Earlier than the sun and stronger, our need for comfort in the dark.   Always on time with its doodle-do and smallgrass recitativo we take the sun   as given, its shadow-play of slats on a bed-sheet (a hot thought   in a hot …

Back in 2000 when the Centenary of Federation was looming, I was inclined to joke that we had to make a song and dance about it because the thing itself had never really happened. It had of course, in history and in the history books, and we had a constitution …