Non Fiction Authors From Australia

"Notoriously, there are disputed territories — for example, border areas and regions occupied by groups which are not independent nations, but many of whose members wish that they were. Again, there are territories like that which used to be called Palestine; here the principles which in the case of Norway point univocally to one national group as that to which the area belongs diverge, some supporting the claims of the Israelis and others the claims of the Palestinian Arabs. Cyprus and Northern Ireland are two other obvious examples of conflicting prima facie rights of distinguishable national groups. In such cases the appeal, by both parties to a dispute, to supposedly absolute rights is disastrous. It reduces the readiness to negotiate and compromise, and it seems to justify any atrocities against the enemy, and any resulting losses and suffering for one's own side, that are needed to vindicate those rights."

"If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life."

"On our view of morality we can defend only nearly absolute principles. But a theist can believe that strictly absolute variants of these are commanded by God, and that we both must and can safely obey them even when from the point of view of human reason the case against doing so seems overwhelming: we can rely on God to avert or somehow put right the disastrous consequences of a 'moral' choice. But though a theist can believe this, it would gratuitous for him to do so without a reliable and explicit revelation of such absolute commands."

"Each individual is linked not only to his biological ancestors but also to traditions of activity and information and thought and belief and value; nearly all of what anyone most distinctively and independently is he owes to many others. The taking over and passing on — with perhaps some changes — of a cultural inheritance is itself a part of the good life, and this too is a social relation to which there belong appropriate sorts of conflict as well as cooperation."

"The happiness with which I am, inevitably, most concerned is my own, and next that of those who are in some way closely related to me. Indeed, for any reasonably benevolent person these cannot be separated: he will find much of his own happiness in the happiness of those for whom he cares, or in what he and they do together, where the enjoyment of each contributes so essentially to that of the other(s) that it will be more natural to say 'We had a good...' (whatever it was) than to speak of a mere sum of individual enjoyments."

"The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports."

"In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so."

"The abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause...a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that...people...have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well."

"We want people to see it as not only legitimate but right and proper that they should pursue what they see as their own well-being."

"Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory."

"Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions, we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones."

"Men...are almost always concerned more with their selfish ends than with helping one another. The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men's sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done."

"To say that someone has a right, of whatever sort, is to speak either of or within some legal or moral system: our rejection of objective values carries with it the denial that there are any self-subsistent rights."

"The kinds of behaviour to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value."

"If men had been overwhelmingly benevolent, if each had aimed only at the happiness of all, if everyone had loved his neighbour as himself, there would. have been no need for the rules that constitute justice. Nor would there have been any need for them if nature had supplied abundantly, and without any effort on our part, all that we could want, if food and warmth had been as inexhaustibly available as, until recently, air and water seemed to be."

"Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices."

"Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life — not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time."

"It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented."

"It is the main function of any economic system to produce cooperation that is quite independent of affection or goodwill, and it is one function of political organizations to maintain conditions in which this is possible. But if we accept the centrality of self-love and confined generosity, we must, as a corollary, accept competition and some degree of conflict between individuals and between groups."

"The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, life is social. We can see each individual as located in a number of circles — smaller and larger, but sometimes intersecting, not all concentric — and so united with others in a variety of ways. Within any circle, large or small, we must expect and accept not only some cooperation but also some competition and conflict, but different kinds and degrees of these in circles of different size."

"Melian Stawell (1869-1936) begins life as a certain kind of outsider. Born into an elite Australian colonial family, she received great early encouragement in her education, had access to a home library, and studied at and then Cambridge. Henceforth her academic, political, and friendship base was in England, wher she wrote a great number of significant texts in classics, as well as Aristotle, the League of Nations, Women and Democracy, and in particular a work on the (1911) that is still highly regarded. Her work is in the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at -, including The Growth of Intellectual Thought (1929), with reading annotations by ."

"A quarter of a century ago, when the were first discovered, all scholars were struck by their likeness to the works of later Greece. Even now, when the knowledge of dissimilarities in detail has obscured for many minds this broad resemblance, no one would assert that a or is impossible."

