The Final "Philistine"
I only learned that my "Philistine" column had been canceled when I saw the March issue
On February 28, I downloaded the March issue of Quadrant magazine and was shocked to find that my usual “Philistine” column wasn’t there. The Philistine — to my knowledge, Australia’s only satire column — first ran in June, 2020 with an entry on (what else?) the Philistines. Over its three-year run, the Philistine ridiculed genocide, cannibals, poetry, Opera Australia, the Pratijnayaugandharayana, acknowledgments of country, New Zealand, independent senators, the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, imperialism, the liberal arts, global warming, George Washington, the European Union, the Irish (repeatedly), Quadrant readers, Quadrant editors, Mormons, Muslims, Shakespeare, and (of course) Kamala Harris. All credit to former Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle for commissioning and standing by the always-controversial column. I loved writing it, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.
Keith’s final issue was January-February 2024 (see my Philistine column on Taylor Swift, now available free online), and Rebecca Weisser took the reins for the March issue. The only communication I had from Rebecca was an acknowledgment that she had received my March 2024 subission. Imagine my surprise, then, when I received the March issue and my column wasn’t there. Rebecca had come to Quadrant from Spectator Australia, and in my usual place was a “Guest Column” from Spectator Australia editor Rowan Dean. Obviously, my first response was to write to Rebecca. I received no reply. Four days later, I wrote to Rebecca again, copying in Quadrant chair the Hon Tony Abbott. It was only then that she wrote to express her “concerns” and told me that she was canceling the column.
Now, in a monthly magazine, the regular columnists submit their copy well in advance of the actual publication date. By February 28, my March column had been in Rebecca’s hands for more than four weeks and my April column was mostly written. Rebecca was well within her rights as editor to cancel my column, but her first step should have been to rescind the standing order for my contributions sometime in January. By waiting until March 5 to inform me of her decision (on the excuse that “I delayed writing this email because it gives me no pleasure to send it”) she cost me two entire weekends of solid writing time — to say nothing of the bewilderment caused when I received the March issue (which, to make things even more confusing, still listed me on the masthead). When I wrote to say that her behavior was highly unprofessional and asked that a brief apology be published in Quadrant along with a statement that the column had been canceled, Rebecca responded: “Thank you for your email. Your views have been noted.”
Over the last decade, I have developed a great love for Quadrant magazine and its sometimes-idiosyncratic but always-sincere brand of grounded cultural critique. I hope it can survive Rebecca Weisser’s editorship. I fear that it will not. To everyone who is still involved with the magazine: good luck, and godspeed.
In the meantime, I present to everyone … the Final “Philistine”.
The Philistine
Salvatore Babones
Two nations inhabit this ancient continent. The Boss here at Quadrant likes to say that Australia is a nation "with an indigenous heritage, a British foundation, and an immigrant character" (that's his Oxford comma, not mine), but leave the immigrants out of this—or at least, the recent ones. They're happy living in any Australia that will offer them a Subclass 189 visa and a reasonable pathway to citizenship. No, when it comes to emotive questions of national identity, there are really only two kinds of Australian: the luckiest-country-on-Earth Australians who celebrate their inheritance on January 26 and the cut-Captain-Cook-off-at-the-ankles Australians who lament their dispossession on the same date. In other words, the bogans and the antisemites.
The bogan nation is easy to understand: people like a day off with a barbecue, some fireworks, and a bit of fun. It's harder to explain why opposing Australia Day, supporting the union movement, believing in climate catastrophism, espousing socialism, embracing euthanasia, watching the ABC, and hating the Jews all go together to form a coherent sense of national identity. That they do is undeniable. Go to any anti-Israel protest in Hyde Park or Federation Square, and you'll see advocates of all of these causes waving their respective flags in gleeful solidarity. You'll find veteran protesters sporting multiple buttons from each of the different causes, and even multi-cause buttons like Aboriginal flag pins bearing the slogan "always was, always will be Palestinian land".
The rise of the Cook-must-fall variant of Australian national identity may seem new, but (minus the antisemitism) it goes all the way back to the First Fleet. Its traces can be seen in the Rum Rebellion and the Eureka Stockade. It was a murmur throughout the Federation debates, rose to the surface in the conscription referendums of World War One, and played a key role in the 1917 General Strike. For the last hundred years it has been an ever-present undercurrent in Australian political life. It is clearly evident in the 'left' factions of both the Liberal and Labor parties, motivating both the Republic and the Voice referendums. And it reaches its full expression among the Greens.
Representing roughly one-eighth of the Australian electorate, the Australian Greens are the undiluted embodiment of the boil-Cook-and-eat-him strand of Australian nationalism. The Greens check all the boxes—Aboriginal posturing, unionism, climate, socialism, euthanasia, the ABC, and antisemitism—not because these stances form a coherent program, but because they form a coherent electorate. This is the core group of hyper-nationalists who yearn for an Australian nation based, not on English law and British custom, but on the sandstone of Uluru; for an Australia founded, not in 1901 or 1788, but in the mists of time.
