Search Results: Shakespeare
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Lyn McCredden
- 09 September 2014
1 Comment
You moved lightly with your dancer's step and your gentle, gracious hands that knew Mozart and Bach, soil under your nails, old-fashioned hymns, and a child's rounded head. Your heart was woven with the words of Shakespeare and Donne and Eliot, words you gave away to so many hungry to hear.
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AUSTRALIA
- Ailsa Piper
- 22 January 2014
17 Comments
I'm fifth generation Australian, but I don't have a word to describe the emotional malnutrition I feel at our leaders' lack of vision. Maybe there are words for such feelings in Yamatji, or Eora, or Noongar, but most of us wouldn't know. This was a place with more linguistic individuation than Europe, before our boat-people ancestors arrived, but they didn't take the time to learn its words or hear its stories.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Breen
- 18 December 2013
11 Comments
Santa walks into a bar and the barman says: Sorry, we're claused. If sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, then punning must have a reputation almost as undesirable. A joke that can be greeted only with a groan can hardly be a real joke now, can it? But punning has a rich history. It graces the pages of the greatest of writers. And when it comes to puns, subeditors responsible for article headings believe themselves to be a race apart.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ailsa Piper
- 18 September 2013
9 Comments
Waters fall. So does night. We fall asleep, sometimes because staying awake is too painful. Soldiers fall, and we mourn them. They are boys, many of them, so fall-able. We fall into love, and out of it again, like it is some dark hole. We forget that love should be about rising, because we have fallen back onto cliché. We go through life as though we will always be upright, and when we fall, it hurts.
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RELIGION
- Ailsa Piper
- 07 August 2013
18 Comments
His casual tone didn't seem to fit the words I was translating from Spanish. I questioned him. Eight? Yes, eight. Every night? Every night. Finally I could no longer deny what I was hearing. Decades earlier, my amigo's then eight-year-old brother had been abused by a religious man of the cloth. My amigo was here walking the Camino Mozárabe in memory of that brother, who eventually had committed suicide.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Barry Breen
- 10 April 2013
6 Comments
If poetry is the pulse of our cultural life, so too can it be seen as the pulse of our public decisions. Our poetry loving Minister for the Environment may find wisdom in the words of some of his favourite poets when it comes to decisions about the Murray Darling basin, Tarkine wilderness and Great Barrier Reef.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Binoy Kampmark
- 09 August 2012
3 Comments
Hughes was part of that movement of Australian artists and intellectuals — Germaine Greer and Clive James among them — who fled to Europe in the 1960s. Yet he was unable to escape the antipodean orbit he found arid and constricting. Australian reference points followed his pen with nagging persistence, a permanent shadowing.
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MEDIA
- Moira Rayner
- 25 July 2012
20 Comments
Johnson & Johnson's 'Carefree' ads talked unblushingly of women's vaginas, inter-period discharge and daily smells. According to some, we shouldn't talk about such things, not on television. Until recently commercial products for absorbing menstrual blood didn't exist, with dreadful effect on women's participation in community and public life.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Philip Harvey
- 03 July 2012
7 Comments
More than once I observed him walking from the Medley Building of the University of Melbourne to Newman College reading a book, not looking up. It was the book leading the human through the everyday world.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Bullen
- 14 June 2012
8 Comments
'Monday is Day Oncology, where the dark burses arrive by courier, and we're glad to see them stripped for action, hooked in the air, lucent against fear.' Maybe only Steele could see these bags of chemo as Christological signs. As with the zoo once, so now the oncology ward offers hints of that other eden.
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RELIGION
- Philip Harvey
- 13 June 2012
24 Comments
One character sings a risqué satire called 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus'. Another wanders into a church and misinterprets the liturgy to comic effect. The puritanical Catholic hierarchy were offended, but Joyce's seemingly anti-religious novels would not exist in their final form were it not for his Jesuit education.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Benedict Coleridge
- 19 March 2012
17 Comments
The 17th century Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi's Book of Travels describes Christians as pigs for slaughter. Yet its beautifully imagined world is open to Christian readers who can forgive the comparison. In the same way Dante has much to offer beyond derogatory depictions of gays, Jews and Muslims.
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