QUADRANT MAGAZINE
THE McAULEY YEARS
1959
Quadrant was founded in 1956 and the first four issues appeared in 1957. The organising genius in the venture was Richard Krygier, a Polish-Jewish refugee, and the founding editor was the leading poet James McAuley. Behind the magazine stood the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, the Australian arm of the international Congress for Cultural Freedom, dedicated to cultural freedom and the intellectual resistance to communism and its fellow travellers in the West.
Peter Coleman is one of the surviving members of that resistance movement. He wrote The Liberal Conspiracy to chart the rise and fall of the Congress, and he also wrote an account of the selection process when James McAuley became the first editor of Quadrant. McAuley was the sole editor for the first five years and the magazines that appeared during that time have become collectors items because he published the leading poets, essayists and critics of the day.
They stand as a monument to the spirit of freedom, of democratic capitalism and the best aspects of western culture and intellectual life. It will be good to see them put on line for the benefit of people who do not have access to the originals. The contents of the first five years (20 editions) of the McAuley Quadants can be seen below to indicate the riches that will become available when they are put into the public domain.
Rafe Champion, Sydney 2011
The guiding principles, from McAuley's first editorial comment.
To be Australian in our orientation, because we are interested in this country, its people, its problems, its cultural life, its liberties, and its safety;
To publish work of interest and merit on any topic without regard to the affiliations or repute of the author, the sole requirement being that the material should be worth reading;
To be guided, when an editorial attitude is called for with regard to questions of civil liberty or public standards, by the principles underlying the parliamentary institutions of this country and the Common Law - than which we know no better school of freedom and civility and prudence, in the old high sense of those words; for to be a good Australian is to be a local variety of that 'free and lawful man', the traditional ideal of Western civilization.
QUADRANT
1959
Volume III
Number 9. Summer 1958-9
Hugh Atkinson - Book Learners and Life Learners
An imaginary dialogue.
E W Titterton - The Problem of Nuclear Weapon Tests
The author explained that fears in Australia regarding the health hazards of the testing programs in progress at the time on the part of Russia and the US were wildly exaggerated. However the prospct of a stay on tests by both parties should be welcomed at a possible first step to disarmament.
Irving Kristol - Unilateral Defeatism? [Summary and commentary by R. J. Stove]
Irving Kristol, touted late in life as “the godfather of neoconservatism” (a description which he neither rejoiced in nor denied), was born in 1920 of non-observant Jewish parents. After his military service he became an extremely active figure – indeed one of the leaders – in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which appointed him as co-editor (with Sir Stephen Spender) of Britain’s Encounter when that magazine began in 1953. Subsequently (1965) he founded another prominent Cold War periodical (itself now defunct), The Public Interest, and for a quarter of a century (1972-97) wrote a column about politics for The Wall Street Journal, as well as having numerous articles published in almost every significant American and British political magazine on a freelance – yet still very frequent – basis. His wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, has specialised in analyses of 19th-century England’s intellectual life, Lord Acton being a particular hero of hers. The couple’s children include William (Bill) Kristol, currently editor of The Weekly Standard. Irving died in 2009, having produced several books, including Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978) and Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983).
No hint of Kristol’s subsequent neoconservative enthusiasms marks this article, which is a straightforward and grim Cold War commentary of the sort that Patrick Buchanan or B. A. Santamaria might have written (and did write). Kristol’s chief targets are three Britons: Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestley, and the then equally celebrated Commander Stephen King-Hall. All three men were active in ban-the-Bomb protests – which included the Aldermaston marches, held every year from 1958 to 1963 – while rejecting the options of complete non-aggression or unequivocal pro-Soviet sentiment (though Priestley had previously flirted with the latter, and Russell would afterwards do so during the Vietnam War, despite having (many years before) briefly advocated a first nuclear strike against Moscow). To Kristol, the crusade for unilateral nuclear disarmament is objectionable precisely because “it is a crusade, a profession of unconditional righteousness.”
