This is an interesting account of how the university English Department drifted from its original purpose, which is the study and assessment of the Canon of English literature, but there is no doom prediction in the survey. Indeed, Adam Walker senses a renewed interest in reading and literature, but outside the university.
The video below presents an interesting discussion about Netflix’s coming version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as compared with previous productions. I made the following comment about the previous productions:
The 1980 version with Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul lacks the production values of the 1995 and 2005 versions, but it is more faithful to the story and the characters. Colin Firth may appeal to the female audience, but he does not play Jane Austen’s Darcy. Though without the same appeal, David Rintoul is closer to Austen’s Darcy. I invite people to actually read Jane Austen’s descriptions of Darcy and the dialogue he has in the story. The same holds for Elizabeth Garvie’s Lizzie, who maintains her sweetness and refinement while tearing Darcy apart in the drawing room scenes. Jennifer Ehle’s Lizzie is too vulgar to be an authentic Jane Austen Lizzie. As for Mr Collins, the two actors who played the part in the later versions made a farce of the character, particularly David Bamber in the 1995 version. Mr Collins was a pompous fool, but, as Charlotte Lucas pointed out, he was educated with a respectable position in society. He didn’t eat like a grunting pig. I regularly watch the 1980 version and enjoy it each time.
Lisa Jane Spencer has suffered a monumental mob attack since her recent satire on Aboriginal identification. Fortunately, she hasn’t caved in. Indeed, she’s determined to push on, as the reel HERE demonstrates.
I commented previously that her parody was based on accurate evidence. The rules for Aboriginal identification are so loose as to require a mere feeling of being Aboriginal. Check the rules if you don’t believe me.
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I’ve been pointing out for years that you cannot distinguish many people who claim to be Aboriginal from people with British ancestry. You even have people like lily-white Bruce Pascoe, who are proven to have not a jot of Aboriginal in them, prancing around in souvenir-shop fur and waving a K-mart spear. It would be a joke if there weren’t the serious question of power acquisition involved. These white-Aboriginals obviously have grown up and been educated in normal white Australian society. They’ve been given the playbook of Aboriginal agitation, which they mindlessly reel off at the slightest provocation.
Really, are they surprised at someone parodying their fakery?
How Ideology Overrode Public Safety in the UK.
It’s on Australia’s horizon. What will Australia’s dominant political class do? They’ll probably go looking for white racists. There are so many white people around that they’ve got a lot to choose from.
I highly recommend ‘Daily Insight’ YouTube channel.
Isaac Butterfield has produced the best report on Henry Nowak’s murder that I have seen. No comment is necessary. The presentation speaks for itself.
This is a question Ayaan Hirsi Ali urgently puts to the people whose ancestors – Europe’s Germanic tribes – created the modern world. She is worried it hasn’t. She’s worried the West is surrendering to its ideological and uncivilised enemies.
Many Australians are reacting fiercely today to threats to Australia’s character and culture from ideological or national groups. What character and culture, some are asking? Indeed, the more extreme deny that such a character and culture exist. In the final chapter of my book, PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION, I sketch what I understand as Australia’s character and culture.
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An excerpt from chapter 19, ‘Cultural Continuities in 1900’, Prison Hulk to Redemption, available through Amazon.
From the outset [of Prison Hulk to Redemption], I endeavoured to depict a new, independent nation emerging from Captain Phillip’s seminal act of planting the Union Jack in the soil of Sydney Cove. In a remarkably short time, the inaugural members of this new nation began to refer to their land and themselves as Australia and Australians, though still closely connected to their origins in the British Isles. The fiery and intemperate William Charles Wentworth embodied those who experienced no doubts about themselves and the new nation they were forging. But what, precisely, does this Australianness entail?
Australianness represents a profound modification of Britishness, the unifying culture of the British Isles—England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—rooted in the broader culture of Christian Europe. Although Australians retained many traditions, customs, and social and political institutions from Great Britain, as well as the arts and literature, and were content to do so, their experiences led them to develop fundamentally distinct identities from their counterparts in the British Isles. The varied physical environment contributed to the emergence of a unique, independent expression of Britishness. Consequently, all traditions, customs, and institutions brought over by the First Fleet were transformed, regardless of how subtle these changes might sometimes have been. Although this transformation began as soon as Captain Phillip planted the British flag, it was not until the 1880s that overseas observers began to notice a distinctly Australian character.
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