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Art is a strange posing of discoveries, a display of what was no more possible. For it is the task of the creative artist to come up with ideas which are ours, but which we haven’t thought yet. In some cases, it is also the artist’s role to slice Australia open and show it bizarrely different, quite new in its antiquity.

Half a century ago, Sidney Nolan did just this with his desert paintings and those of drought animal carcasses. I recall seeing some of these at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1953 and being bewildered by their aridity: a cruel dryness which made the familiar Ned Kelly paintings seem quite pastoral. Nor could I get a grip on his Durack Range, which the NGV had bought three years earlier. Its lack of human signs affronted my responses.

The furthest our littoral imaginations had gone toward what used to be called the Dead Heart was then to be found in Russell Drysdale’s inland New South Wales, Hans Heysen’s Flinders Ranges, and Albert Namatjira’s delicately picturesque MacDonnells. Nolan’s own vision was vastly different: different and vast. It offered new meanings and posed big new questions.

At the outset, I acknowledge the traditional custodians on whose ancestral land Queensland’s first university stands.

It is now approaching eight years since I retired from the Bench. In the time since then, I have effectively ceased to be a lawyer. Consequently, I do not feel qualified to offer any really worthwhile professional advice to those of you who are setting out on legal careers.

The most I can do is to urge you to be true to your own personal principles and to the ethical standards which are essential to the proper practice and administration of law in this country. That having been said, I venture to share a few thoughts with you about the nation, which will be increasingly reliant on the leadership of people like yourselves as it passes through its third half-century.

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Ali Ismail Abbas

Dear Editor,

There is a terrible irony in the title of Raimond Gaita’s La Trobe University Essay, ‘Only As a Last Resort’ (ABR, May 2003). His title should surely have been the phrase that guided the choice of accompanying stills. Gaita’s admirable piece contained much to ponder and praise. The Reuters photograph (by Faleh Kheiber) of Ali Ismail Abbas diminished those reflections.

He meets a man with an icicle voice

who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’

to act impulsively; this man elevates

‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships

at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar

(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,

at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –

which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed

pickled brain, in a jar).

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Tim Bowden on Denis Warner

Dear Editor,

I write to point out a singularly unfortunate error in Brian McFarlane’s otherwise thoughtful and indeed generous review of my autobiography, Spooling Through: An Irreverent Memoir, in the May edition of ABR. By using the phrase ‘the egregious Denis Warner’, your reviewer has confused the distinguished Australian foreign correspondent and author with Russell Warner, an ABC executive with whom, to put it bluntly, I did not get on, for reasons clearly stated in my memoir.