in academia. I like it when Giles Auty still tells us — if only we’d listen! — about the Sunbeam Convertible he drove in the sixties. I like it when the big McG reveals that altruists are really the “compassion industry”. Don’t get me started. Good on you, Rob, for proudly contributing to such an thoughtful little journal.
weathergirl, did you have better luck with your article about how the Australian Constitution was annulled by the Treaty of Versailles and therefore all Federal, State and local governments since 1919 have been invalidated and all Federal and State taxes and council rates collected since then have been theft, which you have a right to resist by forming and joining an armed militia?
Further background information on this matter can be found at http://members.iimetro.com.au/~hubbca/rangeview.htm and http://www.brumbywatchaustralia.com/Principality01.htm
They never accepted my article about how the Port Arthur Massacre was a hoax.
Lovely.
Mind you, the CIA seems to have largely been a hoax itself, given what it did compared to what the unfortunately American taxpayer thought it did. Which is probably a reason for the aforementioned militia.
Quadrant has kicked off two of the most significant public debates of the last 10 years — on the ’stolen generations’ and the falsification of Aborigianal history. Like it or loathe it, agree with its contributors or not, it punches way above its weight.
Contrast it with Ken Davidson’s Dissent, for example.
Who cares if Quadrant was funded by the CIA? So were a lot of anti-stalinist but leftist publications during the Cold War. And who cares if it gets funding from the Australia Council? It’s never been a consistently pro-market publication anyway. Social democrats like Bob Carr and Jess Shaw, Santamaria socialists and statist conservatives like Robert Manne have been associated with it. It’s had a good run and has published a lot of interesting, unpredictable articles
I personally don’t begrudge Quadrant the funding.
But P.P. McGuinness is surely a hypocrite for decrying grants to academics from ARC funds on the grounds that he doesn’t like their ideological position.
Rob, kicking off these “debates” isn’t noble. You could say the same of the carbon lobbyists. They didn’t so much kick off a debate as a disinformation campaign.
To David: remember irony? Compare and contrast two propositions: (1) The Port Arthur Massacres never happened. (2) Aboriginal massacres never happened.
Which one outrages you?
Paul: he he!
Kim:
I agree ….. but this is Australia ….. and Hypocrisy, along with Arrogance, Gullibility, Callousness and Rorting, is compulsory …. oops, sorry, I should have said “mandatory”, shouldn’t I.
The ’stolen generations’ issue has largely dropped out of public debate now, because its methodological and evidentiary flaws have become all too obvious. And Windschuttle’s thesis still awaits a convincing refutation. Unfortunately for his opponents, every time they attempt to join battle with him they find he knows more about the subject than they do.
Quadrant did sterling service in both cases. It can also reasonably claim to have led the charge on the egregious National Museum of Australia.
umm, blowing your own trumpet a little there, rob?
Being the open minded chap I am, I once purchased a copy of Quadrant to give it a go. My first impression was that this publication must be produceed by intellectualy retarded folk in a sheltered work shop. Hell- it was crap, embarrassing really.
The Australia Council gives money to some truly awful projects. Some of them are so bad they make Quadrant look decent. I think its funding could be safely cut in half without a dimmunition of out kulcha.
Yes, Jason, bad form I know.
But in the interests of idle stoushing, what the hell. (Quadrant archives appear to be down).
“And Windschuttle’s thesis still awaits a convincing refutation. Unfortunately for his opponents, every time they attempt to join battle with him they find he knows more about the subject than they do.”
Are you winding me up, Rob? This is hardly worth a bite, but I’ll try to be polite, not for your sake but for the sake of the uninitiated who might drop in. Many, many eminent scholars, on all sides of politics, have refuted each and every one of Windschuttle’s ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims, in detail, with REASON and EVIDENCE. And, as Naomi will attest from personal experience, when Windschuttle is faced with hard facts, he withers. His “scholarship” is thoroughly dishonest and doesn’t deserve the attention that all the old ideologue farts at Quadrant and The Australian bestow upon him. It’s Windschuttle and them against every other historian in the country. (Oh, but that must mean the others are part of a Left-wing conspiracy, doesn’t it?)
And when, Rob, will you tire of your vainglorious self-aggrandising?
Yes, there’s only about 30 “Massacre Creeks” in Australia. I suppose they picked the name for the ambience?
The denial of the stolen generations is one of the crank episodes of white blondfold history, and fortunately a complete failure in a wider historical sense. Only crackpot RWDBs seem to think its had an impact, because they actually read Quadrant (heads up: noone else does). Even Herron, Minister in the first Howard government, “disputed” it by saying “only 10%” were taken away.
