Good advice from the (Anglican) Church of Ireland: ‘We now sincerely urge a spirit of generosity both from those for whom the result of the referendum represents triumph, and from those for whom it signifies disaster.’

Pity that the Premier was unable to attend the NSW Literary Awards given in his name. He was away in Japan on important state business. Last year it was something else. Premier O’Farrell was also usually busy elsewhere on the night. Surely it is within the wit of man to find one evening when the Premier is not already committed. The organisers of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Melbourne last October managed to find a time for the presentations when Tony Abbott was available. It was a grand event in the splendid Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria but there is no doubt that the Prime Minister’s presence also added a sense of occasion which the Premier would bring to the state awards. At the moment the NSW presentations sometimes seem one of the better Public Service events – a worthy and cost-efficient celebration but still needing a touch of panache. In Sweden the Nobel Prize for Literature is presented by the King!

David Malouf made a telling point in his brief speech accepting the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the Awards. It amazed him that judges could ever agree on selecting a winner from a short list of best books. It is impossible, he said, to choose between half a dozen unique and incomparable works. Almost all judges will agree with him. I certainly do. Malouf’s winning entry was Earth Hour (UQP). It was gratifying to win an award 45 years after the publication of his first book of verse, Bicycle and Other Poems (also UQP).

During most of the speeches at the Awards, the ‘Welcome to Country’ – the acknowledgment of the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land on which the State Library was built – was given ten times by ten different speakers. About one every ten minutes. A little overdone, you might think? But the Library did well in another acknowledgment. In a year when we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli and the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the Mitchell Library remains the only institution that commemorates the 500th anniversary of the first image of the great symbol of Australia, the Southern Cross engraved in Florence in 1515 for the Lettera of Andrea Corsali, an extraordinary Florentine explorer of the South Seas. The Lettera is one of the treasures of the Mitchell Library. A fine tribute to Corsali, a glass sculpture by Jon Hawley and Chris O’Dwyer, adorns the vestibule.

Say what you like about Magna Carta, but as Nicholas Cowdery QC reminded his listeners at a recent lunch to celebrate the great charter of 2015, the 1297 version (on display in Parliament House, Canberra) is still part of the enacted law of the ACT. It declares, in its 25 Edw 1 c29, that no free man in the ACT shall be imprisoned except by the law of the land. It also protects, it’s reassuring to find, the Archbishop of the ACT! Incidentally, the great charter cost the federal government 12,500 pounds in 1952. In 2007 another original was auctioned for $US21.3 million.

On one or two occasions I’ve suggested on this page that, in combatting what Christopher Hitchens called Islamofascism and others call Islamic totalitarianism, the world needs something like the old anti-communist and anti-fascist Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). An international association of literary and political intellectuals, it organised international conferences, literary-political magazines and national committees to uphold liberal values and support dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. It is good to see that Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her new book Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now devotes the best part of a chapter to calling for a kindred organisation today. We cannot defeat an ideology, she writes, with air strikes and drones or even boots on the ground. ‘We need to fight it with ideas – with an alternative vision, as we did in the Cold War.’ She notes the importance of CCF-related magazines like Quadrant in Australia and Encounter in England. She also welcomes the work of the Sydney-based Muslim writer Ida Lichter, especially her The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular (2010) and Muslim Women Reformers (2009). She condemns those Western critics who either ignore or dismiss as unrepresentative Islamic dissidents, moderates and liberals. She lists a number who should be as well-known as Solzhenitsyn or Havel. If we continue this non-intervention in the culture war, she warns, we will never extricate ourselves from the battlefield.

The NSW Minister for Education, Adrian Piccoli, did well to overturn the education department’s foolish ban on the use in state schools’ religious classes of two Anglican texts –Michael Jensen’s You : An Introduction by and John Dickson’s A Sneaking Suspicion. The Minister’s face-saver was the assurance by the Anglican Archbishop that teachers in religious classes are trained in the ‘sensitive, age-appropriate delivery’ of religious ideas on everything from sex to suicide. Secularist teachers who feel compelled to distance themselves from religion usually intimate their views when teaching literature, history, or the sciences. But they too are expected to teach in a ‘sensitive and age-appropriate’ way, and usually do. The complaint in this affair has been not only that the education department took it on itself to ban Christian books but that it did so without consultation or explanation.