The current gambit for the 'mists of time' is 60,000 years, according to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The Parliament of New South Wales officially confirms that at this early date "the area that was to become New South Wales was inhabited entirely by indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with traditional social, legal organisation and land rights" [sic; that's their atrocious writing, not mine]. The Parliament does not specify how many Torres Strait Islanders lived in New South Wales at a time when the Torres Strait did not yet exist, or exactly where the proto-state's indigenous barristers convened to litigate disputes over land rights. Aboriginal land rights must date from time immemorial, and therefore there must have been legal mechanisms to support them. Politically speaking, it is inevitable.
Equally inevitable, of course, is that the Guardian would go even further. It awards Aboriginal Australia no less than 80,000 years of human habitation—despite the fact that all humans in the rest of the world seem to descend from people who left Africa only 60,000 years ago. Maybe they skipped Asia, sailing straight from Africa to Australia. Or more likely: they invented the airplane and flew.
In most countries, such outlandish claims of autochthoneity are generally associated with religious literalists: "the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, unto thy seed have I given this land". Not so in Australia, where university geologists funded by the Australian Research Council claim that Aboriginal songlines passed down through 400 generations accurately record the locations of watering holes that have been submerged for more than 10,000 years. This, to establish native title over 'sea country'. Your freehold title may only extend to the high water mark, but native title will soon extend to the end of the continental shelf.
It can be hard to understand why university academics would treat Aboriginal songlines as more authoritative sources of history than they do the Bible, the Mahabharata, or the Donation of Constantine. But they are revolutionaries, and like all revolutionaries, they imbue their myths with a sacred reality. They lay down their holy writ and say a prayer over it: "I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of this land, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging". And since they work at universities, they add: "sovereignty was never ceded; this always was and always will be Aboriginal land"—precluding the possibility that even Aboriginal Australians have the authority to cede their own sovereign land.
An obvious challenge to this Cook-as-instigator-of-Aboriginal-genocide national origin myth is the fact that all of Australia's major institutions derive from the actual England-in-the-sun founding of the country in 1788. Even the Uluru Statement from the Heart was written (in English) by a convention called by an Australian government agency, attended by delegates invited by that agency, and meeting in a venue paid for by that agency (a venue that is, astonishingly, still called the Ayers Rock Resort). These obvious facts pose challenges to the 80,000 year narrative, but not insurmountable obstacles. History can't always be rewritten, but with a little creativity (and a lot of tenacity), it can be overwritten.
For example, you might think that Australia's civil liberties derive from its English heritage. Not so. No less an authority than the Attorney General's Department explains that Australia's "freedom of opinion and expression come from ... articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)". They emphasize that "there is no Commonwealth legislation enshrining a general right to freedom of expression". Why is slavery illegal in Australia? Again, we have to thank the ICCPR. From where do Australians derive the right to a fair trial, freedom from arbitrary detention, and the presumption of innocence in criminal proceedings? From Magna Carta, you say? Perhaps from the English common law? Don't be silly; it's the ICCPR.
Americans like to believe that they "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights", including the right to life. Not so Australians. According to the Attorney General's Department, Australians owe their right to life to ... the ICCPR. This, despite the fact that Australia only signed the ICCPR in 1972. While we can all be grateful that within days of taking office Gough Whitlam voluntarily relinquished his powers of official censorship, enslavement, arbitrary detention, and extrajudicial punishment (to say nothing of his absolute power of life and death over his 13 million subjects), one does hear rumours of a time before the deluge. Word on the street is that it was pretty good. Or at least that the Liberal tyrants made the trains run on time.
Australia's relegate-Cook-statues-to-a-museum-basement-and-let-Lidia-Thorpe-write-the-contextualising-plaque nationalists are not, as many traditionalists believe, unpatriotic. After all, what could be more patriotic than to believe that your country is not merely 236 years old, but 80,000? Not merely one of the world's oldest democracies, but absolutely the world's oldest country? Not merely the beneficiary of a scientific method transplanted from abroad, but the fount of all science, inventor of agriculture, modern land management, and the boomerang? A country that had no poverty, crime, or war; a country that lived in perpetual harmony with nature; a country where all the aunties were wise and none of the uncles were pedophiles; this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Australia!
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Invasion Day mob (that's the collective noun for a gleeful gathering of statue-topplers) truly love Australia; they just can't think of a better name for it. One day when representatives from Gadi, Naarm, Meanjin, Tarntanya, Boorloo, Nipaluna, and Garramilla meet in Nganbra to found a new republic based on Aboriginal (and Torres Strait Islander) governance principles, they may call it something else, but they will be no less proud of their country for doing so. After all, it's not Australia they hate. It's the relegation of Australia to the status of a distant outpost of Empire. For them, the Red Centre is the New Jerusalem at the heart of the postmodern world.
It's all very inspiring, seen from the left perspective. It's just a shame about the antisemitism. Granted, the Invasion Day mob has always said that Australia is nation founded on genocide. But we never thought they meant it.
The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.