Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Search Results: spiders

  • AUSTRALIA

    The card is in the mail

    • Michele Frankeni
    • 11 December 2023
    1 Comment

    Despite all the reasons not to send Christmas cards, this year I decided to revive my card-sending custom. What appeals most about card sending is it has the attraction of being almost rebellious; a small gesture of maintaining personal connections in a world that can sometimes appear downright hostile to human interaction.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Celebrating needling humour

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 February 2023
    3 Comments

    The plot of Kate Solly’s very enjoyable first novel, Tuesday Evenings with the Copeton Craft Resistance turns on the conflict between good and evil, represented respectively by the generous desire to turn Catholic property over to refugees and the vicious desire to prevent the project by portraying refugees as Muslims and Muslims as sinister and alien.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Clean on the surface

    • Gayelene Carbis
    • 16 March 2021
    11 Comments

    We will go to the laundry and finish coffee in time for the clothes to finish the wash cycle. This is called catching up with my father. He would say you don’t do this — you just don’t do that — talk about your dirty laundry in public.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    'Virtue signalling' and other slimy words

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 March 2019
    17 Comments

    The slimy words are those that convict their targets of simulating virtue. They include the old favourite 'bleeding hearts', the perennial 'political correctness' and the most recently minted 'virtue signalling'. They are slimy because they purport to be counters in rational argument but dismiss opposed arguments without engaging with them.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The meek find the violent absolute

    • Carolyn Masel
    • 07 May 2018

    Early traumas last, the experts say ... but memory can resemble an old wound that presages damp days or, like a sharp new line, make one gasp again. What violence do they endure who with nightmare slowness flee a wolfish past? And are theirs unexamined lives who have attained the modern armour-plated dream?

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The story of the dog who wouldn't be ours

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 June 2017
    11 Comments

    It was humiliating, being refused adoption at an animal shelter. But it was worse knowing, in the ensuing months, that there was a little dog out there, and lots more besides him, who was being withheld from a genuinely loving family simply because they had failed to meet unreasonable demands. We tried to find a suitable dog at other shelters, but the pickings were slim. And so we did the very thing the shelter that had refused our application railed against: we bought a puppy from a pet shop.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We will never be free of all our debts

    • Sandra Renew
    • 20 February 2017
    4 Comments

    Observing the decades long incident is unbearable - although they have fallen beautifully time is not on their side, their ideals are consigned to fire. But do we care so little that when the fates convene and humans fail sumo-sized jelly fish and yellow crazy ants and ubiquitous spiders will be all that's left? Do we care so little and think we are free of all our debts? Did we think we were never so needy as to sell our dreams?

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Unity on the lamb in the ethnocracy of Australia

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 20 January 2017
    12 Comments

    Like all authorised generalisations, this luminous, unified vision of Australia contains truth, exaggerations, and lies. As well as being a globally known story, it's also the story Australia most likes to tell itself; it sings through ideas like the lucky country, the land of the fair go, the land of the long weekend. Social research on Australia tells a more complex story. Australia is in fact an ethnocracy - a state that is formed in the image and for the benefit of a dominant ethnic group.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dreams, storms and boyhood

    • David Ishaya Osu
    • 29 September 2015
    5 Comments

    A family of four: an ex secret, a doll to share new moons with, a sky-blue diary and a door — nobody does the sign of the cross during sex; a braid of moonlight and shadow directs your head to a pillow, and next to your window hangs a raindrop ready to touch your heart; even a rat cannot feast on a field of vows; can i go outside of this life, you ask.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    The Lord's Resistance Army is alive and well

    • Dorothy Horsfield
    • 26 August 2015
    1 Comment

    For almost twenty years, across the settlements and subsistence farms of Central Africa the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has preyed upon civilian populations with exceptional cruelty, emerging from the bush in small units to commit unspeakable atrocities. These days there is a common assumption that the LRA has been decimated and scattered and that its leader Joseph Kony is in hiding and probably ineffectual. But visiting activist Sister Angelique Namaika insists this optimistic assessment is misguided. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Island Christmas

    • Various
    • 18 December 2012

    Ceilings creep upward in silent communion. Porcelain hands like the soft robes of Jesus, reach across a domed fresco from Bethlehem to Nazareth ... When darkness settles on rocks and stones, old churches shrug back into themselves, back into their timber rafters that squeak a thousand Amens.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Parable of the inhospitable hospital

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 November 2012
    12 Comments

    Even No Advantage, the best of policies, could not control the breaking of bones, crushing of spleens, poisonings, complications in pregnancy, aneurisms and other events. Still the Intruders came: on crutches and stretchers, with drips, catheters and prostheses. The council saw with alarm, and their opponents with grim satisfaction, that the policy was not working. It had to be strengthened.

    READ MORE