This story (the title of which alludes to Jessica Mitford’s October 1974 Atlantic Monthly report, “My Short And Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor”) really begins with two processes that became obvious to Australians in early 2008. First, there was the evidence—clear from the American media’s caterwauling about the subprime meltdown—that a world recession was a matter of “when,” not “if.” … [Read More]

Say what you like against us Australians, there is one activity where we excel, and that is, in producing artistic hoaxers. The nonexistent modernist poetic genius “Ern Malley” in the 1940s; a subsequent platoon of “Aboriginal” creators (“B. Wongar”, “Wanda Koolmatrie”, “Eddie Burrup”) who invariably turned out to be about as “Aboriginal” as Nicole Kidman; a nonexistent Ukrainian novelist named “Helen … [Read More]

Karen De Coster’s article on “The Standard of Living Bubble” leaves open, inevitably, the question of foreign equivalents to the hoggish economic meltdown that Miss De Coster describes. Still unsolved, for instance, is the mystery of why Australia, so far, has managed (unlike, by the looks of it, France) to avoid the worst of the real estate bubble. Why should this … [Read More]

The tale is told by M. F. Barnes, in her 1931 study Renaissance Vistas (and it has often been depicted by great painters, notably Botticelli and Carpaccio), of Saint Augustine, wandering along the seashore. Lost in cogitation upon the Holy Trinity, the saint meets a small boy who busies himself filling a hole in the sand with teaspoonfuls of water from … [Read More]

You have no idea what joy lies in discovering that there is another human being in one’s homeland who actually has heard of, and reads with pleasure, Samuel Francis. But so there is. Australia, where moral cowardice and insanely punitive libel laws have combined to produce an intellectual milieu even more squalid than the average Beltway think-tank, has actually allowed the … [Read More]

May I, even at this late stage of the John Lukacs controversy, offer a few thoughts that do not seem to have been articulated elsewhere on this site? Readers have now stepped into a first-person authorial zone. They should be, accordingly, warned. I have on my shelves a 2004 edition of Dr. Lukacs’s A Student’s Guide to the Study of History. … [Read More]

Review of Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, by Peter Gay: W. W. Norton, New York City, 2007, 610 pages If a Nobel Prize existed for the authorial achievement that most obviously combines clichéd competence with ideological obsession, Peter Gay’s Modernism would win it at a canter. The review attributed to Dr. Johnson pre-emptively dealt with such works: “This book is both … [Read More]

The tale is told by M. F. Barnes, in her 1931 study Renaissance Vistas (and it has often been depicted by great painters, notably Botticelli and Carpaccio), of Saint Augustine, wandering along the seashore. Lost in cogitation upon the Holy Trinity, the saint meets a small boy who busies himself filling a hole in the sand with teaspoonfuls of water from … [Read More]

You may have heard of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But you probably haven’t heard of The Man Who Killed Robert Lowell. So who did kill Robert Lowell? Well, I have a horrible suspicion that I did. Quite accidentally, you understand. It happened like this (members of the jury). In 1974, the year I turned 13, my parents—having accurately and … [Read More]

It occurred to me recently that thirty years have elapsed since I first began earning money as a church organist. Perhaps in those thirty years, I may have learnt a few things of some general interest, worth passing on to others. I’ve played in many Catholic churches, and in quite a few Anglican [Episcopalian] churches. But I don’t know the first … [Read More]