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'Each day I take time out to sit in each room. I’m gazing at death, but gaze long enough and you forget about death and disappear into the colour of the wall. Give it a try. Who gives a damn?'
I spent memorable hours yarning with Father Bob and I accompanied the Father Bob McGuire Foundation food van on some of its nightly forays to parts of the city to provide sustenance to those in need. Invariably Father Bob would turn up at some point in the evening to lend his inimitable presence to the show.
To close the year for Eureka Street, the editorial team wanted to nominate who we considered to be the Eureka Street ‘person of the year’ based on who we think somehow embody Eureka Street values.
The nationalist values purported to be Australian and to have flowed like blood from Anzac Cove will not do. Australians celebrating Anzac Day this year cannot assume that New Zealanders share all the values that are deemed Australian. Indeed, this Anzac Day New Zealanders might recall Australians to its more authentic meanings.
Yasmin opens the book and runs a lacquered fingernail down its table of contents. 'How we can seduce a man and not fall in love,' she reads. Then: 'How we can learn to keep secrets from men.' Is the government okay with this? 'What can you do?' Yasmin shrugs. 'Everybody knows people fall in love, have sex. This is how life works.'
The antecedents of Right-White Nationalism have, over three decades, entered mainstream Australian discourse. In Romper Stomper, it is represented by far-right group Patriot Blue, and a TV shock jock resembling those that Peter Dutton speaks to. But Romper Stomper doesn't pretend violence is the monopoly of the right.
For an item of clothing that virtually no Australian Muslims wear, the burqa sure gets plenty of airtime. I've never seen the (usually blue) all-enveloping cloak with the small material grill for sale in any of the bricks-and-mortar Islamic clothing stores I've visited. Short of travelling to Afghanistan, the only place I can think where an anti-Islam protester might get one is by searching Halloween costume listings on eBay or Etsy.
It is an enduring personal tragedy that I can never think of 'zinger' responses to hurled insults until having turned them over in my mind for some time. The white male hoon in his 20-year-old unroadworthy car has long-since roared away from the traffic lights after shouting some unremarkable and unoriginal statement: 'Go back to where you came from you [expletive] terrorist.' Kilometres later I'm ready to shout out: 'I would, but Doncaster East is becoming way too pricey for the likes of me.'
'First warning: if you're going to be serious about a Human Rights Act, make sure that your government departments are sufficiently resourced and encouraged to produce meaningful statements of compatibility. Second warning, especially in a unicameral legislature: make sure that your parliamentary committee on human rights has sufficient muscle and status to arrest the progress of any bill until it has been thoroughly scrutinised for human rights compliance.' Frank Brennan's remarks at the Fringe Conference of the 2016 Queensland ALP Convention.
It was a bright winter's day when we visited Iphigenia. Long widowed, she was meticulously turned out in black traditional outfit. Iphigenia is not sure how old she is; she thinks she is 86. Anglophones regularly make a hash of this beautiful name, the correct pronunciation of which is Ifeeyainya. But the ones I know are intrigued by the mythological character, who was ill-fated, to say the least. I soon learned that there had also been ample sorrow and trauma in the life of the modern Iphigenia, too.
'Whether or not we have a bill of rights, much of our human rights jurisprudence remains partial, failing to extend rights equally to all. Once we investigate much of the contemporary discussion about human rights, we find that often the intended recipients of rights do not include all human beings but only those with certain capacities or those who share sufficient common attributes with the decision makers. It is always at the edges that there is real work for human rights discourse to do.' Frank Brennan's Blackfriars Lecture