An Australian Spectator emerges

Jeffrey Poacher

How wonderful that you have arrived (or emerged)! At last: the prospect of an independent voice. So - welcome, welcome, welcome.

Antipodes Spectator

Congratulations on a thrilling venture. Here is The Spectator's chance to re-invigorate its sometimes jaded tolerance of bad writing from its writers. Several of the current Spectator contributors are simply third rate. This week's contribution from Giles Coren is perhaps the nadir of this trend, but is by no means an isolated case of bad writing, trivial content and self-publicising. So, whilst it is a humanising and splendid practice in The Spectator to "recognise human frailty and caprice", their toleration must surely cease with bad writing. The slogan "champagne for the brain" has too often in recent times been inapt. "Fosters for the brain" was sometimes nearer the mark. Christian Kerr's piece on Malcolm Turnbull is an excellent start. Oscar Humphries' father has in the guise of Edna Everage penetratingly observed the likeness of Kevin Rudd to a dentist. Even with all his flaws, Turnbull is to Rudd Hyperian to a satyr and an exciting alternative Prime Minister after a one term Labor (sic) government. It will be heartening for Spectator readers to read of events in a country whose economy is in splendd shape after eleven years of conservative government and which shows no sign yet of succumbing to the terminal cultural self-repudiation which afflicts Britain.

David Morgan

The year was 1989. I'd already been an avid Spectator reader in Australia for three years. And now, newly arrived in London, I went to the Spectator vs Coach and Horses cricket match at The (Fosters) Oval. There were my idols: Taki, Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson, Giles Auty, Marcus Berkman, Ferdinand Mount, Jeffrey Bernard (the umpire, who retired early due to the heat). Not only did I see them, I met them! If Auberon Waugh had been there, it would have been perfect.

The Spectator then was truly 'champagne for the brain' and until the late 90s I never missed an issue.

But then I started to fall out of love. This may sound like heresy but I'm afraid in the past decade the Speccie has gone from champagne to a mixture of lemonade and vinegar. Can Australia come to the rescue?

I'm looking forward to the Australian Speccie being, not champagne (apparently we can't call it that now anyway) but a sparkling yet no-nonsense Australian wine giving the same taste for a much more reasonable price.

(Now for the nitpicking: 1828 was actually forty years after the First Fleet and it was William Charles Wentworth)

Irfan

Finally! A sensitive conservative voice for Australian readers. Hopefully you won't be aping that geriatric paranoid monocultural drivel that passes for conservatism and is printed in Quadrant and/or the Opinion page of The Australian!

Roger Carr

I always fancied myself writing Taki-style pieces for The Spectator, but unfortunately all we really have in common is our age and a lust (for life, I add hastily, lest the lady in the back paddock reads this). The sad truth is I am more akin to Low Life through its various manifestations over the many, many years I have been reading it.

On a spring afternoon in Melbourne, Victoria (New South Wales is really only an aberration), with the sun a’shine and the Spring Racing Carnival at full gallop, would Taki be inside with a computer screen?

Nah.

Low Life, however, would quite likely be, fulminating over the deal life dole him and the miserable look-at-me who is now our prime minister, bereft of the vision splendid of our sunlit plains extended which Clancy knew... But, I’d better not try and sneak in the back door. If the editors want a Low Life Australian with fifty years of ink on his fingers they know (now) where to call.

Antipodes Spectator

Irfan raises an interesting point. It will be a fine thing indeed if the Australian Spectator succeeds in putting forward an intelligent articulation of the conservative Australian voice. Sadly, The Australian has left itself vulnerable to accusations of ignorant right wing jingoism, some of its writers are suspected plagiarists and simply write badly in any event. One in particular would rival Sarah Palin for redneck vocabulary and uncouth prose. However, the conservative voice in Australia is crying out for a medium through which it can be intelligently conveyed to a public which suffered a punishing regime of political correctness and femocracy under Paul Keating. Those elements, having been successfully stifled in the Howard years, are now coming out of the woodwork to reclaim their emancipation. So confident are they of being vindicated that an ABC radio host called for a "purging" of conservative columnists and opinion writers at The Australian immediately after the election of the Labor (sic) government in 2007. Having been forced in the Howard years to apply, through gritted teeth, protocols of balance, after the election Australia's public broadcaster sacked Gerard Henderson, the Director of the conservative think tank The Sydney Institute, from his weekly five minute segment on its breakfast show. By contrast, the left wing commentator Michelle Grattan, political editor of The Age, Australia's most left wing newspaper and known amongst the elite intelligentsia here as The Spencer Street Soviet, has been retained. The Stalinist parallels apparent to the rest of us from the very use of the word "purge" have so far escaped those calling for it. All this leads to comical situations. Having no aristocracy to eradicate, The Age has attempted to furnish itself with a substitute. Because the Victorian Bar has traditions whereby it seeks to exclude from its higher echelons those it feels do not qualify in terms of education, ethical conduct and reputation, and because it goes to perhaps excessive lengths to protect its reputation by secrecy in disciplining those of its members who breach its stringent rules of conduct, The Age perceives that thses characteristics qualify the Bar as a viper's nest of privilege which is fair game for attack. The Age thus elevates persons of largely upper working class to lower middle class provenance who have managed to acquire a degree of gentrification by reason of professional success into an antipodean aristocracy which would, if not checked by The Age, oppress the people in the manner of the French aristocracy at the time of Louis 1V or the Russian aristocracy under the Tsars. If only!

Hayward Maberley

William Charles Wentworth may have appeared to "petition for greater democratic freedoms for New South Welshmen" In fact what he really wanted came to be known as "Bunyip aristocracy". A phrase coined in 1853 by Daniel Deniehy in response to Wentworth's proposal to create an hereditary peerage in New South Wales, Deniehy's satirical comments included: "Here, we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a "bunyip aristocracy." This ridicule found great support, Wentworth had no real suppoert, hence no titled aristocracy in Australia.
Now interestingly enough the Bunyip, which is a creature of Aboriginal legend with a dog-like face, dark fur, a horse-like tail, flippers, and walrus-like tusks, is reputed to live in billabongs, also in creeks, lakes, rivers and waterholes. From where it rises to grab its prey.
Are you sure the term Billabong is the best for a site that is hopefully to have free flowing and wide ranging discussion. Billabong is the term used for a smallish lake, an oxbow lake, a stagnant pool of water attached to a waterway. Billabongs are usually formed when the path of a creek or river changes, leaving the former branch with a dead end.
You do not want to end up being a dead end, as David Morgan has remarked in his concern about the The Spectator UK

Simon

You're joking aren't you? The editor of the Australian suppliment is in London. That doesn't matter you say. Well let's see. What would be the first priority for the Australian Spectator? Hmmmm...establish an AUS$ subscription rate maybe? Find a stable of decent writers? Start raising the profile of the Speccie in Australia? Fail. Fail. Fail.

Expat

Hooray! I've been reading the Spectator for ages - glad you've decided to open an Aussie edition, brilliant idea!

Matt

An Australian edition is most welcome, of course, but this spectator.co.uk/australia web address makes it seem like we're still just in the colonies.

Perhaps a proper web presence at spectator.com.au (or similar) would be more apt for such a venture?

Australian Primate

Even after it was mentioned in the Oz, the clanger in the first sentence of the introduction still hasn't been corrected. Is this the standard we can expect from the "Australian" Spectator?

Ken Westmoreland

I wish the Aussie Spectator every success. However, it is precisely because Britain has newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent that gives the Spectator real enemies - despite what people say about the Fairfax press (especially the Age) and the ABC, Australia's media are far more conservative than those of the UK, and certainly Canada. (Why not have a Canadian edition - an excuse to bring back Mark Steyn!)

Unfortunately, the Australian press is stagnant and inbred, held back and archaic laws on foreign ownership, which allow a US citizen to own most of the country's daily newspapers, just because he used to be Australian, and by a fetish with provincialism, a throwback to an era when Australia was divided into separate colonies with their own import tariffs and railway gauges.

(The provincialism of NZ newspapers is even sillier, given that it's a much smaller country, a unitary state, and with the same code of football nationwide.)

Given that many people in Australia still have an aversion to reading a newspaper published outside their state, will they take to a slightly Australianised version of a Pom magazine, especially one that fought off a takeover by Rupert Murdoch ? (Thanks Charles Moore!)

