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Conscientious friends have recently sent me bundles of the letters I wrote them decades before. I found myself strangely reluctant to look at them, or even loose the letters from their envelopes. The longer I procrastinated, the more I asked myself why I was doing so, and concluded that memory is another form of haunting: those letters are home to ghosts.
One senior development consultant, an Australian with decades of experience in the region, told me they've never seen such significant anti-Australia sentiment in PNG public discourse. This makes sense. A former colony of Australia, PNG grapples with social problems on a scale unknown to our prosperous country. Why should they now have to also absorb the costs of resettling refugees who sought asylum in Australia?
Tony Thornton, former National President of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia, was a great lover of humanity and fighter for social justice. The persistence of poverty and homelessness in prosperous Australia affected him deeply. He was never willing to accept a status quo that included the wholesale rejection of people who were made to feel the sharp edge of inequality.
It is often the poor who suffer most in a disaster. When the polar ice caps melt, rising seawaters flood an impoverished southern American bayou town. The survivors destroy a dam that keeps the nearby city dry and their village flooded. The indictment here of the prosperous West is hard to miss.
There's something disquieting about quietness imposed from above in the heart of a democracy. Anti-Poverty Week is a good time to reflect on how, as a nation, can hear the revolutionary stories of the oppressed and abandoned in our midst.
Malcolm Turnbull recently compared Kevin Rudd to the Shakespearean character Coriolanus, a reviled control freak. Politicians sometimes invoke Shakespeare to flatter their own cause. But this is fraught with dangers: they can come off sounding pompous, or their analogies may backfire.
Peter Taylor, selected straight from .. Petersham firsts to bowl his offies .. for the baggy green, taught us how .. the 'Strayan dream can fizz and spit .. through Sydney's fond atmosphere.
It was easy to find the centre of the blast .. an eternity of razed houses, a stony desert .. dead soil, waiting for rain .. I write home often. My letters are cheerful.
It is surprising how little the political parties have to offer in the lead up to the Federal Election. They do not present themselves as nation builders with visions of a prosperous and happy society, but as technicians with a bare promise that we will be better off financially.
Sometimes we need to look elsewhere to realise what is happening in our own backyard. Ireland is not Australia, but both countries have become prosperous at a time when many other developed nations are in the midst of an economic downturn.