Kristol asks, rhetorically: “What if, in the course of a ‘local’ war, Korean-style, things go so badly for the Communists that, in desperation, they employ ‘tactical’ nuclear or atomic weapons? … What ought we then to do? Surrender on the spot? Reply in kind? … The enormity of such a decision is awful. … I can understand how, in this dilemma, many decent people might seek refuge in pacifism – though there is also the prospect that, in the endless and mindless conflict of nuclear-armed desperadoes that human history will then become, they may have opted for both pacifism and the extinction of the human race. But I cannot understand how someone like Lord Russell or Mr Priestley can demand unilateral disarmament while sedulously avoiding any explicit adherence to pacifism.”
Also, Kristol takes aim at the physicist Carl Friedrich con Weizsäcker (son of a prominent wartime diplomat and brother of a future German president), who earlier had put his signature – as had several other leading scientists – to a manifesto calling for West Germany to eschew all atomic weapons. Of Weizsäcker’s argument, Kristol complains: “One really needs to be intellectually double-jointed to get a grip on it,” since the manifesto itself admits the role played by the Bomb in contributing to world peace. “How lucky to be a scientist in Germany today,” Kristol sneers, “where righteousness is buttressed by ineffectualness! … If [Weizsäcker] has provoked me to a testiness of tone, I can only plead that my own quota for the tolerance of mindless rhetoric about the Bomb has been exhausted.”
The crux of Kristol’s argument is this: “The problem of the Bomb is the problem of the Cold War.” Kristol cites the revelation supplied to him by several individuals who had led, and miraculously survived, the 1956 Hungarian uprising – individuals who were by conviction social democrats rather than right-wingers – that if they had possessed H-bombs, they would have used them (however reluctantly) in their struggle against Moscow. He expresses puzzlement (as Buchananite paleoconservatives would do afresh after 1991) at the apparent unwillingness of European governments to take a bigger role in defending themselves than has been their habit. “The countries of Western Europe, taken together, have the population, the industrial resources and the trained personnel to match Soviet Russia in conventional military strength – if they want to. And there’s the rub.” Such defence self-reliance, or in any event partial self-reliance, would entail not only a reversal of the unilateral policies which socialist parties in the West have advocated, but also sacrifices involving “having to do without as many television sets, cigarettes and washing machines as [Europe] would like.” But Kristol also urges, near his article’s end (and unlike later paleoconservatives), “longer terms of compulsory military service [within the USA] and the diversion of American resources to the maintenance of a very large, well-equipped, well-trained military establishment based on non-nuclear armaments.”
Paul Kelly - "Two Poems for Christmas"
Bernard Hessling - The Multi-Millionaire
fiction
fictionKenneth Hince - The Case of the Dismissed Professor [Summary and commentary by R. J. Stove]
Kenneth Hince (born in 1926) was for decades one of the most prominent figures in Melbourne artistic life. His own store in the city – Kenneth Hince Old and Fine Books – served as a meeting-place for discussion as well as, or rather more than, for the carrying-out of commerce. Many-sided in his interests, Hince had a particular expertise regarding music (though it would seem he never underwent formal training in that field), and wrote regular music-related articles during the 1960s and 1970s for The Age and The Australian. Anne Summers, in her memoir Ducks on the Pond, mentions Hince with approval as a 1960s magnet for Melbourne’s Catholic, but also anti-Santamaria, intellectual life (she had herself worked briefly and unhappily within the Santamaria organisation’s headquarters). In 1999 Hince deposited most of his papers in the National Library of Australia. It has not thus far been possible to ascertain whether Hince, as of January 2012, is still alive.
The subject of this essay was G. W. L. Marshall-Hall, one of the few Australian professors ever to lose his job. Marshall-Hall achieved substantial fame in Melbourne’s musical life during the years before and after Federation. By turns he was conductor, composer, lecturer, and aesthetic theorist. (Some of his own music has been released on CD.) Since 1958, there has arisen a veritable cottage industry of Marshall-Hall-related scholarship, including a commercially published biography by musicologist M. T. Radic, and a doctoral thesis – as yet still in typescript – by another musicologist, Joe Rich. But when Hince wrote his piece, this activity was all in an unsuspected future. In 1958, few people even in Melbourne remembered Marshall-Hall’s name. Certainly the average Quadrant reader would not have encountered it before. So Hince consciously sought to make the Marshall-Hall legacy better known.
For this legacy Hince had great admiration, as he had for Marshall-Hall himself, whom he calls “intensely virile as man and musician.” Despite being the first occupant of the Ormond Chair of Music at Melbourne University, Marshall-Hall was the reverse of a conventional don. Sketchy in formal education but with great natural talent, he expressed himself with vigour in both conversation and writing, and directed – in Hince’s words – “public concerts remarkable equally for the new names on his programmes and for his impromptu indictments of humbug and the orotundity of newspaper critics.” Unusually well-read, Marshall-Hall was very much au fait with the controversies raging in Europe during his time over Wagner’s compositions, and he made a similarly serious study of Nietzsche’s music-related invective. Hince quotes Marshall-Hall’s hot disagreement with Nietzsche’s anti-Wagner and anti-Brahms verdicts.
Unfortunately for his career, Marshall-Hall lacked the discretion to conceal his heterodox religious views, which (from Hince’s description of them) seem never to have constituted formal atheism, but which laid him open to charges of blasphemy. He released in 1898 a collection of poems with the blandly misleading title Hymns Ancient and Modern. These poems in fact jeered at Christian teachings and were, for 1898, singularly outspoken on sexual matters. The book came to the notice of the university authorities, who in 1900 declared that it “render[ed] him an unfit tutor of the young.” By later standards it seems to have been very mild – Hince says that “the reader of 1958 may search the volume in vain for signs of moral turpitude” – but as a result of its publication, Marshall-Hall’s professorial contract, due to come to an end anyhow, was not renewed. Hince gives a few examples of Marshall-Hall’s verse, none of which are likely to shock today. One of these runs:
“One thinks this, another that,
According as he’s lean or fat.
Those that cannot think at all
Theologians we call.”
Elsewhere in his writings, Hince reports, Marshall-Hall endorsed Nietzsche’s scorn for Christianity, whatever his differences with Nietzsche’s musical assessments. Hince conjectures that “since he could not keep them [his Nietzschean sentiments] out of print, it is probable that he could not keep his lectures and public utterances free of them: this was his fatal error.” Indubitably he supported Nietzsche’s contempt for egalitarianism. This he combined with an Anglophobia which, in late-Victorian Melbourne, would have appeared almost treasonous. (He was in fact English-born.) As Hince notes: “It would have been an extraordinary thing to find no elements of grudge, no traces of personal scores repaid, on the tribunal which sent him packing.”
Although Hince gives few if any details of his protagonist’s later career, it is worth mentioning that after failing to keep his university post, Marshall-Hall founded the institution which was first called the Albert Street Conservatorium, and afterwards renamed the Melba Conservatorium. (Today the Melba has been incorporated into Melbourne University.) Later he went back to England; later still, on the premature death of his successor Franklin Peterson, he resumed his old professorship. This occurred in 1914, not, as Hince wrongly says, 1916. In 1915, aged 59, Marshall-Hall died of appendicitis.
George Molnar - How to be a Tourist
Travellers tales in cartoon form.
George Baker - "The Ballad of High Holborn"
Georges Faludy - Poetry in a Hungarian Prison
A harrowing account of the way men kept the life of the mind alive under the unrelieved horrors of communist prison camps.
Georges Faludy - "Western Australia"
Rae Campbell - Tempo at a Tokyo University
Impressions and memories of teaching (and learning) among the rising generation of young Japanese.
A G Mitchell - The Australian Accent[Summary and commentary by R. J. Stove]
[Summary and commentary by R. J. Stove]Alexander George Mitchell (born in 1911) became founding Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University when it was set up in 1964, and is probably best known for his editorial labours upon the Macquarie Dictionary. He wrote a good deal on English literature – especially in its mediaeval forms – but was primarily a scholar of linguistics. In 1965 he collaborated with Macquarie colleague Arthur Delbridge (10 years his junior) to provide a formal classification of Australian accents, which the two men divided into three broad groups: broad, general, and cultivated varieties. These categories are still remembered today (“broad” would include the late Steve Irwin’s accent; “general”, John Howard’s; “cultivated”, Alexander Downer’s).
Australian speech patterns constituted a subject to which Mitchell returned over and over, from 1946 onwards. (He did more than any other individual – or so Les Murray says in The Monthly’s August 2010 number – to persuade the ABC, during the 1960s, to countenance Australian accents being used on air.) In this piece Mitchell complained about the assumption “that no one can really be serious if he asks for serious consideration of the speech through which Australians communicate their thoughts and feelings.” This assumption he attributes partly to Australians’ geographical isolation from most other Western countries, and as a result their usual lack of experience of being “in a foreign country where everyone speaks another language.” Besides, Australian speech has far fewer regional (as opposed to educational) variants than does the speech of Britain, the USA, or even Canada.
Mitchell cites a conversation which, though imaginary, is likely to occur in its essentials among Englishmen: “You come from Gloucestershire, do you not?” “Yes. From Cheltenham, as a matter of fact. And how is business in Birmingham?” He contrasts this geographically specific exchange with the sort of thing which is likely to occur when an Englishman questions an Australian:
“Englishman: ‘You come from Australia, do you not?’
‘Australian (in slow, challenging but anxious tones): ‘How do you know?’”
According to Mitchell, people – and, it would seem, Australians more than most – have “great difficulty in knowing accurately what the sounds are that we use when we speak.” He believes that this problem is aggravated by “the comparative crudity with which traditional spelling represents sound,” at least in English, with its abundance of diphthongs. “An attempt to represent characteristics of pronunciation by means of traditional spelling is bound to cause distortion. … When, therefore, people indicate by spelling or by vocal imitation what an Australian says, the result is almost certain to be a distortion of what the Australian actually says.”
Mitchell regrets the prevalence of the belief that Australian speech is unusually nasal in its character. “All speech,” he maintains, “is in some degree nasal, for a physical reason … all speech has an accompanying nasal resonance.” He asserts that “perhaps three per cent of Australians speak with pronounced nasality,” and that the popular assumption of nasality being more widespread in this country than it actually is derives from the following syllogism: “nasal speech is generally thought to be bad – Australian speech is generally considered bad – therefore Australian speech is nasal.”
When Mitchell wrote his article, the phrase “Received Pronunciation” (to denote the sort of accent one might hear in, for instance, the Queen’s Christmas message) was not yet in common Australian use, although this descriptor had in fact been employed in Britain since the early 19th century. At any rate, Mitchell in 1958 was already rejecting the idea that RP should be considered normative. He points out here that English pronunciation in Shakespeare’s day – even among the most aristocratic social classes – would, if we ourselves heard it now, “sound like a strange rustic dialect. … English is no frail and tender growth that needs sheltering and protecting. It is vigorously, and in many of its manifestations rudely, alive.” If per impossibile we were to assume that Australian speech patterns in 1788 were identical to English speech patterns at the same period, “the differences would still have developed. But the patterns were not the same … Then the conditions in which the pronunciation developed in the two countries were different.” Such phenomena as Australia’s gold rushes, not to mention the earlier tendency of convicts and free settlers to be thrown together into the same social surroundings, were bound to produce a vocal intermixture that in England failed to happen. “Our accent,” Mitchell finds, “is not something that we mistakenly decided to adopt at some point in our history. It is part of us.”
Vincent Buckley - "Sinn Fein"
Brian James - Untimely Aid short story
E O Schlunke - The Horse: Man's Best Friend
Episodes of accidents on horseback, with potentially lethal consequences.
E G Docker - Caste and Politics
A report on the way the dysfunctional caste system in India is playing out in democratic politcs, with some parties forming up on caste lines.
Anthony K Russell - Looking After the Details
Pressing on with the campaign for improved industrial design, calling for awareness at all levels from writers in the way they write about the urban landscape, industrial designers, architects , builders and the population at large . No more Australian Ugliness!
Reviews
K. Slessor, John Thompson and R . G. Howarth (eds) The Penguin Book of Australian Verse; Colin Clarke, Australia's Hopes and Fears; K. R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law or the Pursuit of Progress; Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch.
Number 10. Autumn 1959
Comment - 'Progress' in China (abolishing the family), 'Progress' in Tibet (the Chinese occupation), The Inner Battlefield (the struggle for minds).
Boris Pasternak - "To Madame Tsvetaeva"
Peter Hastings - Zhigavo and the Other Russia
An extended essay on the man, his work as a poet and novelist, and his times.
Manning Clark - Monologue by a Man in Black
A fictional and higly ironical account of characters in a Commonwealth Government bureaucracy concerned with security during the Cold War.