But good luck. I agree with Irfan about Quadrant - a magazine that lost its raison d'etre after the Cold War, and is a refuge for fruitcakes and closet racists. Paul Keating was wrong about a lot of things, but spot on about Paddy McGuinness.

Doubting Tom

I would love to read a Spectator-inspired magazine full of Australian content. But it's hard to get excited about an Australian "supplement", published out of London, featuring, so far, a bunch of tired names. Contrary to some of the pessimistic posts above, Australia has a thriving publishing/media scene if you bother to look beyond Fairfax and Murdoch. The Monthly, The Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Quarterly Essay, Heat... online, Crikey, Eureka Street, The New Matilda. To compete with these, the Spectator will need to come up with something more than a botched First-Fleet reference (yes, yes, descended from convicts, still hilarious in the Old Dart, we know) and a Who's Who of ex-pat oldies.

(also: Australia, a bastion of small government? Really?)

Jill Kitson

I'm a regular reader of the Spectator, along with the Guardian Weekly, the TLS, the LRB, the NYRB, and online editions of a number of newspapers. This 'Australian' supplement is a really bad idea. At least it was easy to tear out and throw away. Just send us the UK edition.
Oh and Arthur Phillip spelled his name with two l's.

Matthew White

I missed the first edition of Spectator Australia and have just caught up with the second edition. It is a terrific idea and deserves the support of all right-thinking (hem hem) Australians. I can understand why you need to move slowly by gently pushing forward a supplement to see if the bait takes. Historically attempts to establish new journalistic voices in Australia on any large scale have been ruthlessly stamped out by the reigning monopolies (aka Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch). You will find though that most Australian readers will not be attracted or impressed by a recurrent diet of people like Kathy Lette and Jeffrey Smart - Australians who do not live here, remember Australia as it was in the 60s or 70s, and write about themselves. When I was living in England I was suprised to see Kathy Lette regularly asked on to TV news shows to do her "Australian" turn which the English apparently find amusing. For us it's just embarrassing. You do need to have some decent local writers who can bring to the endeavour the traditional Spectator qualities of good writing, knowledgeable interest in a range of interesting subjects, good taste, good humour and a refusal to tolerate mediocrity. And you won't find many of them amongst the established journalist profession here. But finding good writers should not be beyond the ability of the Spectator. The occasional ex-pat celebrity will then be a diverting ingredient but kept in perspective. But good Luck! And if the launch editor is ever in Sydney, he should contact me and I will take him to lunch at my club where he can meet some real Australians. Bye for now.

Martin T

I only stumbled upon this on your website some weeks after the announcement and must say I am thrilled with the news! I have been an avid UK-based reader of the Spectator for years and now it follows me home!

Aussie

If the best you can come up with is Nell Campbell describing how she has to scour her dishes with her pubic hair in the shower, Christmas Edition, you can count me out for a subscription. Stone the crows and starve the lizards we are so past it

Ned Kelly

Spectator Magazine: the perfect media for greedy fat-cat neo-liberal fascists to read whilst they watch the rest of the world go down the toot.

Robert Palmer

Tom Switzer said on Q&A that Australia should not adopt a carbon tax because "the rest of the world is not decarbonizing their economies. Mr Switzer either doesn't know, or is misstating what he does know.

The fact is the world as a whole is not reducing carbon emissions fast enough to prevent climate change, so the policies now must be to mitigate and to adapt.

The United States is this summer adapting to long stretches of peak temperatures in excess of 100F.

Introducing a low level Carbon Tax is a policy that that can foster adaption, by putting in place in Australia market mechanisms to develop a lower carbon economy, at a gentle rate which does not greatly affect international trade - ie less effect than the credit crunch, resulting from disruptions in the USA and Europe.

it will encourage alternatives to fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. But I do not expect top see these fossil fuels not fully exploited, and burnt to the last kilo, but a slower rate would help adaption.

Australia also needs to develop its trade infrastructure: world class hotels, efficient and capable ports, and more modern transport like high speed rail in the Eastern corridor. But Carbon should eventually be priced more equitably by a tax, or an emissions trading market.