Well for the last few minutes I've been trying to figure out if this poem published in the most recent Overland is an erasure poem or got hit by a tornado.

Those are minutes I won't get back, but I wasn't going to do anything with them anyway.

Per payment, John, how's this? Poets get paid as soon as I do.

Sounds reasonable, Quincy. Do you have anything of mine in your files? If I'm not blacklisted, that is.

A poem in the soon-to-appear issue, as it happens, John.

Wow. Just, wow. Who is Windshuttle, and what is his relation to the journal in question? It would be easy to do some kind of whitewash sensationalist defense of free expressionism, but if Windshuttle is an editor, why would *anyone* send *anything* there?

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2...-manne/comment

"Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the “orthodox” historians and by the authors of the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report Bringing Them Home. More importantly, the Aboriginal children removed by force were not “stolen”. They were removed for the same welfare reasons neglected white children were. While some of the compounds or “half-caste” institutions to which the children were removed were not ideal, others were no worse and indeed often better than the equivalent institutions that housed white children at the same time. Anti-Aboriginal racism played virtually no part in the removal process. Even though Windschuttle now accepts that the Protectors in interwar Western Australia and the Northern Territory advocated a program known as “breeding out the colour”, it was neither an instance of eugenics nor at any time a formal government policy. Nor was it even connected to their child-removal practices. Far from being concerned to destroy Aboriginality, let alone perpetrate genocide on the Aboriginal people, the removals were almost always justified and motivated by good intentions. For all these reasons, Windschuttle regards the idea of the stolen generations as an un-Australian left-wing myth, whose purpose is to defame both the many decent Australians who worked selflessly on behalf of Aboriginal children and, even more importantly, the nation."

I don't know if that's a good faith summation of Windshuttle's argument. But if it's even close...

Oh, and calling people "Insufferable Prigs" in a headline isn't very likely to generate much rational discourse.

Best,

Bill

(ps. John, reading Minter's Vitae (http://sydney.edu.au/arts/english/st...minter.330.php) I'm not sure the word 'silly' was the first thing that came to mind. 'Dedicated to his causes,' perhaps, but some of that stuff looks fairly interesting.

Apparently, Keith Windschuttle is the editor of Quadrant.

But Quadrant at its birth had funding from the CIA, via the usual circuitous route.

The difference between Quadrant and similar stooge journals, though, is that the CIA felt that Quadrant was too right-wing!

I think it's good for poets—anyone, really—to have some understanding of the journals publishing their writing. Each person can make the decision about how he feels having his writing published therein.

But lumping everyone together under the same ideology, based upon the ideology of the journal or a single editor of the journal, and blacklisting them, seems silly. We're back to judging persons, not poems, and worrying about politics and not everything else that is important in this world.

So did Encounter, a jolly good journal, edited by the poet AnthonyThwaite and alas no more -- the journal not Anthony who flourishes like the green bay tree. I don't care about the idea of tainted money perhaps as much as I should. The British Labour Party's journal Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, its worthy if rather unsuccessful leader, kept going on Russian money, often stuffed into Foot's pocket in crisp banknotes. Many journals in the UK and not a few publishers, including my own, are kept going on government money. Is not the British Government at least as wicked as the CIA?

As the Emperor Vespasian said to his son, picking out a coin which came into the Imperial coffers by way of the tax on, er, ordure, 'Does it smell, my son?'

A little context:

Minter's bona fides have been cited.
Keith Windschuttle (born 1942) is an Australian writer, historian,[1][2] and former ABC board member.

Major published items include Unemployment, (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, (1984), on the political economy and content of the news and entertainment media; The Killing of History, (1994), a critique of postmodernism in history;[3] The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past;[4] The White Australia Policy, (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history;[5] and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth. He has been editor of Quadrant magazine since 2008.[6] He has been the publisher of Macleay Press since 1994.

This [Bold-face] seems to be the crux or source of the animosity. Wiki is the source.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/hist...ation-deniers/

These two editors are at cross-purposes. I suspect a professional difference of opinion has become deeply personal.