Sydney Boys High School 1955

Yes, fifty-three years ago next February this little boy from Sutherland started at age 11 to go to Sydney Boys High travelling through a Surry Hills Ruth Park would have recognised. The god-like Fifth Form students — High School only went to Year 11 then — included quite a few who became, well, god-like figures.

Did you know that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade can trace its origins to the Department of External Affairs that was first established in 1901? Since that date, five old boys of Sydney High have headed the Department with responsibility for foreign or external affairs: Sir John McLaren (1887), 1929-1933 (as Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department); Sir Alan Watt (1918), 1950-1954; Sir James Plimsoll (1933), 1965-1970; Sir Alan Renouf (1936), 1974-1977; and Dr Peter Wilenski (1955), 1992-1993. James Plimsoll and Peter Wilenski have also acted as Australia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 1959-1963 and 1989-1991 respectively…

 

Good news from The Empress

For those who know about this:

 

Prophetic traditions

Isaiah Condemns Social Injustice: Isaiah Chapter 5 (Contemporary English Version)

You are in for trouble! You take over house after house and field after field, until there is no room left for anyone else in all the land. But the LORD All-Powerful has made this promise to me:

Those large and beautiful homes will be left empty, with no one to take care of them. Ten acres of grapevines will produce only six gallons of juice, and five bushels of seed will produce merely a half-bushel of grain.

Recently watching a documentary on ABC about the 60s which featured Martin Luther King, and having also been reading about theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, I was reminded of the enduring power of the prophetic tradition.

I can’t help wondering if the verses from Isaiah quoted above resonate awkwardly in modern Israel…

 

How anti-correctness-correctness killed off John Howard…

…and haunts Miranda Devine.

JOHN HOWARD conceded defeat in Bennelong yesterday. But less than a year ago the woman who vanquished him, Maxine McKew, thought her partner, Bob Hogg, was mad for recommending she try to depose the prime minister.

It was the audacity of Hogg’s suggestion that horrified McKew. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was the only prime minister to lose his seat, and that was in 1929.

“I said to him: ‘Are you insane? People would think that would be the ultimate vanity? Who does she think she is, taking on the prime minister?”‘ McKew told Margot Saville, whose book The Battle For Bennelong will be launched next week…

That story in today’s Sydney Morning Herald continues: