In one of the greatest scandals of Australian cultural warfare, the Australia Council has cut off funding to the literary and creative pages of conservative cultural-intellectual magazine Quadrant (see my article in News Weekly, June 18, 2016). It has maintained or increased grants, now totaling six-figure sums, to various minuscule leftist magazines, such as the…
A DISTANT PROSPECT by Annette Young Distant Prospect Publishing, Lorn, NSW491 pagesPrice: paperback $US19.95; hardback $US36.95Available at Amazon and at www.adistantprospect.com Reviewed by John Young This is a fascinating novel, set in Sydney in the 1920s. The central character, Lucy Straughan, is a teenage girl partly crippled as a result of polio. She and her father are Irish, and had moved to Australia some years earlier, after the tragic death of Lucy’s mother. When Lucy begins attending a Catholic school at Strathfield she at first finds it hard to fit in, and is subjected to teasing and bullying from certain…
The detective as knight-errant is a key character in the modern imagination. He enters into the story to solve the mystery and thus restore order. Aaron Pedersen as Jay Swan. Such stories are tragedies told backwards, for the protagonist is not the detective but the victim, as the great Ross MacDonald, author of the Lew Archer stories, argued. The detective acts as a sort of a Greek chorus, one who in discovering the truth, reveals it to the audience. But the detective is not just the discoverer – he is also the avenger, the agent of Nemesis, who enacts…
Since Friday July 8, the names of NSW member schools of the Safe Schools Coalition (SSCA) no longer appear on the SSCA website. They have been taken down. (“NSW schools ‘harassed’ into hiding: youth foundation”, The Weekend Australian, July 16). A graffitist has been keeping up with developments at Cheltenham …
