The world of soccer needs urgent treatment
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Soccer, too, has been degraded
I watched the disgusting exhibition of dirty play and bad sportsmanship in the World Cup Final between Spain and Argentina.
Most of the dirty play and bad sportsmanship came from the disgraceful Argentinian team. They shamed themselves and their country.
Between 1959 and 1962, I attended a Catholic secondary school that played soccer. I was centre forward in the school team. Playing fairly and with sportsmanship was as important as your skills. A dirty player, one routinely penalised for ‘in the back’, tackling off the ball, and other such misdemeanours, simply wasn’t chosen. To persist in dirty play on the field would have you sent off.
Tripping, kicking the opponent, grabbing him or his clothes, pushing during a corner kick, and holding, as the Argentinians did, were not tolerated. Whenever Spain looked like making a break, the Argentinians committed a foul. I have never seen a disgusting display of cowardly sportsmanship.
I wasn’t the only one disgusted. Some want Argentina out of the World Cup: ‘Kick Argentina out of the World Cup’ petition nearly breaks Guinness World Record
Bondi, Mr Albanese, Bondi
The empirical evidence of Islamic terrorism and what happens when Islamic migration is allowed into a Western country is overwhelming.
The truth, however, for the left is of no concern; ideological hegemony is. Ideological power goes before all else, even before the integrity of one’s culture and the safety of its citizens.
Prime Minister Albanese and his government are betraying Australia and its people on all fronts.
Spirituality and Modern Australian Fiction
I had not heard of Russell Guy before reading this essay. Two things strike me in this engaging reflection. First, he tells the story of the writer struggling to have his writing known in a time when ideology predominates over truth and worth. Second, he presents a rebalancing of the narrative about European settlement and its effect on Aboriginal people. The inevitable historical meeting was not one-sided, and Christianity is given its rightful place. I’ve noted the titles of his two novels with the intention of reading them.
*****
Russell Guy: ‘Two things of which I’m certain: a nation that rejects its Christian foundation will go the way of Great Britain, and fiction that focuses on the spiritual consequences of individual lives can effect its redemption.
Spirituality and Modern Australian Fiction
Russell Guy, Quadrant, Jul 08 2026
Adapted from talks given by the author at the Alice Springs Public Library and Winton Writers Festival in June 2026.
Iâm interested in spirituality and modern Australian fiction because thatâs how my writing has developed and been influenced. The last three verses of Henry Lawsonâs âThe Good Samaritanâ, written in 1904, is, I believe, because he was so often desperately in need of one, a classic example:
âOnce on a time there lived a man,â
But he has lived alway,
And that gaunt, good Samaritan
Is with us here to-day;
He passes through the city streets
Unnoticed and unknown,
He helps the sinner that he meets â
His sorrows are his own.
He shares his tucker on the track
When things are at their worst
(And often shouts in bars outback
For souls that are athirst).
To-day I see him staggering down
The blazing water-course,
And making for the distant town
With a sick man on his horse.
Heâll live while nations find their graves
And mortals suffer pain â
When colour rules and whites are slaves
And savages again.
And, after all is past and done,
Heâll rise up, the Last Man,
From tending to the last but one â
The good Samaritan.â
Verse as good as any Bob Dylan has written.
In 1978, I wrote a story, published in Tracks surfing magazine, called Whatâs Rangoon to You is Grafton to Me. I adapted it to radio for Sydneyâs 2JJ and it crossed-over to Radio National. Since then, itâs been pirated via the Internet and a perpetual link at the ABC.
Rangoon contains glimpses into New Age spirituality, with fragments of Christianity and Islam, as the anonymous protagonist, driving all-night from Brisbane to Sydney, ponders the Second Coming of âyou know Whoâ, while jellyfish flap across the Pacific Highway in a nod to surrealism.
The Desecration of the Australian War Memorial
The Capture by Stealth of the AWM
Robert Hill, Quadrant, 20 July 2026
“A major feature on Frontier Wars will piss off the majority of Australiaâs 600,000 veterans.â So warned Major General Greg Melick in 2022, when he was National President of the RSL and a member of the Australian War Memorial Council.
âThe fundamental element is that the War Memorial was built in sacred recognition of wars that Australians fought as a nation, unified against an external foe. It is not to be a memorial for conflicts within Australia,â Barnaby Joyce said in 2022.
These statements expose the question the Memorial has never honestly answered: if a major Frontier Wars display would so profoundly disturb the veterans whose service the Memorial exists to honour, why has the policy been advanced without a clear public announcement, published legal advice, or a frank explanation of how it fits within the Australian War Memorial Act?
