For part of my life I lived for many years in a monastery. Singing, particularly of plain chant, was important, and the monastery was divided, with a monastic, unworldly sense of the implication of its metaphors, into ‘the choir’ and ‘the scrubbers’. I excelled. Whatever vocation I had, it certainly included being an eternal scrubber. For many years I spent fifteen minutes a day with a patient friend who attempted to teach me to sing the Gospel for the third Sunday before the Epiphany. Standing in the monastery basement and earnestly inhaling the smell of monks’ football boots and sandshoes and unwashed football jumpers, I could never get this simple piece of plain chant right.

I continue to sing off-key, much to the delight of the children my monastery never intended for me. This is my last Abbreviations column. Because of ill health, I have resigned from ABR. But apart from that, I believe that all columnists should retire after three years. Or sooner. Attention Philip Adams and Max Harris. In this last column I shall be more self-indulgent than usual. This column commenced as an information sheet. When it was handed to me, I dutifully typed out various badly written press releases until I could stand it no more and started giving my opinion. Now I find I am repeating myself. Boring for my mother and any other readers. So, I sing again off-key and start with some of things I have done off-key that relate to the joys and agonies of editing.

As Professor Oskar Spate says in his Foreword, ‘Most Australians who have heard of Miclouho-Maclay at all have a vague idea that he was the first ethnographer to do serious work in New Guinea, a Russian with a warm human sympathy for native races’. In this sensitively written biography, Elsie Webster presents Maclay as a man of strong, complex and sometimes inconsistent character who packed a remarkable amount of work and adventure into his short life of forty-two years.

Nicolai Miclouho-Maclay was born in Russia in 1846. His father was a railway engineer who died when he was eleven years old and his mother’s grandfather had been physician to Prussian and Polish kings. He was a ‘hereditary nobleman’, a rank which did not carry a title. He was called ‘Baron’ by people outside Russia but he did not encourage its use and he can be acquitted of the charge of self-aggrandisement. In 1868 he adopted the additional surname of Maclay but, although he claimed a Scottish grand-mother, its origin is uncertain.

Sydney’s Nullarbor, that international wasteland fringed by car yards that masquerades as the Parramatta Road, has few peers in the communications business. Driving back to my airconditioned oasis at the cultural Broadway end of the tatty ribbon, I passed drought-stricken telegraph poles all festooned with a stark (Koo?) message, black on yellow: “Fergie and Andy its official”. That’s what instant communication is all about … and let us look forward to similar treatment for book promotion: “A Fortunate Life – a million sold”, “Keneally nabs Nobel Prize”, “Illywhacker joins space probe mission”. You can sense my optimism tinged with yearning.

I was wrong about ABC Television’s State of the Arts. It is adopting the Oscar Wilde approach to culture, seeing the artistic world as a witty florid pastiche. Here is lack of audience involvement. Once again it is for the converted, with no stops to pick up passengers on its road to Damascus.

Hans Mol, who, though of Dutch birth, has many ties with Australia, is professor of Sociology of Religion at McMaster University in Canada. His Religion in Australia being out of print, he has now produced a new book on the same subject. The opening passages inform us that religion is on the periphery of Australian society and that it is ethnically based.

The historic mainline churches, Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, demonstrate both theses amply, while the post-war influx of adherents of Orthodoxy and Islam are further instances of the latter. The first chapter provides a detailed demographic study of religious adherence, followed by a discussion of the sects. This highly charged term is used in a -non-pejorative sense to indicate a ‘particular religious body [which] tends to stress its marginality and separateness in a particular society and tends to attract individuals who are marginal.