Archive

The current legal regime for the regulation – I use the term advisedly – of drugs has many unintended consequences. One of its minor tragedies is the number of thinkers and activists whose valuable energies are thus diverted to the Sisyphean labour of undoing it. So many words have now been written on the failure of prohibition that there is surely little more to be added. More than a decade ago, former Senator Peter Baume expressed it well: ‘Our strategies seek to prevent the production of certain designated illegal substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the importation of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the distribution of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the sale and use of substances, and fail to do so.’ Instead, our laws and policies make all these activities that much more dangerous, more corrupt, more poisonous and more destructive.

As W.H. Auden observed more than forty years ago: ‘To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life, / The word ‘Intellectual’ suggests straight away / A man who’s untrue to his wife.’ Perhaps such popular attitudes explain why intellectuals as politicians are rare in the bear pit of modern Australian parliaments ...

An Australian tourist visiting Italy in the mid-1930s wrote home: ‘you may say what you like about Mussolini but you cannot deny that he has done a more amazing thing than anyone else in history.’ Unstinting admiration for Fascist Italy was common in Australian references to Italy in the interwar years; politicians, businessmen, Catholic prelates, Protestant pastors and middle-class tourists all sang his praises. They were also at one with the view expressed by R.G. Menzies, at the 1934 Conference of the Victorian Young Nationalists, that Italy’s transformation was the product not of Fascism but of its charismatic leader and his untrammelled power. In the eyes of the rarely well-informed Australian observers, Mussolini had resurrected Italy, ‘made over his people’, ‘intensified and completed the creation of Italian nationality’, and erected an efficient and effective state. Trains not only ran on time but also at a profit, according to Sir Hal Colebatch, Premier of Western Australia.

In September 1929 John Monash, ex-commander of the Australian Corps in France, sat down to reply to his former subordinate, Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, a National Party senator and militia major-general. Elliott had asked why he had been passed over for a division in 1918. What ‘secret offence’ had he committed that General Birdwood, the English chief of Australian forces, had denied him advancement? Monash was disturbed that Elliott’s sense of injury should be so raw a decade after the guns had fallen silent. In a tactful, compassionate reply, he set aside the idea of a secret offence and gently reminded Elliott that others, too, had had complaints, and had left them behind. The affection of their men mattered more than honours: ‘This same affection and confidence you have enjoyed in rich measure, and no one can question that it was well deserved. After all, you commanded a celebrated Brigade during the period of its greatest successes … Then why worry as to the verdict of posterity upon so brilliant and soldierly a career?’

'It is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.’ Oscar Wilde’s Cecily, in The Importance of Being Earnest, expresses the contradictions of many diarists. Whether by chance, or by the diarist’s own wish, this most private form of writing often comes before the public. It may be that in the diary’s purest form the self communes with the solitary self. Yet many of the great diarists have a strong sense of audience. Writing a diary is a means of exploring the self, but it is also a way of testing voices, trying on masks. This element of theatre is very strong in the diaries of Donald Friend.

Smugness is an occupational hazard for the writer on etiquette. The exquisite Miss Manners, in Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour, describes the ‘wicked joy’ of her trade: ‘There is that pleasant bubble in the throat, the suppressed giggle at another’s ignorance; the flush of generosity accompanying the resolve to set the poor soul straight; that fever of human kindness when one proclaims, for the benefit of others, one’s superior knowledge.’ Suppressed giggles resound through-out the genre. Surely there’s one coming from the late John Morgan in Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners when he suggests that ‘when inviting royalty it is important first to decide, as with any guest, if you are on close enough terms to proffer an invitation’; or that ‘it is bad manners to expel any liquid from any orifice in public, and breastfeeding is no different’.