Only decimated.
Its Australia’s one great weakness – the inability to maturely confront its own history.
“Many, many eminent scholars, on all sides of politics, have refuted each and every one of Windschuttle’s ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims, in detail, with REASON and EVIDENCE.”
Links, please, weathergirl. I’ll pass them on to Keith.
“And when, Rob, will you tire of your vainglorious self-aggrandising?
Fair point, wg, I will try to stop doing that.
Yes, LE, Bringing Them Home claimed one in three were separated. The ABS figures show one in 10, i.e. 10 per cent. And even then BTH did not enquire into the reasons for the separations.
Links, Rob? Why? None of these will persuade you. All will be evidence of Lefty elitism. But thanks for namedropping your mate Keith. You certainly keep choice company.
http://www.blackincbooks.com/blinc/politics_current_affairs/
http://www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/catalogue/0-522-85128-2.html
http://www.overlandexpress.org/163.html
Here’s another for good measure, to scupper your Bringing Them Home claim that the “debate” [read: campaign] was just about numbers:
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/May01/manne.html
This is a test. I’ve tried to post something twice, without success. Here goes.
Okay. What I tried to submit was:
1) Thanks, Rob for namedropping. You keep choice company.
2) The links, which I think might have been the problem, will follow.
Link 1:
http://www.blackincbooks.com/blinc/politics_current_affairs/
Link 2:
http://www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/catalogue/0-522-85128-2.html
Link 3:
http://www.overlandexpress.org/163.html
And for good measure, to poo on your assertion that the stolen generation “dabate” (read: campaign) was about numbers:
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/May01/manne.html
Thanks, weathergirl.
Windschuttle has already dealt with most of the references in his articles for Quadrant. The Overland reference is new to me, so thanks for that.
Manne’s long essay is particularly weak. You might like to look at some of the rebuttals in the subsequent ‘Quarterly Essay’, Appeasing Jakarta, especially that by Inga Glendinnen.
Clendinnen, sorry.
There are more in other issues of Overland. Another by Bill Thorpe, one by Naomi Parry, and another by Karen Pickering. Here’s an extract from Karen Pickering’s piece, called “Evidence & opinion: debating history”:
“Despite the weight of sheer evidence mobilised against the central thesis of Fabrication, the media has continued to report the debate as a difference of opinion, with no respect for academic conventions of disclosure and peer review.”
So, Rob, you’re clearly a culture warrior. Passing this stuff on to Keith, eh?
Well, I don’t think there’s anything that merits passing on so far, weathergirl. Keith keeps his eye on most of the relevant traffic, and responds accordingly.
Are you Windbaggle’s secretary, Rob?
No, weathergirl, merely a humble seeker after a historical truth that doesn’t necessarily exclude the postmodernist versions thereof. (That statement alone should separate me considerably from Windschuttle.)
Windbaggle’s good, though. How about Spinshuffler? Just in a spirit of cameraderie and all.
I suspect you’re a seeker of a research posi at the IPA or CIS.
Rob, have you hired Children of the Revolution yet? (BTW, we seem to be the only people on larvprod right now…)
No, I haven’t got to that, wg. I remember we talked about films once, when the moon was blue, the night was dark, and the rest of LP had gone back to their graves. Currently I’m working my way through the Val Lewton Collection, recently purchased on DVD.
Footnote fetishism aside – How small of spirit those who would deny recognition of demonstrable past injustice to such a demographically, politically, and socially marginal group as the Australian indigenous people.
Ive never understood it, and never will.
The denialists are still settlers. When they can own their past, they’ll truly belong here, as Australians.
If you get to COTR, you’ll find it rewarding. The left is better at taking the piss out of (at?) itself than RWDBs will ever be. You’ll get a larf.
Oh good, you’re here too, LE.
And well said.
Do you mind, Lefty E., I was chatting to weathergirl. (Sorry, wg.)
You realise, Rob, that LE & I are related? (sort of… in laws). You’d better be nice.
On Overland, there’s a bit of an irony there.
Quadrant and Quadrant type culture warriors most frequently single out Manne as Windschuttle’s adversary. But as weathergirl points out, there are other people on the case. Manne isn’t necessarily the best or the most accurate writer on these topics (despite, or because of, his rep as a “public intellectual”. Perhaps it’s that he’s seen as having betrayed the cause?
Though, as cs pointed out on another thread, he really is still a conservative. Just like Malcolm Fraser.
Point taken, weathergirl. No more blue moon or dark night references.
Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it Mark? Ray Evans at UQ has also been eloquent and outspoken, but generally sidelined.
Rob, I’d much rather you referred to blue moons and dark nights than all the other shite you bang on about. When I said “be nice”, I meant be nice to Lefty Elitist, or else I might deck you with my handbag.
Nice bloke, Ray.
Just sayin…
Yeah. I met him once. A real gem.
He’s also been working on these issues for decades (he’s retired from UQ now, I think). Manne has taken this up more as a political cause in the last few years. So I suppose Windy and Manne deserve each other.
Thanks WG, but Rob can say what he likes. Doesnt bother me (Ok, weird Birdmen abusing people in LE drag excepted!)
I retire, chastised by handbag.
Perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t ….. oh, never mind.
…… refer to the grave we might retire to, is what I might have said, but the handbag reference sure killed that.
Hmmm… thats kinda weird Rob!
He… I didn’t… it’s not what it looks like, LE.
I visited the National Museum of Australia in 2001 before all the hoo har about it appeared. Have to say that it was one of the most enjoyable museums I’ve ever been to, and engaging as well.
What people said in the campaign against it didn’t ring true to me at all!
What on earth have I stumbled into here?
I was going to ask Rob if he’d ever read a short story by Katherine Susannah Prichard called ‘Flight’ (1944), but … Gosh, is that the time?
Yes it is, weathergirl, hahahahahaha.
Seriously, though, Sacha, what did you like about it? Tangled Destinies, Horizons, or Nation? For mine, poltics aside (and the sun will never go down on that debate), it’s the most boring and artefactually impoverished museum I’ve ever been to.
It’s a while ago, Rob, and I don’t remember detailed exhibits, I just remember that it was interesting. I certainly remember that I liked the architecture – eg the ceiling of the main hall was shaped like the complement of a knot (ie, a giant knot would fit snugly inside it) which seems strange now that I think about it, but I loved it at the time. I liked other architectural elements of it as well.
That same visit I went to federal parliament house, and loved the art deco-ness of it.
I don’t mind the architecture (though it’s referred to as ‘the loony museum’ by a good many Canberrans) if you overlook the holocaust reference in the lightning bolt striking the exterior of the First Australians’ gallery. It’s borrowed from Liebeskind’s Berlin museum, intended to convey the message that Australian aborigines suffered the same fate as the Jews.
Is that a fact, Rob, or a supposition?
No, that’s a fact, Kim. You’re unlikely to regard KW as reliable source, so I’ll try to find another. Former NMA director Dawn Casey said she didn’t know about it until it was too late, or similar.
From the Encyclopaedia Brittanica:
“When the new National Museum of Australia (NMA) debuted in March in Canberra following 20 years of planning, it opened to mixed reviews. Though some praised architect Howard Raggatt’s design as a “masterpiece,â€? others deemed the design plagiarized from the Jewish Museum Berlin, which, though it opened in September, had been completed two years earlier. Aerial photographs comparing the two museums had disclosed a disturbingly similar zigzag shape. The director of the NMA, Dawn Casey, maintained that the design was “brilliant,â€? and she downplayed the similarity of the roof designs.”
So it was a statement by the architect, Rob?
If that’s so, and if Casey didn’t know about it (and I’ve never heard of Liebeskind – admittedly she might be more expected to – but there’s no reason to presume she did against her word), why would it be something that reflected on those who designed the exhibits?
If a design is brilliant, then it should be used for inspiration!
The exhibits in the First Australians galleries powerfully attest to the holocaust connection. They speak constantly of a relationship with white Australia whose signature was genocide (and an assimilation which was a ’second order’ genocide) and brutal oppression. That’s consistent with the architectural design.
And your objections to this are…?
And your objections to this are… ?
Actually, Rob, please don’t answer. I’ve heard it all before, in the echo-chamber of Quadrant ideologues.
Well, change the roof design, and lose the motif, whatever! A white curator’s museum representation hardly matters a toss to Indigenous people, I suspect.
So, is this just an intra-Anglo left/right culture war issue for you? Pretty irrelevant aspect, Rob. How about the bigger picture – recognition of the systematic mistreatment of our indigenous fellow Australians?
Jeez, maybe then we could all move on. This is just pissing about with distractions.
That there never was a genocide, nor anything resembling it. That the colonisal authorities did everything in their power to protect the Aborigines. That they punished those who preyed upon them (and that’s not to deny the black episodes). That generations of missionaries dedicated their lives to the education and welfare of Aborigines (only to be labelled genocidal murderers by the authors of Bringing Them Home). That, more recently, hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured from government coffers to support and sustain them. That, finally, we are belatedly realising what a farce was the Coombsian presciption for an idyllic hunter-gatherer return-to-the-future dreamtime for indigenous Australians, and are getting on with some practical solutions instead.
