Latest Articles
Destruction is all postmodernism has ever offered. It has no positive agenda. It works only against, not for. Incapable of direction and purpose, finally it is fading
Feb 17 2026
16 mins
One thing to be said in Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman's favour: he has mastered all the noxious cliches and racialist battle cries required of a Labor appointee
Feb 17 2026
4 mins
Empiricism insists everything can be explained in terms of sensory data. Not only unachievable, that ambition is just plain wrong-headed
Feb 17 2026
23 mins
The Memory of Sir John Monash
Peter Ryan
Apr 01 2015
10 mins
I remember precisely my “meeting” with General Sir John Monash, and I didn’t enjoy it. The day I started school, 1928 (or maybe 1929); my mother shepherding me through the east porch of the stately-but-shabby italianate Land Boomer mansion which housed Malvern Grammar, a comparably shabby-but-decent Anglican school of some 200 boys in Glen Iris.
Just inside the door, in a gilt frame, hung a portrait of an officer, in uniform but bare-headed. It was yet another copy (or a print), I learned later, of Sir John Longstaff’s portrayal in oils of General Sir John Monash. It was natural enough for a five-year-old to suppose that this personage might be part of the school’s management, and I was scared. Under the straight line of a close-clipped military moustache, the mouth looked relentlessly stern; I didn’t fancy falling intohis hands one little bit.
Dad dissolved my needless panic directly he got home from his office job in town. He had passed the whole of the First World…
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