Hugh Atkinson - Burning Bright
A short story.
Mary Gilmore - "Night"
Vincent Buckley - Utopianism and Vitalism in Australian Literature
A stimulating and challenging essay which argued that the dominant spirit of Australian literature is not revolutionary socialism and it is not especially democratic. He suggested that the two chief lines of influence appeared to be (1) a kind of utopian humanism and (2) a kind fo vitalism, an insistence on releasing the basic powers of life.
Charles Higham - "Actaeon's Death"
J K McCarthy - The Rabaul Strike
An episode in 1929 when the native police, workers and servants undertook a well organized strike for better pay and conditions. The strikers were taken back to work by their leaders and the vindictive aftermath reflected badly on the whiite administration.
D'Arcy Niland - King of the Jumbuck-Barbers
A short story, a typical (and superb) Niland character sketch of an unlikely outback character.
Alexander Craig - "Autumnal Ode"
R H Morrison - "Cut Roses"
H A Lindsay - The World's First Policewoman
The inspirational story of Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks. She started her career in social work and was appointed school mistress and assistant matron at the Receiving Home for State Children. Later she became the first probation officer for the State Children's Council. Then she became the first policewoman in Australia, and possibly in the world. Most of her work was done in a helping capacity with women, children and girls at risk.
Instead of retiging at age 60 she accepted an offer from the Methodist Church to direct their newly formed Welfare Department. Among other things she established a residential facility for u nmarried mothers and infants from broken homes.
Gwen Kelly - The Assault on the Mind
A short story.
K E Read - The Bay
A mournful account of a short visit to a delapidated seaside hamlet in the north-western corner of the US and the glimpse of the remnant of local Indians putting on a fake show for visitors, dressed up in stereotyped off the rack" Indian outfits, not the traditional dress of the local tribe.
James McAuley - "Nocturnal"
Vinny D'Cruza - Walking Zero
A remarkable account of an disciple of Mahatma Ghandi who is alleged to have travelled the country persuading rich landowners to part with some of their property to give local villagers a start on the land.
Reviews
Australian Institute of Political Science, New Guinea and Australia; Eric Vogelin, Order and History; J. M. D. Pringle, The Australian Accent; Leicester Webb, Church and State in Italy; Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller; Ribor Meray, TheEnemy' Douglas Stewart, Four Plays; John Jewkes, David Sawers and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention; rebecca West, The Court and the Castle; Junichiro Tanizaki, the Makioka Sisters.
Number 11. Winter 1959
Comment - Total Work
1. Total Work
The ‘hundred flowers’ period in China revealed to the world a deal of inner dissent among the intellectuals and a ‘rectification campaign’ followed to purge those who showed tendencies towards bourgeois concepts of freedom and democracy.
There was a parallel ‘great leap forward’ in cultural production. “In Sulu hsien, Hopei Province, half of the country’s population of 400,000 is engaged in some form or writing or other artistic creation…they have already produced 1.4 million items”.
F Knopfelmacher, On Tolerance
An excellent survey of confusion and obfuscation about tolerance and prejudice and the way the issues have been confused by left-leaning academics in the social sciences.
“The state of the ALP offers another, even more striking example. Many Labor leaders are no longer capable of distinguishing clearly the values of democratic socialism from the fraudulent wares sold to them under false pretences by agents of an Oriental despotism. Indifference, cynicism and the poisonous effects of universal debunking by the pundits have done their work.”
Tom Truman, Profesor Macmahon Ball and our Foreign Policy.
Truman takes issue with Macmahon Ball’s attack on the Australian stance on the US alliance. His position has two parts (1) the American alliance cannot actually protect us and (2) we should align more closely to Asian nations such as India and Indonesia which are indifferent to the Communist advance.
“It may well be as Professor Ball says that the Western ideas of individual liberty and democratic government can make little appeal to the Asian masses whose primary needs of foot, clothing, housing and jobs cry out for fulfillment. But this does not mean that the Communist form of dictatorship is the only alternative.”
Bio of Macmahon Ball. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ball-william-macmahon-12166
Tibor Meray, From My Australian Diary.
