Letters to the Editor

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.

Who’s who

Dear Editor,

Henry Ergas’s disingenuous response (ABR, November 2004) to my review (ABR, October 2004) of Peter Saunders’s Australia’s Welfare Habit and How to Kick It deserves a reply. Ergas poses as a dissatisfied ‘customer-reader’ of ABR. From this position, he expresses outrage at my review of Saunders’s book. Come off it, Henry!

The puzzle of PhDs

Dear Editor,

It’s pretty clear that historians can’t win, especially if they have the audacity to use a doctoral thesis as the basis for a book. As I read Aviva Tuffield’s puzzling review (ABR, December 2003/January 2004) of Clare Wright’s Beyond the Ladies Lounge, and Wright’s understandably puzzled response (ABR, February 2004), I was reminded of a debate that occurred over several issues of ABR in 2002, which spawned plenty of silly generalisations about the quality of writing in PhD theses, but not much else.

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. 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.

Pushing ahead

Dear Editor,

Beverley Kingston has written a rather world-weary review of my book The Commonwealth of' Speech (ABR, December 2002/January 2003). I read it not long after writing to a senior person at my university complaining about the quaint attitude which central committees in the university world seem to take to the Humanities. Much of what I said to him can be recycled as a response to the review.

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Letters and emails must include a telephone number for verification

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Emailed letters must include a telephone number for verification.

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Emailed letters must include a telephone number for verification.

Sneer tactics

Dear Editor,

Perhaps you will allow me to reveal that this is the second letter I have written to ABR in response to Richard King’s review in the November 2001 issue under the heading ‘One Long Giving Away’. The first letter was rejected because it was too long, because it quoted two short poems from the poets under attack, because of references to an earlier article I had written, and because of a comment about the review’s tone.

Bauman’s point of departure

Dear Editor,

Boris Frankel bursts in through open doors. He gives Zygmunt Bauman and me stick for speaking our truths (ABR, October 2001). Viewed in its own terms, what remains of the Left in Australia is in a bad way because it has failed (1) to clarify its ethics, norms and values and (2) to develop alternative visions and policies upon them; because (3) there is no popular bearer or social movement available to carry these invisible ends; and (4) because there is no evidence of popular support for a new society, present unhappiness and misery notwithstanding. If this is not modern, what is it? (If the Soviet and Nazi experiences were not modern, what were they?)