That’s by way of answer to weathergirl.
Apologies for the heat. But I live in Alice Springs, and I see the results of the past generation’s failed policies every time I step outside.
And the positive contribution Windschuttle is making to the present situation of Indigenous people is?
I think Lefty E’s right – it’s got much more to do with intra-White Australian Left/Right stoushes.
Thanks for that, Naomi. I don’t really disagree with what you say save for the last point. I think the jury is in.
Have you read Rosemary Neil’s ‘Whiteout’? Lousy title, but a very interesting book.
Having been to the Berlin Jüdischemuseum I can inform anybody on this thread still interested that the Nazi period actually forms a pretty small part of the exhibits. It’s a vast musuem that covers about one and a half thousand years of European Jewish diaspora. It’s so big, in fact, that there’s a little Kosher coffee shop conveniently placed about halfway (about the year 1650) with cushions, benches to sit on and cake. Seriously.
It’s pretty hard to work out the architectural design from the inside unless you know it’s there. Luckily, there are no end of helpful booklets in twenty languages pointing it out.
…
I suffer from the historian’s debilitating handicap of actually wanting to read every tag and look closely at every exhibit in any museum I go to. As a result I find museum-going of whatever kind totally exhausting and generally, I hate it.
That colours my reaction to the NMA in Canberra—by the time I left I felt like I’d done fifteen rounds of nostalgia with somebody’s grandpa.
Well, 10 years into “practical” reconcilation with some of the worst life expectancy figures in the Western world *even when compared to other indigenous peoples*, Id say the jury hasnt even been appointed.
Frankly, the improvements in the US, Canada and NZ over the last 30 years are a grave indictment on Australian (bi-partisan) inaction.
See here, relevant tract below:
http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/statistics/
(e) Life expectancy – Comparison with other indigenous peoples
Approximately thirty years ago, life expectancy rates for indigenous peoples in Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America were similar to the rates for Indigenous peoples in Australia. However, significant gains in life expectancy have been made in the past two decades in the indigenous populations in Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America. Comparable mortality rates for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in 1990-1994 were at or above the rates observed 20 years ago in Maori and Native Americans, being 1.9 times the rate in Maori, 2.4 times the rate in Native Americans, and 3.2 times the rate for all Australians.
Australia has fallen significantly behind in improving the life expectancy of its Indigenous peoples. Although comparisons should be made with caution (because of the way different countries calculate life expectation) data suggests Indigenous males in Australia live between 8.8 and 13.5 years less than indigenous males in Canada, New Zealand and the USA. Indigenous females in Australia live between 10.9 and 12.6 years less than indigenous females in these countries[57].
I think thats right, Naomi, and its mentioned somewhere in that HREOC report.
“I suffer from the historian’s debilitating handicap of actually wanting to read every tag and look closely at every exhibit in any museum I go to.”
Liam, I’m exactly the same! It’s my default – I’m trying to connect more to my emotions in museums (eg breaking away from boring exhibits), but it’s hard to break a habit.
Mr T is exactly the opposite. He’s motivated by what he thinks looks good – if it looks beautiful he might read the little label. If it doesn’t look beautiful he may consider asking the curator that it be removed.
Mr T is usually in the museum shop/cafe before I am. (Some of these words are verbatim from Mr T himself).
Liam said: ==”Having been to the Berlin Jüdischemuseum I can inform anybody on this thread still interested that the Nazi period actually forms a pretty small part of the exhibits. It’s a vast musuem that covers about one and a half thousand years of European Jewish diaspora”
Wow! A public display that does not ignore 1480 years – or thereabouts – of rich cultural heritage ….. that must have upset Hollywood. (b.t.w. the Holocaust display at the Imperial War Museum in London was an excellent, very informative and dignified display of what happened in the other 20 years).
Rob – the question I would like you to answer is what has the current government done in the last 10 years to help the Aboriginal people, such as those who haunt the streets of Alice Springs? The two years we just spent there were certainly educational and eye opening. I worked for a not for profit organisation which involved among other things helping people in town camps but we really couldn’t do much. Provide a few blankets, maybe a bed for someone bedridden, a fridge or a washing machine to be shared by a number of families, some second hand clothes. Hardly even a bandaid solution.
My perception is all that has been done is pull Keith out of the woodwork to explain historically why it isn’t the government’s job to do anything because they aren’t responsible for the mess in the first place.