Meray is a Hungarian writer who visited Australia under the auspices of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. He recalled some previous impressions of Australia and Australians, including the time that he learned the song Waltzing Matilda word-perfect. In 1951-52 he was a war correspondent in Korea, covering the Armistice negotiations (from the other side). The war correspondents spent the long evenings drinking rice wine and their hosts usually persuaded them to sing their national songs.
“Pracki sang Polish, I Hungarian, Winnington English and Wilfred Burchett Australian songs or rather he sang one, always the same, ‘Waltzing Matilda’”
Lloyd Ross, How Relevant is Socialism?
Ross was a self-educated trade unionist, a strong anti-communist and the pillar of the Railway Union in New South Wales after WW2. He describes how the Australian labour movement has struggled to make sense of the many and varied definitions of socialism, and the contribution from sources such as the doctrines from Henry George and the radical left which have contributed to the movement at times. For example, he examined the problems of a group of self-proclaimed contemporary ‘socialists’ – the editors of Outlook – An Australian Socialist Review, finding that after a dozen or so issues containing a microcosm of socialist controversies, nothing emerged that could help the Labor Party to offer a coherent political program.
http://asslh.org.au/hummer/no-19/lloyd-ross/
R G Geering, Joyce Carey: the Man and his Work.
A charming portrait of an engaging personality and tireless writer, nowadays little known, though in the sixties his book The Horses Mouth enjoyed a cult status among would-be artists. People whose knowledge of Carey did not extend beyond that book will be amazed at his range and depth of his work. Geering complements that impression with the memory of a friendly, helpful and gregarious man who continued to hold open house and to maintain his daily discipline of reading and writing even as his strength was failing due to the advance of muscular atrophy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Cary
W A Zbyzewsjyi, Letter from Europe: A Third World Power.
Reflections on the mounting ambition of the six nations in the Common Market to become the third force in world politics, alongside the US and the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Community
R F Brissenden, The Private Eye.
Brissendon focuses on the work of Raymond Chandler who he regards as the best known and most accomplished writer in the field of crime and violence. He has introduced elements of craft and moral depth into the American thriller which began its violent career in the 1920s. This genre is distinct from the “polite and bloodless wonder, the English detective story” and also the more realistic works of Simenon and Graham Greene.
Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, is likely to be the best remembered due to the movie which contains arguable the best dialogue of all, aided by William Faulkner and two other screen writers who worked on Chandler’s story, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the leading roles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sleep_(1946_film)
Edward St John, Treason Trial in South Africa: The Third Phase.
Some background on the origin and evolution of the Apartheid system is essential to understand the bind that South Africa had worked itself into by the 1960s. This has been provided by William Harold Hutt, the English economist and longtime resident in South Africa. That background will also help to illuminate the problems that persist in the nation.
St John attended the Treason Trial in 1959 on behalf of the British Section of the International Commission of Jurists. Thirty people of several races, including two Europeans, had been on bail since 1956, on a charge of conspiring to “subvert and overthrow the State by violence, and to substitute a Communist State or some other State”. The Crown had no direct evidence to support the charge and based its case on a massive amount of circumstantial evidence amounting to 8000 pages of transcript. The trial has just completed the third phase which involved hearing defence objections to the indictment. A fourth phase was about to begin, with the Judges decision being taken to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. So far no evidence has actually been taken before the Judges, who rejected the defence case to quash the whole indictment.
St John refrained from any comment on the likely outcome of the trial. He expressed grave reservations about the prospects for a painless resolution of the situation in South Africa.
Reviews
Leonie Kramer, Exotics of Different Kinds.
Kramer reviews a number of novels that have recently become available in English translation – Camus, Exile and the Kingdom; Henry de Montherlant, Desert Love; R K Narayan (an Indian), The Guide; Juan Ramon Jiminez, Platero and I; Vladimir Grinioff, Tale of a Whistling Shrimp.
Russell Ward, The Australian Legend; Raymond L Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Australian Explorers, A Selection from their Writings; Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry; Russell Braddon, End of a Hate; G. Shepperson and T. Price, Independent Africa; Jeremy Warburg (ed), The Industrial Muse; Christopher Adams (ed), The Worst English Poets; Derek Hudson, English Critical Essays, Twentieth Century; V R Naipul, The Suffrage of Elvira; Joseph Campbell (ed), Man and Time; Herge, The Adventures of Tintin: King Ottaker’s Sceptre and The Crab with the Golden Claws.
