The Beholder Your love touched horizons   Shading into skies: These late Sunday pastels   From your patient eyes Still keep you, grandmother,   Living in my sight; Your landscapes hold Heaven   Within their light’s light. For, “O, Gentle Presence . . . ”   Your touch had them sing – These winter-green pastures   Resting until spring: Of you, my grandmother,…

Not left, nor right I am happy to reply to Hal Colebatch’s letter in News Weekly, January 27, 2018, responding to my review of Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism (“Disentangling the free-market fraud”) in the December 2, 2017, edition. This is the prevailing view: that the global financial crisis (GFC) was the fault of governments. It was actually governments’ leaving of the role of…

WHEN HARRY BECAME SALLY: Responding to the Transgender Moment by Ryan T. Anderson Encounter Books, New York Hardcover: 251 pages Price: AUD$37.75 Reviewed by Dr John Whitehall Ryan Anderson’s new book, When Harry Became Sally, will provoke many in Australia’s feminist and LGBTIQ community: the former because it insists on complementary physiological and psychological differences between males and females; the…

THE STORY OF AUSTRALIA’S PEOPLE: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia by Geoffrey Blainey Penguin, Melbourne Hardcover: 496 pages Price: AUD$49.99 Reviewed by Rex Drabik For over 60 years – or more than half of the period since Federation – Geoffrey Blainey has been chronicling Australia’s past and bringing our national history to a wide audience through his…