"Like several other interwar liberal internationalists, F. Melian Stawell was a classicist by training, set for an illustrious career at working simultaneously on the ancient Greeks and contemporary world order. Stawell is best known as the author of The Growth of International Thought, a book increasingly cited, if not read, as the first to use the term ‘international thought.’"

"... At the outset we are shown the two great armies, Greek and Trojan,—both winning our sympathy,—the one fighting for honour and justice, the other for home and country. We are shown , the fair woman who is at once the cause of the war and its prize; we are shown the two kings, in his noble endurance, in his restless activity; we are shown the two champions, and , both lovable and attractive to us, sworn enemies to one another."

"When the idea of Democracy first took hold of the modern world, it brought with it to many minds the demand for the . To many minds, but not to all, and this because the strongest arguments for that independence are bound up with the fundamental conceptions of the democratic ideal, and not with the secondary advantages of a democratic state, and there are always minds on whom the second have far more influence than the first. It is probably for a similar reason that the has made so little headway in Europe during the last century. For this has been a time of detailed work in legislation, rather than of far-reaching ideas."

"The last works of a great artist have always a peculiar interest, and when they are the works of his old age they often show a peculiar change. The greatest artists do not copy themselves: stereotyping is fatal to creation. For creation, it cannot be denied though frequently forgotten, is always the production of something new, and this is why so often it is neglected or scorned by contemporaries. The creative artists, though their work corresponds with experience, are always outstripping experience, stretching forward to something they have never fully known, entering fresh worlds only half realised. Beethoven, Rembrandt, Titian, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, all show this in various ways. There is something unearthly in their closing work, and at the same time they are more at peace with this earth than ever. Nor is this because the world appears less terrible to them than it did, but because they seem to discern something more which countervails the terror."

"... After Philo and Plato, it was little use to say that Christ was merely like God, and the Spirit that came to us like both. Only the thorough-going assertion of unity could satisfy the longings and quiet the doubts that had been raised."

"Rugby backs can be identified because they generally have clean jerseys and identifiable partings in their hair. Come the revolution the backs will be the first to be lined up against the wall and shot for living parasitically off the work of others."

"Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe—appearing either as the Cringe Direct, or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of the Blatant Blatherskite, the God's-Own-Country and I'm-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian bore."

"[T]he Australian black, without exception, nurtures, one might almost say from the cradle to the grave, an intense hatred of every male at least of his race who is a stranger to him. The reason they themselves assign for what I must term this diabolical feeling is, that all strangers are in league to take their lives by sorcery. The result of this belief is that whenever they can, the blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished and often slain afterwards if they cannot be conveniently carried off. Such being the normal state of things amongst the Australian blacks, the cause of war, of which I am now treating is generally set down to the sorcery of some hostile or little-known tribe. In such cases a party will set out after the burial, mad for bloodshed; march by night in the most stealthy manner, perhaps fifty or a hundred and fifty miles, into a country inhabited by tribes the very names of which they may be ignorant of. On discovering a party of such people they will hide themselves, and then creep up to their camp during the night, when the inmates are asleep, butcher the men and children as they lie and the women after further atrocities. If the parties discovered be too large to slaughter wholesale, one or two will be disposed of by sudden onslaught or otherwise, and the invading party will quickly retire, to be followed in due course by warriors seeking their revenge. In melees of this sort it sometimes happens that a man or woman belonging to a tribe associated with the one whose members made the onslaught is killed in the darkness and confusion unrecognised the result of which is further complications and bloodshed. Should a man under any circumstances accidently kill one of his own tribe he has to undergo certain penalties. Though the custom of carrying on war in this manner is general throughout Australia, under no circumstances, I believe, is a sentinel ever posted. I have known a whole tribe pretty near, when apprehensive, watch until perhaps eleven o'clock and then all go to sleep. Onslaughts of this kind are usually made a couple of hours before daylight. Should blacks at any time come on a man with whom they are unacquainted they invariably kill him, if possible. Strange children are killed in a like manner. A black hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached, if he succeeds in carrying her off, otherwise, he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands. I have never heard of a tribe yielding to another, for no quarter would be given; nor of a strong tribe attempting to possess itself of the territory of a weak one, as so commonly happens in Africa. No idea of conquest exists, nor properly speaking of battle, for their fights do not lead to slaughter or spoils, and are devoid of the ordinary consequences which follow battles and victories in civilized countries. This sort of warfare is favourable to the weak. As a token of peace, the Australians hold up green boughs."

