Overland 163: Massacre of Australian History

This issue of overland, The Massacre of Australian History, is a contribution to this ongoing debate.

Some of our readers may think we are too focussed here on Quadrant, a magazine deemed by them as irrelevant to serious debate. I disagree. Quadrant, after all, was set up by te CIA and the Right to conduct idealogical warfare on Australia and remains one of its main organs. It is the institution where the intellectual Right finds repeated outlet for its more or less malignant outpourings. It is a magazine that seems to be taken seriously by the Prime Minister and other politicians who have important legislative and policy roles.

The Massacre of Australian History features two long and important articles. The first is Mark Davis’s overland lecture which focusses on the way the Left needs to combat the logic of economic rationalism in its search for solutions to the continuing cultural-political crisis it finds itself in. He points to the many activities, interventions and manipulations of the Right and argues that these, paradoxically, offer hope to the Left…