Stan Grant

“Each child born should be a tabula rasa, a chance to write history anew. Instead their fate is foretold. Our historical blood feuds call us into battle. We are encouraged to live big, heroic lives, avenging ancestral crimes.”

“It would be premature to say we are witnessing a reversal of secularism in the West, but some are suggesting there is a floor under the decline of faith and it is the young who are leading this revival.”

“I recently watched a television special marking the 25th anniversary of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. I felt not merely transported in time but taken to an entirely other universe.”

“What is the most significant news story of the past couple of weeks? Trump’s Gaza deal? The attack on a British synagogue? Closer to home, is it Andrew Hastie’s political manoeuvrings? … Certainly, those stories have made the headlines. …”

“It is perilous and foolish to speak into the maelstrom. As a rule, I tend to avoid it. This week, events compel me to break my rule. I am speaking of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its subsequent fallout. In this case, the human tragedy is amplified …”

“I was recently talking to a dear friend and one-time mentor of mine, a legend of Australian journalism, who asked me if, like him, I barely read news beyond the headlines anymore. More than that, I said, I try to avoid the news completely. I am not alone.”

“One of the soft indulgences of my life is to spend time browsing in a bookstore, preferably one with a healthy second-hand section, better if it has timber shelves and a ladder, with jazz or classical music playing quietly. One such store is Henry …”

“Alongside a hundred thousand others, I have just been entranced by Oasis. Two hours ago these people were strangers. Now they are my people. I am not English, but tonight I am an Englishman.”

“Getting lost is one of those antique pleasures denied us in the age of satellite navigation. Occasionally, though, technology fails us and we are set adrift in a world still capable of delight and novelty.”

“I am out of words. In this I am certainly not alone. Our world is surely too loud, and our words are not enough. At times such as these, I turn to another language that Plato says ‘penetrates to the centre of the soul’.”

“For me, the great Australian novel is Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. I am not the first to say this: the story of Stan and Amy Parker as they build a new home in the wilderness is an Australian Genesis story.”

“In 1979, I was entering my last years of school and The Clash released their landmark album London Calling. It became the soundtrack of my emerging political awareness. Its startling array of jazz, blues, rockabilly, ska, reggae, funk and disco, …”

“Reconciliation invites reliving the trauma. It expects the traumatised to perform the rupture of time for the good of the nation. This is a cruel imposition.”

“I have just returned from a writers’ festival in Auckland and I am still processing the experience. I was humbled to be among several writers to deliver the opening night address. Each of us was tasked with riffing on the theme ‘The moment …”

“Nations should know who they are. That’s at the heart of our compact … Dutton tilted at an Australia he did not understand. We are a practical not philosophical people, suspicious of government fiat but not of each other. ”

“Pa was in his 30s when he signed up. My grandmother was scared and furious. She had three little kids and they lived on an Aboriginal mission in a remote New South Wales town. They were locked out of Australia. Why would he fight for it? What has this …”

“We have invented the economy. We have fashioned it out of the air. We have made an altar of money. The market is the arbiter of all things. We are caught in its spell. It is a world no more real than Narnia or Moria but far less entrancing and far more …”

“We can’t grasp the complexity of China without reading its most supple thinkers, without being immersed in its history. We cannot know China unless we know China’s humiliation.”

“As for the global order, Trump may in his own oafish way be telling us an inconvenient truth: there is no global order. Whenever I hear talk of a global order, it brings to mind something the neuroscientist Abhijit Naskar once said: ‘Order is nothing …”

“Darkness is not to be scorned. Darkness has its illumination. Saint John of the Cross called it the ray of darkness. We are called into the night, the abyss, to reckon with the things of the soul, to reach God. In the dark is a light of hope.”

“Race is a briar patch and, if we remember our Uncle Remus stories, once you’re in the thickets you can’t get out. The Sam Kerr case has proved that. First of all, it breaks what I have found to be one of my more useful rules in life: simple …”

“I asked my father once – a Wiradjuri man whose body bore the scars of history – a question about the past. He shook his head. ‘Don’t go there, boy,’ he said. ‘It will only drive you mad.’ Like individuals, nations are driven mad by history. …”

“All cities are cruel, but New York’s cruelty is in proportion to its temptations, which are immense. At home, greeted with misfortune, I might quicken my step or avert my eyes. Here I must make a more dramatic calculation.”

“The Christmas present I treasure most from childhood is a book of Greek myths. We didn’t have much and there were no grand gifts or holidays. Our cricket bat was carved out of a fence paling with a tomahawk.”

“Identity is a shroud. It conceals contradiction, complexity and soul-affirming idiosyncrasy.”

“When democracy loses its intimacy, when it can no longer be understood at the level of a whisper or a smile, then democracy descends into vulgarity and contempt ... The obscenity is baked in.”

“Whoever wins next week, America loses. One candidate is grotesque and the other insipid. Donald Trump’s television-inflated personality and proto-fascist flirtations divert focus from the inadequacy of Kamala Harris, who until recently was a near-invisible …”

“T. S. Eliot wrote that humankind cannot bear too much reality. We follow the elusive bird as it flits from tree to tree, leading us to imagined new worlds, alternate pasts and futures not foretold. We chase the sound of phantom echoes, music unheard. …”

“I can still hear it. That word that lands with the brute force of history. That sucker-punch word. The taunt of cowards. That word that incites lynch mobs. Yes, I can still hear it. I always hear it.”

“Noel Gallagher trades in memories as much as music. It is some trick to take the past and make it better. In the hands of politicians, the past is a weapon. In our toxic age, history is a poisoned well. Noel makes the past a place I want to visit again.”

“ …”

“To stare into history is to stare into a rippled pool and see only a distorted image of ourselves. There is too much of it to change that which we cannot change.”

“J.D. Vance is fascinating. Not for who he is now, but for who he has been and who he may become. I doubt either presidential candidate, Harris or Trump, walked his road, asked his questions or did his reading.”

“From Richard Nixon’s Watergate lies and corruption to both George Bushes and Bill Clinton, all roads lead to Donald Trump. Trump reveals not American greatness but American fragility. America has always teetered on the edge of collapse.”

“If all of the predictions about China that I have read or covered were accurate, then either China would have collapsed or conquered the world. Neither has happened. According to the books on my shelves, we are way overdue for a war over Taiwan. ”

“In the popular imagination, Vladimir Putin is too readily demonised, simplified or caricatured. He becomes a cartoonish character. The truth is far more complex, fascinating and ultimately chilling.”

“Reconciliation too often appears forced, contrived or convenient. Reconciliation requires more than proforma government apologies or ‘truth-telling’. However sincere, political reconciliation will always be unfulfilling. Reconciliation is …”

“I believe I have seen one of the faces of evil. A decade ago, in the mountains of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, I sat with a man arrested for capturing, abusing and brainwashing children to turn them into suicide bombers.”

“Before he died, novelist Cormac McCarthy told physicist Lawrence Krauss there was no poetry today. McCarthy believed science had obliterated poetry. How could poetry compete with the beauty and brutality of mathematics? Science has bent the horizon.”

“The world could be enduring death by America, whose cancer of inequality and populist political mayhem has metastasised into the global body politic.”

“I have seen the worst our world can do. I have covered war and misery in more than 50 countries. I have seen the Hobbesian world: a war of all against all. Sometimes killers praised God – sometimes God was at the head of the armies. But that …”

“We live in a world of superseded ideas of philosophy and science – still adhering to Newtonian physics, Cartesian duality and Kantian ethics. They have served us well, but the laws of nature no longer support them.”

“Secular modernity reveals that hell is not God’s absence, it is the absence of God’s absence; we have traded Augustine’s God-shaped hole for Nietzsche’s abyss.”

“How do we begin to talk about something so degrading to what should be our glorious humanity if we do not first ask the question of how we allowed ourselves to drift so far from each other?”

“‘What would they know, what would they know, what would they bloody know, about being a blackfulla.’ It is a penetrating line in the documentary The Australian Dream. Gilbert McAdam – an Indigenous football hero – …”

“As politicians look to exploit the fringes, and governments are reluctant to implement reforms, what chance do Indigenous issues have? Yet these questions are fundamental to who we are as a nation, as a people: identity, the legacy of history, the challenges …”