Why did nations turn so often to war in the belief that it was a sharp and quick instrument for shaping international affairs when again and again th… - Geoffrey Blainey

Multiculturalism is really a policy designed for those who hold two passports and who can abandon Australia if our society collapses – indeed if it collapses through the foolish policies they themselves have imposed. For the millions of Australians who have no other nation to fall back upon, multiculturalism is almost an insult. It is divisive. It threatens social cohesion. It could, in the long-term, also endanger Australia's military security because it sets up enclaves which in a crisis could appeal to their own homelands for help.

Even in the 1860s and 1870s most Australians did not feel fully at home in their land. So many of them were new migrants, mostly from the British cities, and so they found rural Australia strange and even hostile at first. Above all, in the long European see-saw of ideas and taste, the wilderness and untamed nature were falling somewhat from favour; to be revived late in the century. Attitudes to Australian landscape reflected this see-saw.

Science and technology have a simple and persuasive message: the world's problems are soluble by ingenuity and material innovations; the world's riddles, such as the origins of the universe, can be unravelled by the scientific mind. But while science's achievements have been remarkable, they have not been revolutionary in probing human nature. In some ways the measurable problems analysed by science and technology are more easily dissected than human problems. The moon is more easily explored than the typical mind and heart.