Poets From Australia

"I saw bank booms ... land booms, silver booms, booms, and they all had one thing in common—they always burst."

"All men are born free and equal; and each man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of horse racing."

"A man without one redeeming vice."

"There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around That the colt from old Regret had got away, And had joined the wild bush horses — he was worth a thousand pound, So all the cracks had gathered to the fray. All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far Had mustered at the homestead overnight, For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are, And the stockhorse snuffs the battle with delight."

"He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko's side, Where the hills are twice as steep, and twice as rough; Where the horse's hoofs strike firelight from the flintstones every stride, The man that holds his own is good enough. And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home, Where the river runs those giant hills between; I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam, But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen."

"It was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town, He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down. He loitered here, he loitered there, till he was like to drop, Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop. "Ere! shave my beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark, I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark.""

"The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are, He wore a strike-your-fancy sash, he smoked a huge cigar; He was a humorist of note and keen at repartee, He laid the odds and kept a "tote", whatever that may be, And when he saw our friend arrive, he whispered, "Here's a lark! Just watch me catch him all alive, this man from Ironbark.""

"Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong Under the shade of a coolibah tree, And he sang as he watched and waited till his "Billy" boiled, "You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me.""

"The noblest study of mankind is man, but the most fascinating study of womankind is another woman's wardrobe."

"The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair. The full facts about the Soviet Union were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao's China left that compounded despair looking like an inadequate response. After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché."

"[Donald Horne's] central tenet, that his homeland was a lucky strike consistently mismanaged by second-rate politicians, caught on as a dogmatic aid to national self-doubt. As I read on through our recent and gratifyingly rich heritage of commentary and memoir, it became clearer to me all the time that we hadn't become a prosperous and reasonably equable democracy by the accidental dispensation of benevolent nature and a favourable geographical position. The country had been built, by clever people. Our constitution itself was the work of people who had studied history. They were readers of newspapers and periodicals, they were eternal students in the best sense, they were bookish people. They had built a bookish nation. But, as so often has been the case with Australia's consciousness of itself, the problem was to realise it."

"Roman Polanski's new film The Pianist is a work of genius on every level, except, alas, for the press-pack promotional slogan attributed to the director himself. "The Pianist is a testimony to the power of music, the will to live, and the courage to stand against evil." If he actually said it, he flew in the face of his own masterpiece, which is a testimony to none of those things. In the Warsaw ghetto, the power of music, the will to live and the courage to stand against evil added up to very little, and The Pianist has the wherewithal to respect that sad fact and make sense of it. In the Warsaw ghetto, what counted was luck, and the luck had to be very good."

"The new Germany is a democracy. So was the old Germany, or it tried to be: but then the Nazis got on, and Hell broke loose. It can break loose anywhere: all people have hellish propensities."

"For those who would like to throw off the burden of history and move on, Goldhagen’s book has been a welcome gift. Purporting to bring the past home to the unsuspecting present, he has had the opposite effect. If he has not yet asked himself why his book has received such an enthusiastic reception in Germany, he might ponder why 'the Germans' should be so glad to be supplied with the argument that their parents and grandparents were all equally to blame because they inhabited a culture blameworthy in itself: we’re different now. But nobody is that different now, because nobody was that different then."

"The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power."

"We tend to think of [Hitler] as an idiot because the central tenet of his ideology was idiotic – and idiotic, of course, it transparently is. Anti-Semitism is a world view through a pinhole: as scientists say about a bad theory, it is not even wrong. Nietzsche tried to tell Wagner that it was beneath contempt. Sartre was right for once when he said that through anti-Semitism any halfwit could become a member of an elite. But, as the case of Wagner proves, a man can have this poisonous bee in his bonnet and still be a creative genius. Hitler was a destructive genius, whose evil gifts not only beggar description but invite denial, because we find it more comfortable to believe that their consequences were produced by historical forces than to believe that he was a historical force. Or perhaps we just lack the vocabulary. Not many of us, in a secular age, are willing to concede that, in the form of Hitler, Satan visited the Earth, recruited an army of sinners, and fought and won a battle against God. We would rather talk the language of pseudoscience, which at least seems to bring such events to order. But all such language can do is shift the focus of attention down to the broad mass of the German people, which is what Goldhagen has done, in a way that, at least in part, lets Hitler off the hook – and unintentionally reinforces his central belief that it was the destiny of the Jewish race to be expelled from the Volk as an inimical presence."

"The Holocaust would have been unimaginable without the Nazi Party; the Nazi Party would have been unimaginable without Hitler; and Hitler’s rise to power would have been unimaginable without the unique circumstances that brought the Weimar Republic to ruin. To hear Goldhagen tell it, mass murder was all set to go: a century-long build-up of eliminationist anti-Semitism simply had to express itself. But the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past."

"Claus Graf von Stauffenberg's famous last words Es lebe das geheime Deutschland have turned out to be not quite so romantically foolish as they sounded at the time. If there never was a secret Germany, the July plotters at least provided a sacred moment, and the Germans of today are right to cherish it."

"In Germany, everyone knew that helping or hiding Jews was an unpardonable crime, which would be punished as severely as an attack on Hitler’s life – because it was an attack on Hitler’s life. Why, Goldhagen asks, did the population not rise up? The answer is obvious: because you had to be a hero to do so."

"[I]t makes no sense whatsoever to call the perpetrators of the Holocaust 'the Germans' if by that is meant that the German victims of Naziism – including many Jews who went on regarding themselves as Germans to the end of the line – somehow weren’t Germans at all. That’s what the Nazis thought, and to echo their harebrained typology is to concede them their victory."

"Our post-Hannah Arendt imaginations are haunted by the wrong figure: for every owl-eyed, mild-mannered pen-pusher clinically shuffling the euphemistic paperwork of oblivion, there were a hundred noisily dedicated louts revelling in the bloodbath. The gas chambers, our most enduring symbol of the catastrophe, were in fact anomalous: most of those annihilated did not die suddenly and surprised as the result of a deception, but only after protracted humiliations and torments to whose devising their persecutors devoted inexhaustible creative zeal."

"McAuley's nominal subject was left-wing incomprehension of the recently published Dr. Zhivago, but the real object of his ire seemed to be liberalism in general, starting with the invention of moveable type, or perhaps the wheel."

"The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it."

"Schnabel said that Ludwig van Beethoven|Beethoven's late piano sonatas are music better than could be played. Larkin's best poems are poetry better than can be said, but sayability they sumptuously offer. Larkin demands to be read aloud. His big, intricately formed stanzas, often bridging from one to the next, defeat the single breath but always invite it. As you read, the ideal human voice speaks in your head. It isn't his: as his gramophone records prove, he sounded like someone who expects to be interrupted. It isn't yours, either. It's ours."

"Dead ground is the territory you can’t judge the extent of until you approach it: seen from a distance, it is unseen. Almost uniquely amongst imagined countries, Tolstoy’s psychological landscape is without dead ground — the entire vista of human experience is lit up with an equal, shadowless intensity, so that separateness and clarity continue even to the horizon."

"Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing."

"When Pushkin - who was in the position of having to think what form a national culture might take - called for a dispassionate criticism, he wasn't calling for help in writing poems, which he could do all by himself. He was merely stated his wish to write them in a civilized atmosphere, whose absence was reducing him to isolation, and thereby damaging his individuality."

"When Humphries writes in propria persona his prose can scarcely contain its freight of cultivated allusions. He writes the most nutritiously rococo English in Australia today, but nobody will be able to inherit it. To know him would not be enough. You would have to know what he knows."

"[T]hat's really the first thing to say about Speer's architecture. It was just awful. A genius without talent, he was essentially a theatrical personality, with enough gumption to be quiet about it."

"Speer got quite a lot done in Berlin and if hostilities had not started early he would have transformed it utterly, with consequences far more hideous than anything achieved by the RAF."

"In the twelfth century the Basque fisherman of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. (This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did)."

"The Ocker is strictly a mass media event — but then Australia is pre-eminently a mass society. Ockerism's most famous incarnation is Paul Hogan, a stand-up comic who rivals even Dennis Lillee as an advertiser's idea of irresistible consumer-bait."

"Australian TV is so bad it is almost impossible to describe. If you have seen American television and can imagine it without its redeeming features, then Australian TV is even worse than that."

"To me [Sydney Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing opera houses."

"Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff."

"Speer never made the mistake of saying there were no extermination camps. He said he didn't know about them. He impressed the gullible by declaring himself willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes even though he was not aware of their full scope. But as the man better informed about the Reich's industrial resources than anybody else including Hitler, Speer was in fact fully aware of the purpose and the extent of the Final Solution and by pretending he was not he did the opposite of accepting responsibility. Speer cheated the rope, cheated the world, and yet further insulted the shades of innocent millions. Those of us who live by our brains should remember his example, which serves to prove that intellect confers no automatic moral superiority. Otherwise we will meet him again in the Infernal Regions, and be once more confronted with that look of puzzled concern, as if there were something difficult, ponderable, and equivocal about the rights and wrongs of tearing children from their mothers' arms, piling their little shoes in heaps, and pushing their twisted corpses into ovens."

"The running gag of the Grand Prix series is that whereas Murray [Walker], safe in the commentary box, sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves."

"If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference."

"In The Bob Hope Golf Classic (LWT) the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service."

"The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics."

"Give or take the odd anatomical discrepancy, John Berger affects me exactly like Jane Fonda - ie. any opinion of mine which I discover he shares I immediately examine to find out what's wrong with it."

"Shaw said that three years as a theatre critic was the maximum before insanity set in - the implication being that anyone who lasted longer than that was too dull to be unbalanced by his nightly ordeal."

"The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same."

"Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world."

"Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it."

"Mrs. Krantz, having dined at Mark's Club, insists that it is exclusive. There would not have been much point to her dining there if she did not think that. A bigger snob than she might point out that the best reason for not dining at Mark’s Club is the chance of finding Mrs Krantz there. It takes only common sense, though, to tell you that on those terms exclusiveness in not just chimerical but plain tedious. You would keep better company eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a launderette."

"People don't get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it."

"As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks..."

"Joseph Brodsky, writing about Mandelstam, called lyricism the ethics of language. Larkin's wit is the ethics of his poetry. It brings his distress under our control. It makes his personal unhappiness our universal exultation. Armed with his wit, he faces the worst on our behalf, and brings it to order."

"After half a lifetime of poking fun at Bernard Shaw's materialism Kingsmill was not above touching the despised sage for ten quid. Even in the Australian school of literary morals, we weren't allowed to slag a man and put the bit on him simultaneously: it had to be one or the other."