"Savage and objectionable as the is, it has played an important part in the past of the Australian race, for it tended strongly to keep up communication between the tribes. The renewal of friendly relations between tribes is always marked by a corroboree. When tribes corroboree, it is a gauge of peace; and this peace is, so far as I know, ratified in no other way. A quarrel between two associated tribes is usually brought to an end by an invitation to fight which invariably ends in a corroboree. A great point in it, as a medium of reconciliation, is that it excludes for the most part explanations, questions, and reflections. Two tribes at variance meet, a fight ensues, in which generally not much harm is done and then a corroboree takes place, and every point of honour is satisfied ipso facto. On the other hand, ill feelings, and eventually war, not infrequently originate at these meetings, and almost invariably as the result of outrages on women. Though advantages of some sorts have certainly resulted from the corroboree it was undoubtedly, especially when several tribes were present, often an occasion of licentiousness and violence."

"The white race seems destined to exterminate the blacks."

"A turbulent emptiness seized the people as they moved into a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment era. No one any longer knew the direction of the river of life. No one had anything to say."

"The proposals for the use of a southern continent had a history almost as long though by no means so distinguished as the history of its discovery. Some saw it as land dedicated to the Holy Spirit; some saw it as a land fit only for the refuse of society, on the principle that the political body, like the human body, is often troubled with vicious humours, which one must often evacuate."

"The inhospitable environment and the past had predisposed the minds of its European inhabitants to hand over the government of their country to men who were wary of visionaries and all those who held out a promise of better things for mankind. Australians seemed chained for decades to come to the role of being a New Britannia in another world. The young Henry Lawson and all the other prophets of Utopia were doomed to a bitter disenchantment."

"Australians must decide for themselves whether this was the land of the dreaming, the land of the Holy Spirit, the New , the Millennial , or the new demesne for to infest."

"By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch had written the very first page in the history of European civilization in Australia by stating that there was no good to be done there. William Dampier popularized this idea amongst the English reading public half a century later."

"Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The reason lies partly in the environment and way of life of the people inhabiting the continent before the coming of the European, and partly in the internal history of those Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim civilizations which colonized and traded in the archipelago of south-east Asia. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilizations."

"First with the head, then with the heart."

"When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win."

"Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow, and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous. Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life."

"Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!"

"The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, ofen well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better."

"Always listen to yourself... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention."

"Again I feel the need and responsibility to defend our principal religious manuscript, the Ginza Rba, the Great Treasure of all Mandaeans. If you want the truth, the Ginza Rba is the backbone of our community. Without it the Mandaeans could never have survived the centuries-long atrocities, fanaticism and extremism of other nations; without it, I am sure, they would soon disappear in the near future. We should not forget that their successful resistance in the past was due to it. If you read the colophon of sheykh Salah Jabbar at the end of this book, you will see that there was a good tradition among the priesthood, namely: to look upon the Ganzibra amongst them, who has succeeded in copying a scroll of the Ginza Rba to the last word with his right hand (nasaka ḏ-kulhun ginzia b-iaminḥ), as a steadfast and reliable religious man. So they valued his knowledge and appreciated his work to a great extent and placed a crown of honour upon his head."

"The following is the first and significant Mandaean declaration of belief in Gnosticism found in Ginza Rba p. 217 § 19 [Left Ginza 2.18] and elsewhere. "The world, that shall come into being, we cannot extinguish.""

"Ultimately there's one judgement that’s supremely important and that's before the good God when you die. Now if I had thought that death was the end of everything, that the ultimately important thing was my earthly reputation, well obviously my approach would have been different."

"Over the years Ida had fattened up. She sort of spread, like a garden gone wild."

"You spend your whole life trying to work out where you fit."

"She wished her mouth didn't run on ahead of her so much. Her mouth was never any use to her when she needed it."