I am not a military man. I do not claim the authority of service. But my love for this country could not be greater. I know sacrilege when I see it.
The Australian War Memorial is the last place still standing largely outside the ideological capture of our national institutions. It is where politics is meant to fall silent before the dead; where the nation goes not to be lectured, corrected or re-educated, but to remember those who served and those who died.
Yet we are living inside a national fog of exaggeration and fabrication surrounding the so-called Frontier Wars. Claims unsupported by military reality are forced upon us as settled truth, even where no war existed.
The more immediate question is how this contested project became institutional policy. It was not advanced by open argument, but by stealth: through an ideological sequence and in a vacuum of justification. No clear public mandate was sought. No legal reasoning was published. No serious explanation was offered to veterans or the wider public as to why a contested account of colonial violence belongs within the statutory war memorial.
A real Aboriginal woman speaks out
Cheron Long, unmistakably an Aboriginal woman, speaks out against the fakery and rorting in the welcome-to-country ceremonies.
The weasels, ferrets and stoats occupy Toad Hall
Is the culture war over, with victory going to the Marxists? Well-known social commentator Kevin Donnelly thinks so. The evidence seems to support him. A true conservative sees nothing but a wasteland before him – the wreckage and debris of the traditional, Christian society we were so used to. But we need not despair. If I can paraphrase Rousseau: What has been taken away from us, can by the same means be taken back.
Badger, Toad, Ratty, and Mole, with their trusty weapons, to the rescue!
Culture War? Itâs Over and We Lost
Kevin Donnelly, Quadrant, Jun 09 2026
Two essays in The Australian, one by Greg Sheridan titled âHow relentless progressive orthodoxy is politicising life and crushing debate in Australiaâ and another by Henry Ergas, âABCâs Tame shame is an abject breach of trustâ are well worth reading.
Both highlight the way institutions including the Climate Change Authority, the Human Rights Commission, the Australian Law Reform Commission, schools and universities and the ABC have been captured by a progressive, cultural-left ideology.
While detailed and persuasive, there is nothing new in what Sheridan and Ergas complain about. The cultural Leftâs long march through the institutions has been ongoing since the expression was made famous by the German Marxist Rudi Dutschke during the cultural revolution of the mid-to-late Sixties. The Australian author Alan Barcan describes the Sixtiesâ cultural revolution as promoting an ideology that âfavoured relativism [where] absolute beliefs, based on Christianity or liberal humanism, became unfashionable. Politically, a new radicalism and a new concern for minorities emergedâ.
While Dutschke is associated with the âlong marchâ, it was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci who earlier introduced the concept of cultural hegemony. Gramsci describes cultural hegemony as the way capitalist society and the bourgeoise dominate by controlling societyâs institutions. Such domination leads to false consciousness where, even though they are the victims of an oppressive and self-serving system, citizens believe all is well. Women happy being wives and mothers are deluded by a culture that is chauvinistic and male dominated.
1960s Part 3
Lizaâs Journey: Australia in the Sixties, Part 3
Mervyn Bendle, Quadrant, Dec 20 2025
Radical Thought. The Sydney Push had a lot more to it than the Libertarianism and libertinism we discussed in our previous article. As Liza discovered, it appealed also to those drawn to challenging ideas and ideologies, as well as to those, like her, who felt they had profound questions to ask. Prior to the Sixties, such youthful intellectual hunger might have been satisfied by joining the Communist Party. However, its authoritarianism, the revelations about the horrors of Stalinism, and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary (right) discredited the Party for many. This was especially the case with Liza, who heard of the horrors first-hand from those workmates at the store who were amongst the 300,000 Hungarians whoâd fled into exile, with many coming to Australia. Consequently, the Libertarian Society and the Push helped fill an ideological vacuum that lasted until the arrival of the New Left.
Intellectual Appeal. Moreover, they had a intellectual basis, derived from John Andersonâs iconoclastic philosophy, which had survived over 40 years of critique and conflict with the Establishment. The folk who made up the core membership of the Push took ideas seriously and this foundation gave it legitimacy for the intellectually-inclined, including not only the older members but younger folk like Liza or Germaine Greer, who particularly noticed the difference between Melbourne and Sydney: Melbourneâs âDriftâ was romantic in relationships and sloppy in reasoning while the Push (left) was realist in relationships and rigorous in reasoning.
An interview with Hachette’s CEO
Some positive news for authors.