Search Results: Jen Vuk

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Living in the echo of suicide

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 05 April 2013
    4 Comments

    I know and love people who struggle with depression. I've lost friends to suicide. Depression was my constant companion at times and suicide an alluring, far country. A recent novel delves into the life of a family reeling from the suicide of a child, and shows that even in the deepest recesses of grief, joy can interrupt.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In bed with Phillip Adams

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 08 March 2013
    7 Comments

    Adams once told me about his room of gods. It's chockablock with deities from myriad cultures and creeds. While Adams is revered as Godfather to Australia's atheists, at heart he remains a young boy huddled under the covers at night; buried under the considerable challenges due his story of origin.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Election year food, sex and meaning

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 08 February 2013

    David Marr's withering piece on Tony Abbot completes the political trinity. These writers manage the impossible: they have me feeling sorry for politicians. Well, almost. I'm not sure if such magnanimity is allowed in an election year. But what a pleasure to discover those grey Canberran corridors harbouring such a chiaroscuro of emotion.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shaking Australia's 'brutal sexual economy'

    • Jen Vuk
    • 16 August 2012
    15 Comments

    Author Kathy Lette recalls: 'We girls were little more than a life support system to a pair of breasts ... Once I realised Germaine Greer wasn't just rhyming slang for beer, I wanted to write down our story.' Puberty Blues is what you get when teenage girls with a grudge show the world what they're made of.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Shaky surpluses and dirty nappies

    • Jen Vuk
    • 09 May 2012
    4 Comments

    You could you call it coincidence that the week I'm asked to write on budgets, ours blows out. I call it life. Such is the cyclic nature of our 1.5-incomes-and-two-kids lives that just when we think our savings are safe, a new enrolment fee is due, the kids' jeans are suddenly a size too small and I've run out of nappies.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hooked on monogamy

    • Jen Vuk
    • 10 August 2011
    6 Comments

    New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan said recently that  sanctioning gay marriage could lead to demands for the legalisation of polygamy. US author Sidney Callahan argues that, gay or straight, we all strive for 'pair bonding that contributes to equality and unity'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Childbirth grace and agony

    • Jen Vuk
    • 13 July 2011
    6 Comments

    Sydney mother Grace Wang was left paralysed from the waist down due to a botched epidural. When I first heard her story I recalled my own epidural experience with my firstborn, looking fixedly down at the floor trying to ignore the blood pooling around my feet. Childbirth can be a murderous business.

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  • MEDIA

    Let's talk about rape

    • Jen Vuk
    • 06 May 2011
    11 Comments

    Rape takes away the victim's free will and builds around them a wall of connotation and innuendo. For 40 minutes, American journalist Lara Logan was rendered silent by the mob that sexually assaulted her in Cairo. Little wonder when finally she spoke it came out like a roar.

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  • MEDIA

    Loving addicts like Charlie Sheen

    • Jen Vuk
    • 08 March 2011
    9 Comments

    I sat glued to US actor Charlie Sheen's fall from grace, which came to a head yesterday with his sacking from high-rating sitcom Two and A Half Men. The drama played out by his family, more so than the actor's meltdown, brought back a painful episode from my own past.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Granny chic is fashionable exploitation

    • Jen Vuk
    • 16 June 2010
    11 Comments

    As a child of migrant parents, I was taught to respect my elders, to view each wrinkle as the mark of wisdom and a full head of silvery hair as the ultimate badge of honour. I wonder how those in their twilight years feel about young celebrities dying their hair grey in the name of fashion?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The sexualisation of boys and girls

    • Jen Vuk
    • 13 November 2009
    12 Comments

    The pro-rape website set up by students of a Sydney college may be attributed to a culture that peddles sexualised images to both boys and girls from an increasingly young age. When a young girl's body is stripped of its innocence, we all lose out.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Agnostic in bed with science and religion

    • Jen Vuk
    • 24 July 2009
    1 Comment

    Nikki Gemmell, an agnostic, isn't afraid to confront uncomfortable themes in order to glean a glimmer of understanding. Religion and science may not have the selling power of sex, but each have indelibly shaped individuals as well as history.

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