Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
In the last few weeks, we have been drowned, smothered or mired in words that have striven for solemnity. Such occasions as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the various Grand Finals are held to transcend the everyday and so to demand elegiac or epic words. It is easy to laugh at the manifest failures to reach those heights, whether by Poets Laureate who should have known better, or by excitable journalists. There is, however, something endearingly human in the attempt.
Brian Matthews, academic, award-winning columnist and biographer, and Australia's foremost scholar on Henry Lawson and his mother Louisa, died last Thursday 2 June following complications related to lymphoma, at the age of 86. Brian first wrote for Eureka Street in February, 2002 and continued to contribute his monthly column for 20 years.
2021 is set to be a big year for women’s sports — dependent on COVID, of course. Yet, if you looked to the Australian mainstream media’s reporting and coverage of sports, there’s a fair chance you’d get an idea that women’s sports are happening far less than they actually are.
Reconciliation week itself begins on the 27th May, the anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, which granted Aboriginal people the right to be counted in the census. The anniversary of the Mabo ruling in the High Court rounds out the week. Yet every year, I would swear that this week means nothing more to most people in this country than to call on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their workplaces and community to do more work.
Footy returned to our radios, televisions and suburban grounds right around the country last weekend as the fourth season of the AFLW kicked off. It was a weekend of history making moments but it was also a weekend that highlighted some of the very real challenges facing the competition.
The stats are chilling. The rate of homelessness in the Northern Territory is 12 times the national average. Six per cent of all Territorians are experiencing homelessness. More than 16 per cent of Territorians under 16 are homeless. Twenty per cent of Aboriginal people in the NT are homeless. It's time to do something.
The AFL's announcement that AFLX would be scrapped after two seasons, despite heavy media coverage, was a strong indication of the league's commitment to women's football. It now needs to follow up with commitments that reflect the increasing scale and importance of the women's competition to the league.
Half past ten, I'm off to bed. One more whizz around the sun. Ho hum ... What's the point? If it were the solstice, maybe. All that nonsense on TV. And fireworks, celebrating what? The triumph of chronology? This year maybe I will die ...
The Victorian state election is on this Saturday and if I’m being honest, I don’t think I could be less inspired about it if I tried. I want readers to understand just how much of a statement this is coming from me. I loathe our political system and most of our politicians but being an Aboriginal woman who works in the union movement and writes opinion, I am deeply invested in it all.
That this attitude persists at the executive level of arguably one of the biggest sporting organisations in the country despite the role women have played in the success of the game is quite damning. That it took a woman, or women, to change it is hardly surprising.
The best writers on sport show that it is a metaphor for life. Perhaps that is why the triumph of the Western Bulldogs in the AFL Grand Final has been so ruthlessly milked for larger significance. But I would like to exploit it once more for the way in which it illustrates the weakness of a liberal politics that assumes that all will benefit from the economic growth that unfettered competition between individuals yields. The joy of the Western Bulldogs victory lay in its challenge to these assumptions.
What is the biggest number you can visualise? You can probably picture a crowd of 100,000, either because you were once part of such a crowd or have seen shots of a full MCG on Grand Final day. But what about ten times as many, or 1000 times ten times? Now we are talking billions, and your mind has likely gone into what computer programmers call overflow. So when we read that the cost of replacing our six subs with 12 new ones will be $20 billion, it means little to us: it's just a number.
1-12 out of 29 results.