Number 12. Spring 1959
Comment - Anti-semitism in Russia
A brief resume of some techniques of anti-semitic propaganda in use behind the iron curtain.
R J O'Dea - The White-Collar Employee
The author noted that sociologists are starting to focus on the white-collar employee instead of the traditional obsession with miners and wharfies because. This is because the ranks of these workers are growing to a point where they will soon be the dominant category of personnel in the workforce.
Developments of note include the tension between university graduates and others when they perform similar duties and the rising tide of industrial militancy in some groups of office workers who were not traditionally unionised.
M K Adullah - The Babu from Bengal
Geoffrey Dutton - "A South Australian Almanac"
James Jupp - British Labour: Old and New
An important account of the transition in the Labour Party as the leaders of the old factions are replaced by a new breed of university educated activists and organizers. The result is a party of incompatible elements only just held together by the need to fight the Conservative enemy.
Gwen Kelly - Snow White and the H-Bomb
A meditation on how much reality young children can be expected to handle, starting from the abridged form of the Snow White story that the author was reading to her daughter. Much of the moral conflict in the original story was missing in the short form and Kelly speculated that children raised on simplified versions of the classics may be handicapped when they come to deal with the complexities and moral ambiguities of Cold War politics.
Eugene Kamenka - Puritan England and the New Jerusalem
Kemenka shone a light on a little-know 17th century period of Messianic fervor among groups of English Protestants, including such distinguished literary figures as John Milton, regarding the return of the Jews to England as a prelude to a period of worldwide religous reform. The background to this was the expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I in 1290 and their return, sponsored by Oliver Cromwell, after 1657.
John Hempel - Italians in Queensland
Aspects of assmilation of Italian immigrants, starting with a wave in the early nineteen twenties and boosted by some 200,000 of the 1.3 million newcomers in Australia since WW2. They represented the largest non-British group in that total. The article contains a great deal of information on the pattern of settlement, occupations, movements and rate of assumilation. One feature of interest was the way that only one sixth of the Italian newcomers to Queensland settled in Brisbane, in contrast with the concentration of new arrivals in the cities of Melbourne and Sydney observed interstate.
R A Simpson - "To a Patient in a Catholic Hospital"
Denis de Rougemont - The Creative Obstacle
Literary production is crushed under the worst tyrannies, but de Rougemont noted that in the present Western regime of freedom writers can abuse this freedom to their hearts'content. "They can, without incurring any risks whatever, glorify theft and murder, rape and incest; they can speak for any political and ideological perversion, and attack with impunity all existing institutions. And they really do attack them. Church, State, Government, police, family and property, public morals and national sovereignty".
He suggested that high points of literary flowering coincide with periods of mild despotism, with various forms of official censorship which is weak enough to be circumvented with a modicum of ingenuity.
Mary Finnin - "Pause for Peacock"
Judith Wright - The Unshielded Eye
An elaborate analysis of "the paradox of Shaw Neilson" who Wright located in a pivotal position in Australian poetry, coming when there was a germ of an Australian tradition which was not available to Harpur, Kendall, Lawson and Brennan. She paired him with Hugh McCrae as the other poet of "that brief golden age".
She attempted to explain how critics could differ so much on Neilson's capacities as a poet; Stewart described him as a natural rhymer, singing "as the birds sang" while Hope called him "literary", "studied", "mannered" with "self-conscious and literary idiom".
David M Selby - Hell Revisited
A review essay of Dudley McCarthy's volume South-West Pacific Area - First Year in the official war history series for WW2.
Reviews
Xavier Herbert, Seven Emus; Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct and Four Short Stories and Selected Poems and An Essay in Autobiography; Lin Yutang, The Secret Name; John Betjeman, Collected Poems; Randolph Stow, To The Islands; Christopher Koch, The Boys in the Island; Ernest Halperin, The Triumphant Heretic; Ignazio Silone, The Secret of Luca; Patrick White, The Aunt's Story; David Rowbottom, Inland; Geoffrey Dutton, Antipodes in Shoes; James K Baxter, In Fires of No Return; C. W. Webster, Poems; John M. Todd (ed), The Arts, Artists and Thinkers.
